Why would gravity pull a flat world into a sphere? Where do you get that information? Is there any experimental evidence to back that up? Or is that just some kind of hypothetical talking point you've assimilated as an original idea?
From all your previous response, i knew you would start asking stuff like this. But i had high hopes that you really would know this for yourself. *sigh*
Gravity forces everything into a shape that represents the lowest energy state. A cube has corners that have more potential energy than that sides. They would gradually erode to become rounded. There is a certain mass needed to have things become a sphere shape. Asteroids, comets and such can be angular because they are not large enough to experience the same effect as something as large as a planet.
And now before you will response with another question "And why does sphere represent the lowest energy state?" because spheres have no edges.
Any documented evidence or experiments to attest to this? Or is this purely hypothetical still? Didn't know gravity forced anything to do anything, even in pure logical standpoint it is the attraction of one molecule to another. If you have a disc with a certain thickness, any molecule attracts to any other molecule, at the inverse squared of the distance between them. The molecules on the far edges of a disc would attract to every other molecule that makes up the mass. The molecule at the extreme opposite end of the thick disc, wouldn't want to bend over itself and touch the molecules on the other end of the disc. Without a spherical center, the mass is evenly dispersed. There is just enough chance that the Earth would bend to be concave as to bend and make a near perfect sphere.
Also, as we know our Earth isn't made out of pliable plastic or paper, it is multiple layers or hard stone, crust, iron, magma, giant volumes of water etc. To assume it should just fold in upon itself is illogical, and you still arrive at the same question, how was Earth formed in the first place? Big Bang doesn't have any actual hypothetical mechanism on how a multi layered sphere with varying, yet perfect amounts of periodic chemicals happened to form out of an explosion.
I really don't know why YOU can't read up on this stuff yourself, but you ask: "Why would gravity pull a flat world into a sphere?"
Then say: "we know our Earth isn't made out of pliable plastic or paper, it is multiple layers or hard stone, crust, iron, magma, giant volumes of water etc." While not paper, or what we call "plastic", the magma is very plastic and in places quite liquid.
Yes, but as I have said before if you dig down enough (yes I know the Russians tried, and it got too hot at about 12 km) the earth gets very hot.
Evidence: ask anyone in Japan, Hawaii, Italy, Indonesia, San Francisco, around Yellowstone, etc. Yes it's molten rock and magma down there.
Sure it's layers, but more or less in order crust (soil, sand hard stone and water), magma (
molten rock), next bit
and a core largely of extremely hot iron, not necessarily molten because of the pressure. The high temperature is maintained partly by still decaying radioactive materials (Uranium etc - didn't know you were sitting on a nuclear reactor!)
The distribution of components is essentially based on density.
So, the earth is basically a thin skin (5 km to 25 km thick)
floating on molten rock - it IS very PLASTIC. However the earth was created, this is how it ended up. Much of the evidence from this comes from seismic studies.
Being so plastic, gravity alone would pull it into a sphere - it all tries to "fall to the centre", with the lighter rocks floating higher forming the continents. The earth's rotation (and to a smaller extent the distribution of heavier rock) distort the shape a slight amount (about 0.3%) giving us the infamous "slightly pear shape").
Yes, under our feet it feels solid, but ask anyone who has experienced an earthquake or volcanic eruption how solid it really is!
I hope you like rafting, because that is what you are doing - floating around on huge rafts on a "molten rock sea" - get used to it.