this is what, for some stupid reason, prevents people from even investigating massive deceptions.
just like 9/11, focus on the facts and physics. don't let your ego interfere with your logic. use your own powers of observation and calculation instead of relying on folks you don't know.
1. pictures taken of things farther away than would be possible on a ball
2. sun rays coming through clouds at an angle and making angled shadows from parallel objects
3. triangulation calculations for the distance to the sun.
4. the water doesn't go to the equator and then fly off
5. the air magically sticks to a spinning ball so well that it appears as if we aren't moving!
ballers they claim gravity can do all these things just before they say we don't understand gravity!
ball-deniers understand gravity!
this is simple, but unfortunately, so are sheeple, led by the government schools and media. WAKE UP
I like your suggestion to look into things myself without relying on outside sources - that's what I'm trying to do.
So let's think about your 5 numbered points:
1. pictures taken of things farther away than would be possible on a ballSo we're expected to believe that these photos that you have found are NOT photoshopped or otherwise misrepresented. But you're allowed to disclaim any photo I have (taken from a satellite or a man standing on the moon) as being faked? This is not acceptable within your own standard of evidence! How can you respond if I say that this is a secret conspiracy to take fake photos that support FE ?
If you're not allowing outside evidence - this isn't evidence.
2. sun rays coming through clouds at an angle and making angled shadows from parallel objectsSo here is what you're talking about - right? Clearly the light source is not a few million miles away!
We can certainly see that those rays are emerging from the cloud with about a 90 degree angle from the leftmost ray to the rightmost...agreed? This cannot possibly be the case if the light source is millions of miles away...for sure.
But in FE theory, the sun is claimed to be about 3,000 miles away - so how, even in FE theory can you explain these rays?
The truth is that the sun (be it 3,000 or 3,000,000 miles away) is illuminating a large thunderhead cloud that's right above the cloud deck. It's light REFLECTED from that bright, white cloud that produces those rays.
Now I get that this is not the most satisfying explanation (although it happens to be true in this case) - but the FE community needs the same explanation to explain that the sun isn't sitting at around 1000 feet above the Earth! So this argument is (at best) a tie...sunrays through clouds neither proves nor disproves FE or RE.
3. triangulation calculations for the distance to the sun.I have not seen these calculations that you have - and in any case, you're saying that I have to do these things for myself.
OK - on the day of the spring Equinox, I look up sunrise and sunset times (in GMT) from places in the Northern and Southern hemispheres (
www.sunrisesunset.com - or any of a bazillion other websites and almanacs) - and using both the FE map and my RE globe - I plot an "X" at every place that's has sunrise around 6:00 GMT. I notice that these X's lie on an almost perfectly straight line on the FE map - and at points that lie on a semicircle on my RE globe. I do the same thing for the sunset times around 6:00 GMT...and on the FE map, all of these points also lie on the same straight line - but on the opposite side of the central north pole. On the globe, I now have all of my X's laying on a circle that bisects the Earth. This says that EXACTLY half of the RE globe and EXACTLY half of the FE disk are illuminated at the same exact moment. I can repeat this experiment for any GMT time - and the result is exactly the same. Plug this into some math - and the sun has to be a
very long distance away - so far that the parallax is too small to be measurable at the precision of a normal clock. That doesn't work if the sun is much closer than the diameter of the earth disk...the segm
ent of the world that can see a simultaneous sunrise has to be much MUCH smaller than it clearly is.
4. the water doesn't go to the equator and then fly offIndeed it does not. This is because gravity acts towards the center of the Earth - which keeps everything pulled together into shape that's very close to a sphere. Any object that has forces pulling or pushing inwards will tend to pull into the shape of a sphere - which is why water droplets and soap bubbles prefer that shape.
5. the air magically sticks to a spinning ball so well that it appears as if we aren't moving! Again - yes it does. Gravity keeps it pulled down towards the ground - and as gravity weakens further from the center, the air gets less and less dense...which is why it's hard to breathe at the top of a tall mountain.
The air feels the force of friction and turbulence with the surface of the planet - so it spins around with us. HOWEVER, if a wind blows North-South - it does EXACTLY what you guessed it might to - it blows at an angle, due to the rotation of the Earth. This is called "The Coriolis Effect" - which is very well known to people who fire guns over long distances - and it's an effect that anyone can experience for themselves. Coriolis also explains why hurricanes in the Nothern Hemisphere rotate in the opposite direction to hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere - and why hurricanes never form close to the equator. Flat Earth theory doesn't seem to account for Coriolis and can't explain why storms always rotate the same way...which is a problem.
ballers they claim gravity can do all these things just before they say we don't understand gravity!
ball-deniers understand gravity!
We know how gravity acts - we can measure it, we can establish the mathematics behind it. We know that every mass in the entire universe pulls on every other mass with a force that's proportional to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them. This rule works for everything we can measure in the entire universe - and it works. It perfectly explains the motions of the Earth, Moon, Comets, Asteroids, Planets and even entire Galaxies.
But you're right...we don't know WHY the force acts the way it does - only the way that it acts.
So...how does the experience that RE'ers call "gravity" operate in FET?
* Some people claim that the earth is accelerating upwards very rapidly. That doesn't explain why gravity is greater at the north pole and less at the equator - and less at the tops of tall mountains. So that doesn't fit reality.
* Some people claim that the flat earth really does have gravity (which works if the FE world is infinite) - but that gets you back to the same problem that RE proponents have trouble explaining. So if you decry RE's "gravity" then this version of FET is not for you because it also doesn't have a "WHY?" answer!
* Some people claim that air pressure from the atmosphere presses down on things. This is so busted, it's ridiculous. But one experiment that disproves it is simply that if you put an object in to an airtight chamber and pump out all of the air - the object doesn't float away. So this one is busted too.
There is another problem here too...tides.
According to the Wiki, the FE moon does exert a force of gravity on the water to make tides. So no matter which FE explanation you have - you still need to invoke a mysterious force that pulls things together in order to get tides to work. (And in any case this FE explanation for tides fails to explain why there are TWO high tides and TWO low tides each day...so it's STILL busted).
So before you decry the lack of a "WHY?" answer for gravity in RE - maybe you should come up with an FE explanation for "weight" and things falling when you drop them and those double-tides on the FE...I don't see a viable explanation here.
I think your triumphant presentation here has quite a few holes in it...and I'd be delighted to hear the solutions.