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Tales Of A Flat Earth

I understand there is a huge horizon, but if I was at the South Pole why don’t I feel like my head is pointing downward ?

Your subjective feelings of "up" and "down" are largely based on the pull of gravity. As long as your posture extends your head away from the center of the earth you're probably oriented "upright", regardless of wherever on the earth's surface you're located.
 
I have often wondered why we see always level land when we know the earth is round.

How is the brain tricked into this perspective ?
If you're asking why the horizon looks flat, this is the best way I find to think about it. As a relatively small being on a great big sphere, you're surrounded my a little circle which is as far as you can see by line of sight before the surface of the Earth drops away (notwithstanding refraction). That circle is your horizon. Every part of it is as far from you as any other part of it, so from the centre of that circle you can swivel your head but the edge will always be the same distance from your eyes. Therefore, the part of the horizon you see at the edges of your vision shouldn't look different, including shouldn't look lower, than the part you see right in front of you, so you won't see curvature.
I understand there is a huge horizon, but if I was at the South Pole why don’t I feel like my head is pointing downward ?
There's no such thing as downward. There's just towards the centre of gravity and away from it. Our conventions for representing the Earth and our limited perspectives are irrelevant to the universe. The Sun doesn't 'come up' in the morning or 'go down' in the evening.
 
The perspectives of our experience of the world around us were initially conceived and established by the scientists of the day.
Hence why our maps and geographical sciences in general are very 'euro-centric' - most of the earliest advancements in 'the sciences' were made in centres of education and research in European countries, chiefly English, German, Italian and Greek.

This led to our perception of anything in the southern hemisphere (eg Australia and New Zealand etc) being 'down' and/or 'at the bottom'.

I would hazard a guess that the first people to experience vision 'beyond the known horizon' would have been the earliest balloonists, such as the Montgolfier brothers.
It was already believed by around 500 B.C., that Earth was round, not flat. But they had no idea how big the planet is until about 240 B.C., when Eratosthenes devised a clever method of estimating its circumference.
link to description of method used
 
Looks like the World is running 'flat out!':points:
If you're asking why the horizon looks flat, this is the best way I find to think about it. As a relatively small being on a great big sphere, you're surrounded my a little circle which is as far as you can see by line of sight before the surface of the Earth drops away (notwithstanding refraction). That circle is your horizon. Every part of it is as far from you as any other part of it, so from the centre of that circle you can swivel your head but the edge will always be the same distance from your eyes. Therefore, the part of the horizon you see at the edges of your vision shouldn't look different, including shouldn't look lower, than the part you see right in front of you, so you won't see curvature.

There's no such thing as downward. There's just towards the centre of gravity and away from it. Our conventions for representing the Earth and our limited perspectives are irrelevant to the universe. The Sun doesn't 'come up' in the morning or 'go down' in the evening.
I suppose you could say, that there is no direction in our World? "Up" is that which is above us/ or "it," and "down" is that which lies below us/ or "it". . . and that's it!:headspinner:Or. . . just to clarify the situation, "up" is equal to "down," and vice-versa.:huh:
 
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In a rotating space habitat, such as the Wheel in 2001, the Naboo in The Expanse or the colony in Babylon 5, up is towards the axis of rotation.

In a constantly accelerating spacecraft, like the Rocinante in The Expanse or one of Heinlein's torchships, up is towards the front of the ship. Since acceleration = gravity according to Einstein, these examples are as real as any other kind of gravity.

So no, there is no absolute preferred direction in our universe.
 
Your subjective feelings of "up" and "down" are largely based on the pull of gravity. As long as your posture extends your head away from the center of the earth you're probably oriented "upright", regardless of wherever on the earth's surface you're located.
I heard a flerf the other day, apparently seriously, saying the Nile is impossible because it flows north, and water can't go uphill :chuckle:

According to my sister, who is a primary school teacher, in Australia and New Zealand, they often have maps with South at the top in classrooms.
 
I heard a flerf the other day, apparently seriously, saying the Nile is impossible because it flows north, and water can't go uphill :chuckle:

According to my sister, who is a primary school teacher, in Australia and New Zealand, they often have maps with South at the top in classrooms.
We all know how the world really looks;
mr-cholmondeley-warner-presents.jpg
 
As confirmed (in places) during the opening titles of the hard-hitting news program, 'The Day Today'.
 
I heard a flerf the other day, apparently seriously, saying the Nile is impossible because it flows north, and water can't go uphill :chuckle:
Good grief, I remember that argument. And they're so straight faced, it makes you wonder whether any of them believe what they're saying. In the debate that made me decide I'd heard enough from the flat-earth community, one flerf had a whole presentation of several minutes, with pictures and figures, about how a particularly long canal (it may have been Suez) didn't have lock gates to account for the curvature of the Earth. It's not as though they haven't been told time and again that curvature is different from elevation. Are they just trolling? Some of them, surely, have to be.

According to my sister, who is a primary school teacher, in Australia and New Zealand, they often have maps with South at the top in classrooms.
I think that's a great idea to help shake us out of a northern hemisphere bias.
 
However much various populations like to place their own countries at the centre of their map though, it's a historical fact that for centuries the trade between nations globally depended on mapping for navigation so that the goods could be transported to their destinations.
The maps used were standardised long ago to use Greenwich, England as the centre.
Hence why we now have 'Greenwich Mean Time' (GMT).
https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topic... main reasons,Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.

Interestingly....
"As the Earth’s crust is moving very slightly all the time the exact position of the Prime Meridian is now moving very slightly too, but the original reference for the prime meridian of the world remains the Airy Transit Circle in the Royal Observatory, even if the exact location of the line may move to either side of Airy’s meridian."
 
Curiously, the reference meridian for the GPS system is 102 metres east of the Airy Transit Circle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IERS_Reference_Meridian
The IERS Reference Meridian (IRM), also called the International Reference Meridian, is the prime meridian (0° longitude) maintained by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). It passes about 5.3 arcseconds east of George Biddell Airy's 1851 transit circle which is 102 metres (335 ft) at the latitude of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.[1][2][a] Thus it differs slightly from the historical Greenwich meridian.
Unlike the Greenwich meridian, the IRM is stationary, while the European crust moves because of plate tectonics.
The IERS system is not quite fixed to any point attached to the Earth. For example, all points on the European portion of the Eurasian plate, including the Royal Observatory, are moving northeast at about 2.5 cm per year relative to it.
 

Flat-earthers are overconfident about their own scientific knowledge but exhibit low scientific literacy, study finds​

https://www.psypost.org/2023/06/fla...it-low-scientific-literacy-study-finds-165795

I don't think we needed another study for this though. Most people have pretty low scientific knowledge. And many people are overconfident in their beliefs. It's the way humans work normally. But this part is interesting:

The researchers found that among the participants, 1.3% indicated that they were fully convinced that the earth was flat, while 82.5% were fully convinced that the earth is not flat. These findings were surprising to some, as there was skepticism about finding individuals who believed in a flat earth, especially among highly educated individuals.

Only a small percentage of people really believe this idea fervently. But lots of people are willing to entertain fringe beliefs because they seem popular, exciting, or plausible for various reasons. I see flat earthism as a reaction to distrust of authority and possibly life trauma. The headline suggests you can fix flat earthism by science education and that is probably not useful.
 
I would hazard a guess that the first people to experience vision 'beyond the known horizon' would have been the earliest balloonists, such as the Montgolfier brothers.
It was already believed by around 500 B.C., that Earth was round, not flat. But they had no idea how big the planet is until about 240 B.C., when Eratosthenes devised a clever method of estimating its circumference.
link to description of method used
Within the ancient texts from India, the Vedas, the earth is described as a ball like in shape and not only is the diameter of the earth accurately stated, the Vedas also list the other planets in the solar system, how far away they are and their size. The Vedas were written approximately 5000 years ago.

Edit: I've just read the entire thread from the start. A very interesting read.
 
John Dobson, populariser of what is now known as the Dobsonian telescope mounting system and of DIY astronomy (anybody else seen A Sidewalk Astronomer? - wow) once said Vedanta must start to take physics more seriously and physicists must start to take Vedanta more seriously if we’re to escape the us&them bind that dominates scientific discourse. I like the sentiment and think it could be practical under the right circumstances.
 
John Dobson, populariser of what is now known as the Dobsonian telescope mounting system and of DIY astronomy (anybody else seen A Sidewalk Astronomer? - wow) once said Vedanta must start to take physics more seriously and physicists must start to take Vedanta more seriously if we’re to escape the us&them bind that dominates scientific discourse. I like the sentiment and think it could be practical under the right circumstances.
That's a really interesting comment. I find the us and them mentality acutely annoying. So much of what science is discovering has already been known thousands of years ago and so many Vendantists are more interested in saying in effect 'we told you so'. So many scientists dismiss ancient knowledge as mythology and therefore not scientific.

One day I hope the two sides will meet and suddenly realise they have a common goal. Science has so much to learn and so much of Vendanta is still not understood without someone who has a proper scientific mind. The real problem is with translation. The purpose of Vendanta is spiritual and in general science doesn't accept the concept of a God. What is needed is a meeting in the middle, if that makes sense. Each side, as it were, has a part to play.

I agree totally it could be practical under the right circumstances. Will that happen? I sadly doubt it but I remain optimistic.
 
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The power lines of Lake Pontchartrain (Louisiana) show simply and clearly the curvature of the Earth.

68fdd043fb3ef464cc7d36c63d54e9e4f1e2f03b.jpg
That's actually quite an interesting photograph - in that it shows the curvature of the Earth looking to the horizon, yet, looking horizontally the sea level is perfectly level. Must be due to focal width of the lens used I suppose!
 
I think you'll find it's because the horizon is assumed to be a fixed point on a sphere extended away from the observer, which would lead to it being the same height in every direction (assuming the world was a perfect sphere) thus describing a level height when observed.

In standard atmospheric conditions, for an observer with eye level above sea level by 1.70 metres (5 ft 7 in), the horizon is at a distance of about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi).
However, assuming no atmospheric refraction and a spherical Earth with radius R=6,371 kilometres (3,959 mi), for an observer standing on the ground with h = 1.70 metres (5 ft 7 in), the horizon is at a distance of 4.7 kilometres (2.9 mi).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon
 

Flat-earthers are overconfident about their own scientific knowledge but exhibit low scientific literacy, study finds​

https://www.psypost.org/2023/06/fla...it-low-scientific-literacy-study-finds-165795

I don't think we needed another study for this though. Most people have pretty low scientific knowledge. And many people are overconfident in their beliefs. It's the way humans work normally. But this part is interesting:



Only a small percentage of people really believe this idea fervently. But lots of people are willing to entertain fringe beliefs because they seem popular, exciting, or plausible for various reasons. I see flat earthism as a reaction to distrust of authority and possibly life trauma. The headline suggests you can fix flat earthism by science education and that is probably not useful.
Quite true. Science deniers will look for the sources that tell them what they want, and will usually find them.

Back when flat earthers were making headway, probably around lockdown 2020, Sabine Hossenfelder released a video saying flerfs are not stupid, they're just empiricist. The Earth looks flat, so they believe it to be. I don't know how much time she spent looking into it. She claimed they believe the Earth is accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s² to account for gravity, and in my experience that's a very rare belief among flerfs. But I can testify that you can give flerfs all manner of visual evidence that refutes their model and they'll wave it away with gymnastics of reason or just ignore it.

But one thing about which she was right is we all need to get our information from somewhere. I can't prove evolution myself, so I trust those who do. I can't prove their evidence isn't faked, so I take their word for it. Human progress depends on this collaborative process between people across time. People with some emotional drive, however small, to ignore scientific discovery will find someone (sometimes even scientists) who will give them something to support their intuitions against the depth of scientific knowledge.
 
Quite true. Science deniers will look for the sources that tell them what they want, and will usually find them.

Back when flat earthers were making headway, probably around lockdown 2020, Sabine Hossenfelder released a video saying flerfs are not stupid, they're just empiricist. The Earth looks flat, so they believe it to be. I don't know how much time she spent looking into it. She claimed they believe the Earth is accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s² to account for gravity, and in my experience that's a very rare belief among flerfs. But I can testify that you can give flerfs all manner of visual evidence that refutes their model and they'll wave it away with gymnastics of reason or just ignore it.

But one thing about which she was right is we all need to get our information from somewhere. I can't prove evolution myself, so I trust those who do. I can't prove their evidence isn't faked, so I take their word for it. Human progress depends on this collaborative process between people across time. People with some emotional drive, however small, to ignore scientific discovery will find someone (sometimes even scientists) who will give them something to support their intuitions against the depth of scientific knowledge.
Isn't it also about how people are not trained to assess information? Factors like, who funded the research, What qualifications do the researchers have, did they follow the correct methodology, was it peer reviewed even when the research was done?

The internet, in general as I've argued elsewhere makes this even more difficult. Search results get more and more cluttered with sponsored links "trending" searches and adverts; "Buy Flat Earths near you." etc. I often heard people of my parent's generation say things like "It's in a book, they wouldn't let them print it if it wasn't true." We now have a generation with immediate access to information, good and bad a few keystrokes away and still with no training on assessing it.

A while back there was some emphasis on primary documents in history teaching but IMO there ought to be more training from an early age on the critical assessment of what you are looking at. That way people will be more likely to trust the evidence of others.

An anecdote from some terrible "management training" I was sent on in the 1980s one exercise was meant to encourage critical thinking and involved questions on a paragraph or two of text. People were mentioned by profession or relationship and it was designed to show that people thought of "The Surgeon" as a white male, etc.

The next day we were given a paper on some behavioral research and asked to comment on the findings. I was picked to talk first and stated that I didn't know who'd done this, when, what controls were used etc. I was very quickly told to shut up, I had been given the paper to comment on the findings, etc. and not question what the lecturer had given me. As I pointed out the "training" on critical thinking only applied to the exercise on critical thinking.:roll:
 
Isn't it also about how people are not trained to assess information? Factors like, who funded the research, What qualifications do the researchers have, did they follow the correct methodology, was it peer reviewed even when the research was done?

The internet, in general as I've argued elsewhere makes this even more difficult. Search results get more and more cluttered with sponsored links "trending" searches and adverts; "Buy Flat Earths near you." etc. I often heard people of my parent's generation say things like "It's in a book, they wouldn't let them print it if it wasn't true." We now have a generation with immediate access to information, good and bad a few keystrokes away and still with no training on assessing it.

A while back there was some emphasis on primary documents in history teaching but IMO there ought to be more training from an early age on the critical assessment of what you are looking at. That way people will be more likely to trust the evidence of others.

An anecdote from some terrible "management training" I was sent on in the 1980s one exercise was meant to encourage critical thinking and involved questions on a paragraph or two of text. People were mentioned by profession or relationship and it was designed to show that people thought of "The Surgeon" as a white male, etc.

The next day we were given a paper on some behavioral research and asked to comment on the findings. I was picked to talk first and stated that I didn't know who'd done this, when, what controls were used etc. I was very quickly told to shut up, I had been given the paper to comment on the findings, etc. and not question what the lecturer had given me. As I pointed out the "training" on critical thinking only applied to the exercise on critical thinking.:roll:
I've had mostly poor experiences in "management training". Similarly, when I mention how unhelpful, pseudoscientific, or potentially misleading some of it is, I'm told to shut up too.
 
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