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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 06:36:07 PM »

Now show me where Lorentz and Einstein provide pieces of evidence for how bodies shrink to explain the results of the MM experiment.

I would like to refer you to your own wiki: https://wiki.tfes.org/Logical_Fallacy

And I quote:

Straw man- where an argument which distorts the opponent's argument. For example, in a debate between a creationist and an evolutionist a straw man would be the creationist arguing against atheism instead of evolution.

You are arguing against the theory of relativity, not against the existence of a round or rotating planet. Again, MM only supports an earth that doesn't rotate in the event that aether exists. This is a misconception which has been abandoned by science since the beginning of the 20th century. And even if it proved that the earth doesn't rotate (again, predicated on the existence of a fictitious medium), it would provide absolutely zero evidence as to the actual shape of the planet. It would simply lend credence to a geo-centric model of the solar system.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 02:34:59 PM »

See the problem is there seems to be a cherry picking of evidence when it comes to what you choose to acknowledge or not. There is unending evidence that the earth is round provided by satellites, photographs, astronaut accounts, etc. Your movement claims that these are ALL fake. Relativity is immaterial to this discussion when we have actual photographs of the earth’s shape.

We do consider that to be evidence. We also consider the video of astronauts on wire support to also be evidence.

Usually when we talk about these subjects it is you guys screaming "some kind of illuuuuuusion!!!" in nearly every topic.

Just like you did with MM. "Illuuuuuusion!!" 

All FE'ers did believe in NASA and ball earth for most of our lives. We have just seen enough of the nonsense. You can spend months researching these topics and seeing all of the excuses and illusions needed. There just can't be hundreds of inexplicable and undemonstrated illusions everywhere.

Again, we generally have very high standards and when we see someone screaming "illusion" we see that as a failing argument. It doesn't matter if it is Einstein himself.

You are putting words in my mouth and mischaracterizing my arguments. I’m starting to understand your position though. You seem to be operating under the impression that anything that cannot be perceived by human senses is an “illusion” rather than a force we have to observe through mathematical data. It’s not that some forces (gravity, Coriolis) are made-up “illusions” that scientists come up with. They are forces that can be demonstrated and mathematically reproduced and applied in multiple contexts and experiments. Just because you choose to cherry pick interpretations and pull quotes out of context from scientific studies doesn’t mean you have found any kind of consistency. It means you either refuse to or are incapable of understanding the science.

However, take gravity for example. Your claim is that it is incontrovertible that when you step off a chair, you feel the earth rise to meet you, rather than you falling to meet the earth. I understand that that is what it feels like, however we perceive everything relative to our own powers of perception. For example, my cat, sitting 15 feet away from me, appears to be no more than a few inches tall when I close one eye. Obviously that would be the smallest cat ever, but I know from multiple interactions with my cat, that it is much larger than that. Just like we can perceive and calculate the effects of gravity when we successfully calculate the tides, or the seasons, or an eclipse, or the movement of planets, etc, etc. Saying that what the world at large calls gravity is the earth rising to meet us is like that my cat shrinks when it gets further from me. It’s absurd on its face. These aren’t “illusions,” they’re simply phenomena that have to be perceived by more than just what they “seem like” to the human senses.

In any case, you’re mischaracterizing my tone by saying that I’m “screaming” and clearly adopting an air of condescension rather than actually engage in a discussion that centers around the actual evidence. Again, I’m disappointed. Your forum claims to welcome a debate, and your wiki denounces ad homenim attacks, yet you’ve done little apart from mischaracterize evidence of relativity and claim that I was first “mumbling” then “screaming.” I’m not particularly interested in pursuing this discussion further with you, but I wish you the best. Maybe you’ll be more receptive and courteous to other skeptics in the future.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 07:03:39 AM »

But it can't be gravity because we know empirically that gravity doesn't exist

From this I get the impression that you’re trolling FEers. I understand that impulse, but I’m trying to legitimately engage in a scientific discussion. I’ve actually learned quite a bit about relativity and the behavior of light from my research to facilitate discussion with Tom.

If I’m misjudging your intentions, I apologize, but it does seem obvious that the most simple explanation is that you have, in fact, proven the existence of gravity. So what empirical evidence could you possibly have that disproves it still when you’ve see its effects with your own eyes through your own experimentation?

If you’re trolling I admire your commitment to the bit. If you’re not, I very much respect your earnestness and your inquisitive mindset.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 06:17:18 AM »

See the problem is there seems to be a cherry picking of evidence when it comes to what you choose to acknowledge or not. There is unending evidence that the earth is round provided by satellites, photographs, astronaut accounts, etc. Your movement claims that these are ALL fake. Relativity is immaterial to this discussion when we have actual photographs of the earth’s shape.

I’m concerned that it’s not that you have “higher standards” for science, but that you only believe what you personally can reproduce on your own. At a certain point, scienctific research and experiments far out-strip what the average person can replicate on their own. We cannot build a rocket that can exit the earth’s atmosphere without the budget of a global superpower. We cannot build our own large hadron colliders. The average person can’t even understand the math behind Einstein’s theory of relativity. How can you expect to create a complete picture of the universe on your own, based on only what you can prove in your spare time? That’s not a higher standard, that is simply distrusting any source that doesn’t reinforce your chosen model of earth and the universe.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 05:37:50 AM »

The discovery of new forces or behaviors of matter and energy necessitate new explanations and new terms for those forces. It’s not an “illusion” when it’s a reproducible and peer-reviewed effect with a mathematical explanation. I’m not saying “it seems that way” I’m saying “it is that way and now we know why.”

Tom, I’m frankly disappointed that you’re ignoring large portions of my arguments, and instead trying to pin the focus on criticisms of relativity. Even if there were issues with General or Special relativity, my original question that I posed has nothing to do with relativity. Trying to poke holes in relativity does not translate to explaining why a flat earth model is a better explanation for what we can observe than a round earth model.

You also have not rebutted my point about the discovery that all science relying on the existence of an “aether” was willingly thrown out and rethought by the scientific community, proving that they are willing to accept upheaval.

You did not refute that a ring laser gyro showed a rotating planet.

You did not refute that proving that theearth is stationary does not make a flat earth any more likely than a globe earth in a geocentric model.

Also, I don’t believe I’ve claimed  to be proficient in science, especially not astrophysics. I’m simply reading about the phenomena you’re telling me about from your wiki, the sources you’ve sent me (one of which directly contradicts what you used it to support) and other sources readily available online. I’m a skeptic and an amateur scientist, just like everyone on these boards, and I just came here to hear some actual evidence to make me really consider an FE model. Instead, you’ve simply tried to disprove relativity in an effort to discredit science, and in your last response, took to ad hominem attacks, characterizing me as “mumbling” and “amusing.” I’m disappointed.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 04:36:48 AM »

I'm not sure what "illusions" you're referring to, could you please explain further?

In the context of the Sagnac effects the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment is also not clear. Applying the same logic to Sun centered rotating frame in which Earth is fixed, one would expect different light speeds as seen from Earth.

I'm sorry, but I have to point out that this excerpt is from an explanation of "some misunderstandings" regarding the Sagnac effect. I agree that it's kind of difficult to distinguish, since English is clearly not the authors' first language, and there is a paragraph break, but in reading the rest of the article, it provides context that shows that the authors are specifically disproving any perceived inconsistency. At the end of the article, the authors explicitly state that the perceived inconsistency between Michelson-Morley and Sagnac can be explained with an understanding of Coriolis force. That, in fact, is the crux and point of the article itself.

Again, your choice of scientific principles to use to try to prove that the earth is stationary is actually pretty ironic, considering the amount of attention Bob Knodel's laser gyroscope's experiment got for accidentally providing evidence that the earth is rotating. Ring laser gyros are one of the most common uses of the Sagnac effect in practical application.

Ultimately, even if there were inconsistencies between the behavior of light and its expected behavior given a rotating Earth, I'm not sure how that justifies a leap to an entirely flat earth. It might simply tell us that we don't understand the behavior of light. At most, it throws into question the heliocentric model, but even a stationary round planet would make more sense, given what we know about physics, than a flat one.

Incidentally, I'm curious to know what your personal favored FE model is, and how you arrived at it. Infinite plane? Firmament dome? Accelerating disc?

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 02:57:47 AM »

Do you think that Lorentz just randomly came up with his length contraction explanation that is currently used in Special Relativity? No. He was trying to explain away Michelson-Morley's experimental results of a stationary earth by claiming that the arm of the interferometer shrunk in size when it moved, and that's why the earth was not seen to be in motion (horizontally).

But the theory that the earth was motionless based on the Michelson-Morley experiment was predicated on the existence of an "aether." In the absence of the existence of aether (of which we have no scientific evidence), Michelson-Morley's results can more accurately be explained by relativity. In fact, I was pretty disappointed that your wiki specifically omits the other two possibilities from Ronald W. Clark's Einstein biography:

The problem which now faced science was considerable. For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first was that the Earth was standing still, which meant scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was unthinkable. The second was that ether was carried along by the earth in its passage through space.... The third solution was that the ether simply did not exist, which to many nineteenth century scientists was equivalent to scrapping current views of light, electricity, and magnetism, and starting again.

Saying that this experiment proves that the earth sits motionless is cherry-picking possible interpretations of the experiment to fit the view that you're advocating, which is something I feel that FE theories accuse the scientific community of doing in favor of a round-earth. Additionally, if you're going to accept the results of this experiment based on the presumption that aether exists, and claim that it's proof that the earth is motionless in space, let's consider something else. The Michelson-Morely experiment would also disprove the theory that the FES wiki presents that the earth is constantly accelerating upwards at a constant rate, since that would be observable by a method used by Michelson-Morley.

It's actually very ironic that you would pick this experiment, because it's actually a fantastic example of an instance in which there was a massive upheaval in the scientific community about the nature of the universe. Rather than trying to cover it up, or insisting that aether still had to exist despite all evidence to the contrary, the scientific community as a whole adopted the consequences of this upheaval, and it opened new doors of discovery. To me, that's proof that if scientists at large believed the earth was flat, it would be groundbreaking, and hailed as a new beginning for discovery of the nature of an infinite plane, or orbiting disc, or whatever the reality happened to be.

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Flat Earth Theory / New to FE theories and have some questions

« on: February 28, 2019, 01:05:10 AM »

Hi there,

I'm a pretty skeptical type of person and I have some questions to which I haven't found satisfactory answers in FE literature or productions.

First and foremost, I just want to verify that I'm correct in assuming that the primary reason for believing that the earth is flat is simply that it appears to be flat when you're standing on its surface?

I guess my difficulty with accepting any FE argument is that science is inherently trying to disprove itself on a regular basis. That's the nature of science. Scientists used to believe that disease was caused by an imbalance between your body fluids, until we discovered microscopes, which show us bacteria and viruses. We have technology that allows us to study their reproduction, and how they produce the toxins that make us feel sick. One of the founding tenets of FE seems to be that it would be a massive revelation that would embarrass scientists, so they're all part of the cover-up or believe that the earth is round dogmatically. But major revelations that disprove existing theories happen all the time in science. Scientists aren't embarrassed that they were wrong, they revel in new discovery, in learning something new about the universe. So, to discover that the earth is flat, and that there are unexplored reaches beyond the ring of ice surrounding our planet, would have the scientific community foaming at the mouth to learn what was outside that wall. Instead, the FE theory requires its proponents to believe that scientists are all either lying to protect the reputation of science, or somehow being deceived by a controlling element?

I also have a hard time reconciling the fact that there is a massive amount of disagreement in the FE community about what is beyond the boundaries of what a human could personally experience. Some believe that we are stationary, some believe we are constantly accelerating vertically, some believe the sky is a domed projection screen, some believe that the universe as described by scientists is correct except that the earth just happens to be the only known flat planet, some believe we live on an infinite plane. The introduction of a Flat Earth model, much like the theory of intelligent design, seems to introduce more questions than it answers. There is plenty of evidence that a gradual enough curve from a small or close-up perspective (for example, a ~6 foot tall human standing on the surface of a sphere nearly 132,000,000 feet in circumference) appears flat. I mean, it's hard to conceptualize an object 22 million times larger than us, we don't even have a frame of reference for what that would be like. So it makes perfect sense that your first instinct is that the earth is flat.

Where I get lost, though, is how FE theories claim that the burden of proof is still with scientists, and that any and all evidence they've presented of a round earth is somehow falsified or incorrect. Let's apply Occam's razor:

• Is it more likely that a) the scientific community, which is by its very nature, skeptical, inquisitive as a whole is presenting knowledge that they either know to be false or lack the ability or will to independently verify or b) that the scientific community has reached such a level of technology and abilities that the average individual cannot reproduce their methods (i.e., launch their own spacecraft) resulting in skeptical and distrustful people finding themselves in a situation where they cannot accept any scientific discovery
• Is it more likely that a) there is a vast amount of scientific knowledge, amassed over the last several centuries (the last five decades in particular), about the nature of the Earth, the universe and other heavenly bodies that all work using the same laws of physics and principles (spherical shapes, elliptical orbits, heliocentric star systems) or b) that the earth somehow does not conform to the observable laws of physics as explained by astrophysicists, either because everything we see in the sky is an illusion/projection of some kind or because the earth is the sole example of a flat planet or plane that we can observe (or other theory).

In order to understand FE theories better, I'd love some explanation as to how these questions are addressed by prevailing FE theories.

Please understand that I am a curious skeptic, and I'm not trying to attack any ideas or theories you may have directly. I'm sure many of you have had the same questions, and I'd love to hear the arguments that swayed you.