Am I right about this?- that we’d need a kind of radial geometry in order to explain say the distance around the Tropic of Cancer being apx. equal to the distance around the Tropic of Capricorn. Or, more blatantly, the similar distances around the Arctic and Antarctic circles. You’d have a have center point, and circles with that point as their vertex would get their circumference proportionally to their radius. Then, when the radius reached half a longitude the circumference would get proportionally smaller until the radius reaches a full longitude and the circle collapses to a point. On this Earth airplanes in the periphery of the disk trying to get to the exact other side of the disk would first fly the edge of the disk and in an instant fly 40,000 kilometers around side of the disk. Momentarily, of course, the plane would be 40,000 kilometers long. Once on the opposite side the plane would continue on to it’s destination.
If you accept measurements, it seems to me there’s no way to save the flat-earth hypothesis except by supposing that our understanding of mathematics is wrong—which seems rather less likely than measurements being wrong.
The most likely way that flat-earth could be true is that all the information we’ve been told about measurements (including, for example, the photos of the spherical earth) is a lie.
(Since you were fond of the Knox case discussion, I’ll note that I have a similar view of the situation there: the most likely way that Knox and Sollecito could be guilty is that there is mundane but important information that has somehow never made it to the internet. In both cases, the most vulnerable beliefs underpinning the high-confidence conclusion are beliefs about the transmission of information among humans.)
The traditional response to this on the FES website is that airplanes aren’t actually flying from one side of the disk to the other. They might go around the periphery to some extent, but outside the disk is probably either a lot of nothing or a very, very large, cold field of ice. So, that would make a trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn take much, much longer than a spherical-ish Earth would predict.
That’s why I assign such a low probability to this—that, and the motion of the stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres working exactly the way they would if the Earth were approximately spherical. If this disk Earth were the case, the stars in the Southern hemisphere would be rotating in the same direction as the stars in the Northern hemisphere, just with a wider radius of rotation, and there would be no axis that the stars rotate about near the south pole; and though I haven’t personally observed this effect, I’m pretty confident that astronomers would have noticed this. (This whole objection got explained away by different “star clouds” in different hemispheres.)
Well, that and the conspiracy.
My initial probability given was probably too low.
Quoting myself:
Am I right about this?- that we’d need a kind of radial geometry in order to explain say the distance around the Tropic of Cancer being apx. equal to the distance around the Tropic of Capricorn. Or, more blatantly, the similar distances around the Arctic and Antarctic circles. You’d have a have center point, and circles with that point as their vertex would get their circumference proportionally to their radius. Then, when the radius reached half a longitude the circumference would get proportionally smaller until the radius reaches a full longitude and the circle collapses to a point. On this Earth airplanes in the periphery of the disk trying to get to the exact other side of the disk would first fly the edge of the disk and in an instant fly 40,000 kilometers around side of the disk. Momentarily, of course, the plane would be 40,000 kilometers long. Once on the opposite side the plane would continue on to it’s destination.
If you accept measurements, it seems to me there’s no way to save the flat-earth hypothesis except by supposing that our understanding of mathematics is wrong—which seems rather less likely than measurements being wrong.
The most likely way that flat-earth could be true is that all the information we’ve been told about measurements (including, for example, the photos of the spherical earth) is a lie.
(Since you were fond of the Knox case discussion, I’ll note that I have a similar view of the situation there: the most likely way that Knox and Sollecito could be guilty is that there is mundane but important information that has somehow never made it to the internet. In both cases, the most vulnerable beliefs underpinning the high-confidence conclusion are beliefs about the transmission of information among humans.)
The traditional response to this on the FES website is that airplanes aren’t actually flying from one side of the disk to the other. They might go around the periphery to some extent, but outside the disk is probably either a lot of nothing or a very, very large, cold field of ice. So, that would make a trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn take much, much longer than a spherical-ish Earth would predict.
That’s why I assign such a low probability to this—that, and the motion of the stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres working exactly the way they would if the Earth were approximately spherical. If this disk Earth were the case, the stars in the Southern hemisphere would be rotating in the same direction as the stars in the Northern hemisphere, just with a wider radius of rotation, and there would be no axis that the stars rotate about near the south pole; and though I haven’t personally observed this effect, I’m pretty confident that astronomers would have noticed this. (This whole objection got explained away by different “star clouds” in different hemispheres.)
Well, that and the conspiracy.
My initial probability given was probably too low.