If GR or the Ferrari effect are deconstructed, then it falls apart.
WELL THEN LET'S DO IT ALREADY
In brief, the so-named Ferrari effect is a terrible misunderstanding of Einstein, Newton, and geometry. It does really need to be deconstructed, as you say, because it was never constructed in the first place. It's garbage. AND I'M GONNA TAKE OUT THE TRASH
For clarity, I will refer to a page on the other site where Mr Johnny D describes the 'Ferrari effect'
over here. I put 'Ferrari effect' in scare quotes because A) it's not really an Effect at all and B) the original prediction by Ferrari was that the Earth would appear round on observation despite actually being flat, so this writing by Davis is a nakedly desperate attempt to cobble together enough spooky-sounding words to explain why the Earth appears spherical, because as we all know, he cannot accept that it is.
(For a spooky example: He writes "Gravity is actually revealed as an inertial force (also known as a fictitious force)."
Does he explain what a fictitious force is? Does he know what that means?
Does it matter at all if gravity is an inertial force? These are questions you don't have to ask, because the Earth isn't flat.
)
OKAY
Consider a theoretical object in a perfectly stable orbit around a theoretical planet in a traditional round earth manner. Remember from Newtons laws of motion: an object in motion tends to stay in motion and in the direction it is in motion. We can certainly say that the object in orbit that it feels no experimentally verifiable difference in force or pseudo-force - which is equivalent to saying it is experimentally not accelerating (and thus not changing direction or speed.)
An object in orbit is constantly accelerating due to the force of gravity. The relevant law from Newton is actually the 2nd law, shortened into the equation F = ma given at the top of the page, not the badly misunderstood 1st law cited here.
So, at the top, Davis has made a disqualifying error. But let us continue!
Our sight would lead us to believe this might be foolish, but if space is curved (and Relativity relies on the assumption that it is) it would be silly to not question our visual representation of space since by all accounts it appears as if our observational (and theoretical) language is ill equipped to deal with description of it.
We should assume that it is indeed travelling in a straight line as its experimental evidence points us to. The issue is with our naive view of geometry and space. Likewise we take the view that it is indeed in motion and not still.
There is not much here, but I will point out a major leap of logic: "It would be silly" to naively accept what we think space looks like, so "we should assume" an orbit is a straight line.
Also - relativity does not assume space is curved, it allows us to do math where space is curved, which is useful because space is really curved.
How can Davis deal with being wrong about everything all the time? I think it would get hard to exist, having to live that way.
MOVING ON
Let’s interpret the ramifications of the statement: an object in orbit travels in a straight (and thus flat), line through space through further thought experiment. First, we can define our field of interest in that taking all such theoretical orbits of our planet and realize them rightly as flat, thus defining the bounding space of interest also to be flat. It follows, given any orbit of this planet to be flat, the planet itself is flat since it satisfies our definition of flatness.
Let us again venture into thought experiment: eject some pods towards the earth from one such of our imaginary satellites at regular intervals along our orbit such that they are in free fall. Again, we can assume these are straight lines extending below to a translatable location on the surface of the earth, its geolocation. We can say these lines are normal to the trajectory of the satellite and they are normal to the ground, thus making the lines parallel. Since the orbit is straight, and the orbit relates directly to the geographical locations it is above, we have come a long way to show the planet is also flat.
Note here that our buddy JD asserted, without continuance or support from where he started ("Let us begin with Newton"), that orbits are straight therefore flat and so therefore the planet is flat. DANG HOMIE that's a jump! He then points that out if you assert one straight line that is parallel to a flat plane, and draw some lines that are perpendicular to the line they will also be perpendicular to the plane, therefore the Earth is flat, dawg! sure have come a long way to show the planet is flat.
NOPE
Giving Davis the benefit of the doubt, I assume he means to refer to
Geodesics, which have also come up in this thread. The layperson's simplification of geodesics is that you can interpret orbits in curved spacetime not as ellipses or circles, but as straight lines. If you take that at face value as physics fact, it makes sense to say something like 'orbits are straight therefore flat.' However:
"The local behaviour of geodesic curves is similar to that of straight lines in Euclidean space." - local here means not the entire curve, but a piece of it: 'a sufficiently short arc'
"Here is an interesting interpretation of geodesics from mechanics. Suppose a particle is moving on the surface under a force perpendicular to the surface to maintain contact. Its trajectory would be a geodesic, because Newton’s second law states that the particle’s acceleration γ¨ is parallel to the force, hence always perpendicular to the surface." - gravity is parallel to the velocity of an object in orbit, which is how orbital paths form geodesics.
MOVING ON
Now let us consider what acceleration means. Acceleration by its nature means either a change in speed or direction, which is to say a change in velocity. So when we look at the parabola formed by a ball in motion we can recognize that it is for the most part accelerating - it changes both direction and speed. Now, let us examine the path if we remove the influence of gravity from our model as well as unbound the start and end points to allow it to move freely.
If gravity was not forcing the object downwards, it would then be travelling a straight path, parallel perhaps to our imaginary satellite and in this case tangent to the apex of our balls climb.
We can see by comparison between a theoretical object in orbit and our ball at the apex of its climb that if not affected by gravity it would travel a straight line. By repeating this experiment again and again with lower apexes of our ball, various orientations, and so on we see the earth itself, not just the paths of satellites, is flat.
What's worth looking at here is that Davis overlays a straight-line representation of an orbital geodesic, a flat-plane representation of a spherical surface parallel to that geodesic, and a preserved parabolic curve not subject to the same transform; note also the presumption about how an object would travel 'if gravity was not forcing the object downwards.' A careful reading of the same pages AS linked might clarify this point for Davis. Incidentally, even if one wants to represent a geodesic as a straight line, it does not follow that one can represent a sphere as a flat plane.
IN SUM
Davis is a hack