AS THE EARTH TURNS
I have a Face
Book friend who posted that he has decided that the Flat Earth theory is correct.
I could say everyone is entitled to believe whatever they choose. But that
would be the lazy man’s answer. Here is my answer to him:
I will defend
your right to listen to arguments and decide for yourself. However, I’ve gone
to the link you posted and watched the videos and listened to the arguments
and, in my opinion, they are all based on ignoring a lot of facts and believing
that for some reason, there is a global conspiracy to make people believe the
earth is an oblate spheroid. But I will refrain from saying what most
scientists might say about the videos. A blunt astrophysicist will tell you that
all of the 200 arguments are completely bogus and call them “pseudoscience”,
and call those who peddle them stupid, or at the very best, delusional and misguided.
Yes, some NASA photos are re-touched, but not for the reasons implied by the
video maker, i.e. to hide the supposed ‘fact’ that the earth is flat.
As an aside, I
think the name ‘pseudoscience’ is misused by many people claiming to be
scientists. Scientists do not know everything. Science is always incomplete.
See my post on the incompleteness theorems proved by Gӧdel. So
calling an idea ‘pseudoscience’ just because it doesn’t fit the current model
is a sure sign that the name-caller doesn’t really understand science. On the
other hand, some ideas are easily disproved. Those can legitimately be called
pseudoscience. The flat-earth theory is one of those.
My friend
asserted that there is no evidence of a curved horizon even at 100,000 feet
altitude. 100,000 feet sounds like
a long way up, but it's only seven one-hundredths of one percent of the
circumference of the earth. The curvature of the horizon is very small,
virtually indiscernible at that distance above the earth. 100,000 feet is less
than 20 miles. Compare that with the distance from New York to San Francisco.
It is about seven-tenths of one percent of that distance. At 100,000 feet you
can't see both SF and NY at the same time because of the curvature of the
earth, even though the horizon appears flat.
I’ve flown
polar routes personally, and I can tell you that direct observations absolutely
refute the flat earth theory. I could point out the fallacies in most of the
200 arguments, but my time is valuable so I’ll just prove to you in a direct
manner that the earth is approximately spherical:
1. Standing on
our eastern shoreline at sunrise, the sun appears to come up out of the
Atlantic Ocean, but we know England, Ireland and Europe are on the other side. If
the earth were flat, how do you explain this?
2. Sunrise
tomorrow, April 13, 2016, in New York City is at 6:20 AM. Sunrise tomorrow in
Denver Colorado is exactly 2 hours and 5 minutes later. The elevation of New
York City is only a few feet above sea level. Denver is about one mile (5,280
feet) above sea level. That’s why it is known as the ‘mile-high city’. The
highest mountain between Denver and New York is the highest point in the
Allegheny Mountains, Spruce Knob at 4,863 feet above sea level. If the earth is
flat, on a clear day, people in Denver would be able to see the sun come up
east of New York City, as the New Yorkers see it, not 2 hours later. Even
accounting for haze, someone on Lookout Mountain, just west of Denver at 7,377
feet above sea level would see the sunrise over the Atlantic at the same time
it is seen in New York.
You can check
this out for yourself: Ask someone in New York, and someone in Denver to call
you when the sun comes up tomorrow morning. If you are in Oklahoma, you’ll get
the call from your friend in New York about 40 minutes before you see the sun,
and you’ll get the call from Denver about 35 minutes after you see the sun
rise. Based on the difference in sunrise times, and the distance in miles
between New York and Denver, you can calculate the curvature of the surface of
the earth, and from that its circumference, proving that the surface of the earth
is curved, and refuting the flat earth theory for yourself.
