To get the day-night cycle to be noticeable, you have to shrink the sun and move it closer to the earth.īy “Zeteticism” he meant an extreme version of the philosophy of empiricism. You also have to get the moon and the sun to somehow circle around over the disk to explain day and night and the phases of the moon. That’s an ad-hoc assumption which disfavors the flat earth hypothesis against models where the orbits of the moon and the sun can be calculated from the gravitational law.īut that’s not the only problem. For example, you have to assume that the moon and the sun accelerate along with the flat earth so we don’t just run into them. The idea that gravity is due to upward acceleration also causes other problems. I explained last week that this is in conflict with evidence – we know that the gravitational acceleration is most definitely not the same everywhere on earth. As a consequence, the apparent gravitational acceleration is the same everywhere on earth.
They mostly agree though that gravity does not exist, and that the observations we normally attribute to gravity come instead from the upward acceleration of the flat earth. And a minority of flat earthers believe that earth is really an infinite plane. An alternative is the so-called bipolar model where both poles are on the disk, surrounded by water that’s held by a rim of something, maybe ice or rocks. But not all flat earthers sign up to this. The most popular flat earth model is that of a disk where the North pole is in the middle and the south pole is an ice wall on the edge of the disk. More importantly, I also want to explain why you should not be embarrassed if you can’t remember how we know that the earth is round.īut first I have to tell you what flat earthers actually believe and how they got there.
Today, I want to tell you why I nevertheless think flat earthers are neither stupid nor anti-scientific. Here you have a group of people steadfastly rejecting evidence that’s right in their face. I, as many people in science communication, am fascinated with flat earthers.
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