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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Debunking "Altered perspective"

« Last post by mtnman on Today at 12:11:40 AM »

You guys are arguing without knowledge how perspective would actually act at large distances. You are making a hypothesis that the perspective lines would never touch. Where is the evidence for this hypothesis that perspective lines will never touch?

This perspective argument is crazy. Is this whole idea just a big joke? I can't tell any more.

Perspective lines can't ever touch because they are NOT REAL. Perspective means, how we perceive something. It doesn't mean how it is in reality.

I'll stick to the railroad track argument because it is so simple. If you stand between the rails, the rails appear to become closer in the distance. It has nothing to do with the horizon. Where is the evidence for this hypothesis that perspective lines will never touch? Because for these angles to meet the rails would touch. And regardless of their meeting or not, no matter how far down these tracks, to the horizon, to the tree line, to half way up the picture, the rails are the same distance apart. I know this because the trains that travel the tracks don't shrink as they move away from us. Even if it looks like they do.

And yes we all believe in the horizon. It's where the Earth appears to meet the sky. It happens because the Earth is round and slopes gradually away. These arguments giving magic properties to "perspective" just don't make sense.

Reference the picture of the tracks. You look down them and see rails moving at angles getting closer. If someone else was standing 300 feet down those same tracks and looked back at you, what would they see? Rails moving at angles getting closer. So how can either perspective be said to have anything to do with the reality of the rails?

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Flat Earth Debate / Constant angular speed of the sun

« Last post by douglips on Today at 12:08:15 AM »

Using an equatorial sundial you can demonstrate that the sun moves through 15 degrees every hour, no matter what time of day it is.
Example construction of such a sundial:


This has several implications, all of which are problematic for flat earth theory.

A) DISTANCE TO THE SUN
If you know the distance between two points at any given latitude between the two tropics (e.g, between say Ziguinchor, Senegal, and Gondar, Ethiopia at 12.6 degrees N - at most about 7400 km), you can calculate the exact distance to the sun. If you believe in longitude, you can just go by the angle difference in longitude. If you don't believe in longitude, you could send a team of two people, one to each location, and measure the exact time the sun passes over head as well as the angle the sun makes at the time the sun passes overhead the other location. Since that is exactly what longitude is, it will work out to the same value.

For this particular example, Google thinks you can drive from one to the other in about 7400km, and the longitude difference is 53.7 degrees. This means that at noon at Gondar the day the sun is directly overhead, the sun is at a 53.7 degree angle in Ziguinchor, and vice versa.

On a flat earth, this means you can draw a triangle where one leg is the line on the flat earth between the two locations, one leg is vertical from the location where the sun is directly overhead, and one leg is from the sun to the other location. This triangle would have angles of 53.7, 90, and 36.3 degrees. The length of the earth leg is at most the driving distance between the two cities, and the vertical distance from the earth to the sun at the location is the tangent of 36.3 degrees * at most 7400km, or about 3400 miles.

B) ANGULAR SIZE OF THE SUN
Because you now know how far the sun is from the earth, you can determine how much farther away the sun is at a time other than noon. In the above example, the sun would be 7400km/cos(36.3 degrees) at the location that is not directly under the sun, or about 5700 miles away. This is 1.7 times farther away than the sun is at noon, meaning that the angular size of the sun should be significantly smaller at the location where it is not noon.

However, the angular size of the sun is always about 1/2 of a degree, this means the sun's distance from you does not change significantly during the day, or the shape of the sun is weirdly shaped such that from different angles it appears larger. Such a weirdly shaped sun would be impossible to eclipse, for example.

C) PERSPECTIVE
Since the angular velocity of the sun is constant, in flat earth theory this means that the sun must be moving faster when it is farther away from you. However, if that were the case, people in different areas of the earth would see the sun moving more quickly overhead, because while it is 4 PM where you are, it's noon somewhere. Either the person where it is noon would see the sun moving faster, or you would see the sun moving slower.

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Burden of proof

« Last post by xenotolerance on September 24, 2017, 11:17:34 PM »

That is an incorrect interpretation of burden of proof, in this case.

The Flat Earth Society claims the Earth is flat. I and others come to post on the forums to dispute that claim.

Yes. And we tell you to look out your window, which is evidence of that claim, and you then proceed to throw a fit, unable to actually justify your beliefs further.

Anyone reading this discussion can follow the links in my signature to two cases of justifying my beliefs further.

Incidentally, out my window right now is a sunset, evidence of a round earth.

If you wish to continue in good faith, I encourage you to develop a response to the substance of my previous comment.

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Flat Earth Q&A / Re: flat earth hypothesis

« Last post by inquisitive on September 24, 2017, 11:00:55 PM »

i have heard allot about perspective. when a ship sails far enough away from a person viewing it, the ship appear to sink under the water or the ship is hidden around the curve of the earth.

here is my question. If we tie a rope between two ships and one heads west and one heads east at what point(s) would the rope become submerged due to the curvature of the earth?

Nothing to do with perspective, check the definition.

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Burden of proof

« Last post by inquisitive on September 24, 2017, 10:50:12 PM »

That is an incorrect interpretation of burden of proof, in this case.

The Flat Earth Society claims the Earth is flat. I and others come to post on the forums to dispute that claim.

Yes. And we tell you to look out your window, which is evidence of that claim, and you then proceed to throw a fit, unable to actually justify your beliefs further.

I look out of my window and see the sun set knowing my friend to the west of me sees it set later. 

How is your timeanddate.com comparision going?

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Debunking "Altered perspective"

« Last post by inquisitive on September 24, 2017, 10:47:01 PM »

A) Perspective is not a property of the universe. It's an emergent property of our eyes and how we view things. "All object experience perspective" is patently false.

P1. Cameras experience the same perspective we do.
P2. Cameras are objects.
C. Objects experience perspective.

P1. Cameras without lenses experience perspective
C. Perspective is not a lens phenomenon

B) Show us your evidence that perspective can account for a change of 20 DEGREES in the sun. Reminder: Neither the sun nor the moon are proofs for this.

Railroad tracks in a perspective scene are not an infinite distance away when they meet the horizon. This shows that your model is wrong.

C) Your "rules for perspective" are based on the assumption the Earth is flat.

The existence of a horizon is based on REALITY. If you attempt to create a model of the earth of any shape you need to have the capability of a horizon. if you cannot do this then your model is insufficient and does not properly account for all variables involved.

You are still clinging onto your very own definition of perspective.  It's not clear what you are trying to prove.

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Flat Earth General / Re: FE as a cultural phenomenon.

« Last post by devils advocate on September 24, 2017, 09:23:17 PM »

And since I posted this there has been a moderate increase in traffic but nothing like I thought would happen.
 

Hey Dither.  Maybe those who join are, like me, people who struggle to understand why anyone would think the earth was flat, the frustration is that Tom seems to stop answering just at the crucial point in the debate thus the chance if converts is low. I have read and asked, had a few answers and digested those but at the crux the responses stop. Another convert lost :-(

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Burden of proof

« Last post by Curious Squirrel on September 24, 2017, 09:14:33 PM »

That is an incorrect interpretation of burden of proof, in this case.

The Flat Earth Society claims the Earth is flat. I and others come to post on the forums to dispute that claim.

Yes. And we tell you to look out your window, which is evidence of that claim, and you then proceed to throw a fit, unable to actually justify your beliefs further.

But it's not. You have yet to present actual, verifiable evidence that cannot possibly be for anything but a flat Earth. None, zero, zilch, nada.

False.

Incorrect.

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: Debunking "Altered perspective"

« Last post by Curious Squirrel on September 24, 2017, 09:14:07 PM »

A) Perspective is not a property of the universe. It's an emergent property of our eyes and how we view things. "All object experience perspective" is patently false.

P1. Cameras experience the same perspective we do.
P2. Cameras are objects.
C. Objects experience perspective.

P1. Cameras without lenses experience perspective
C. Perspective is not a lens phenomenon

B) Show us your evidence that perspective can account for a change of 20 DEGREES in the sun. Reminder: Neither the sun nor the moon are proofs for this.

Railroad tracks in a perspective scene are not an infinite distance away when they meet the horizon. This shows that your model is wrong.

C) Your "rules for perspective" are based on the assumption the Earth is flat.

The existence of a horizon is based on REALITY. If you attempt to create a model of the earth of any shape you need to have the capability of a horizon. if you cannot do this then your model is insufficient and does not properly account for all variables involved.

A) Cameras operate using the same system of vision we do. They are equipped to 'see' the world in much the same way we do, because we know of no other way to view the world in a visual manner.
B) Railroad tracks don't change by 20 degrees. The model perfectly predicts where the tracks will be in a given image based on their distance from the observer. Try again.
C) The sideview model isn't based on any assumption about the Earth. It's to determine where an object physically is. Once again, without a mechanism to move the sun 20 degrees lower than it physically is, you can't have sunlight coming in at 0 degrees or less.

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Flat Earth Debate / Re: I just flew through a sunset and took pictures that support RET

« Last post by douglips on September 24, 2017, 09:10:22 PM »

Photos:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/lGZ30LhidkSFbv0A2