Flat Earth

[Tony_S]

1 hour ago, Gibbo675 said:

Hi Folks,

 

With regard this thread I fear that there is far too much reliance upon the Wisdom of Wikipedia* !

 

I am however intrigued that no on has yet mentioned Airy's Failure which didn't manage to prove that the Earth actually moves and that it turned out as decribed below:

 

"The experiment called Airy’s Failure was a test conducted by Astronomer Royal Sir George Biddell Airy in 1871, in which Airy failed to detect the motion of the earth. The experiment showed that the stars move relative to a horizontally fixed Earth. By first filling a telescope with water to slow down the speed of light inside, then calculating the tilt necessary to get the starlight directly down the tube, Airy unintentionally demonstrated that the earth was fixed horizontally since the starlight came in at the correct angle without needing to change the tilt of the telescope."

 

Just for fun**, for the above I took the first of Googles search results.

 

* An electronic book burning exercise if ever I saw one.

** Lazyness

 

Gibbo.

You seem to have quoted from the flat earth wiki website rather than Wikipedia about George Airy. His water filled telescope experiment was designed to measure motion of the Earth through the aether. It measured none because aetheric drag doesn’t exist because as we now know there is no aetheric fluid through which radiation travels. When I was at school one of our physics text books still included sections referring to transmission through the aether.  Those chapters we were told to ignore.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Tony_S

[Gibbo675]

10 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

You seem to have quoted from the flat earth wiki website rather than Wikipedia about George Airy. His water filled telescope experiment was designed to measure motion of the Earth through the aether. It measured none because aetheric drag doesn’t exist because as we now know there is no aetheric fluid through which radiation travels. When I was at school one of our physics text books still included sections referring to transmission through the aether.  Those chapters we were told to ignore.

Hi Tony,

 

I feel that you have somewhat missed the facetious nature of my posting*.

 

Mind you Wikipedia does tell us that the sun in 86400 miles across which is very conveniently ten times the number of seconds in the day.

 

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

 

* Obviously !!!

 

Gibbo.

[Tony_S]

6 minutes ago, Gibbo675 said:

 

I feel that you have somewhat missed the facetious nature of my posting*

About as funny as a certain politician suggesting he was only joking about ingesting/injecting bleach as a Covid 19 treatment. 

[steve1]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Another approach to this topic might be to ask a more general question: why do some people take a delight in ‘believing’ total nonsense?

 

I’m not talking about either genuine questioning of orthodoxy as a means of pushing the boundaries of understanding, or having faith in the untestable (religion), I’m talking about people who delight in believing things that are either proven by a huge body of evidence to be incorrect, or are so incredibly unlikely on the balance of probability as to be within whisker of proven untrue.

 

And, do they actually believe these things, or are they simply taking jokes or infantile fantasies a little bit too far?

 

Which leads into, why are there so many (mostly ludicrous) conspiracy theories in the first place?  And why do people believe them? 

 

I did, once, meet a man, in the course of my work at time, who did actually wear a tinfoil hat because of the "forces" that were out to get him. It was an unsettling experience.

 

steve

[AY Mod]

21 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

About as funny as a certain politician suggesting he was only joking about ingesting/injecting bleach as a Covid 19 treatment. 

 

This topic was bound to attract certain people.

[Gibbo675]

19 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

About as funny as a certain politician suggesting he was only joking about ingesting/injecting bleach as a Covid 19 treatment. 

It's a thread about Flat Earth, what do you expect ?

 

That certain politician is red shift the other one is blue shift, an earlier "joke" that I posted.

[The Johnster]

I'm not sure where the confusion caused by Columbus in this comes from.  You could still have America and a flat earth, and if you wanted to get to the Indies, the Spice Islands, which was the intention as Muslims had cut the Silk Road, you could get there by finding the edge and going around it, keeping a few miles in from the actual lip.  In fact, and I mean verifiable fact, Columbus knew perfectly well that sailing due west would get him to land; not only was he fully aware of the planet's spherical nature, but he was also conversant with the historical voyages of Eric the Red, and Lief Ericson, Prince Madoc, and the Irish input, the Ossianic Oceanic legends and the monastically recorded, if a little fantastic in detail, voyages of the various saints.  He was in Limerick before the first Transatlantic voyage and was shown the recently discovered corpse of an 'Indian' and the canoe he had arrived in on the Irish Atlantic coast, the canoe being of a type unknown anywhere in Europe. 

 

Moreover, many of his sailors, supposedly terrified of sailing over the edge, would have been aware of the knowledge of Breton, Cornish, Galician, and Irish fishermen who had been to the Grand Banks that vegetation in the water and land birds had shown that a land mass was close at hand.  The 'falling off the edge' thing seems to have been a 19th century invention of Washington Irvine, the American writer, who wrote a biography of Columbus; it is this, and it's inclusion in American school curriculae, that has fostered the impression that Columbus proved that the earth was round. 

 

Christopher Columbus was not a chap that was backward in coming forward in the matter of self promotion, but he never claimed to have proven any such thing, nor did he feel the need to as everybody already knew this.  He claimed, because he knew no better, to have found a route to the Spice Islands, and proved it by bringing some Caribbean spices home with him; he never knew that what he had discovered was a different continent, and that what the Viking and Welsh expeditions had found was not, as he'd thought, the northeastern extremity of Asia. 

 

It was Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian, who first sighted and named for Europeans the Pacific Ocean, and not until Magellan's attempt was the misidenetified continent proven to be separate from Asia, and even then there was no reason to suspect that it did not connect with Asia in the far northern latitudes.  In the event, the Bering Straits were discovered in the early 18th century by Bering, who was a Swede working for the Russians,  The Russians, using English and Swedish captains on occasion, had been for hundereds of years gradually exploring the Arctic Siberian coast, in small ships called Koches, which were shaped to be pushed on to the top of the ice rather than crushed by it so that the expeditions could overwinter.  The European exploration of North America had not reached Alaska at that time, and found Russian colonies when it did.

 

Magellan's expedition (he was killed in the Pacific by hostile islanders) proved that if you sail west and keep going, you get back where you started, but the earth could still have been cylindrical, or had holes at the poles.  But both the poles were reached in the 20th century and there are no holes, neither is the planet cylindrical.  Columbus never even landed on the mainland of the American continent, he only heard about if second hand from the Carib 'Indians', who were rapidly wiped out by pathogens that he'd carried with him on the ships and with the crews. 

 

Asked about the civilisations he was expecting them to know of, the Chinese and South East Asian societies that Marco Polo had written about and which he thought were not more than a short distance away further west and south, the Caribs were able to inform him that great and wealthy civilisation did indeed exist exactly where Columbus thought they were, but they were Aztecs and Incas. and the Caribs mentioned that they had a fair amount of gold.  This proved very unfortunate for those people over the next century...

 

Columbus never proved that the world wasn't flat, or that the Amercias were not the far east of Asia.  He never thought the planet was flat, or anything other than a planet, but without a reliable means of establishing longitude had only a vague idea how for west he was, and since he was expecting to find far eastern Asia. that's what he thought he'd found.

[maico]

On 09/11/2020 at 08:24, Gibbo675 said:

Hi Tony,

 

I don't actually know what shape the Earth is, I have no way of actually proving it one way or another.

 

Philosophically we all shape our own world and talking of philosophical musings I note that one thing I do know is that polarised people are only able to look in one direction. Are you of a polarised mind set ?

 

I shall also point out that I regard Wheel Tappers is a mickey takers section, as such I'm posting this as a mickey taker:

 

 

Belief is an unknowing form of ignorance, I know that I don't know,

 

Gibbo.

 

 

I remember at age 13 using the School theodolite to do some long-distance triangulation measurements. The sum of the interior angles always equals slightly more than 180 degrees. This spherical excess is because you are dealing with a spherical triangle. The results are the same everywhere hence the Earth must be spherical or to be more precise an oblate spheroid due to the Earths's rotation of 15 degrees per hour. As every schoolboy knows the sum of a smaller planar triangle always equals 180 degrees.

(Ramsden built the first accurate theodolite capable of measuring spherical excess in 1796 and they were used to produce the first geodetic surveys of the UK.)

[SHMD]

There are two types of “Flat Earthers”: -

 

1/ The genuinely simple and befuddled person who can’t back extrapolate (interpolate?) a large sphere’s surface, which can be approximated to a flat 2D surface locally, if no time or motion is aloud to take place from the observers point of view.

 

2/ Malicious people who know there are huge great holes in the Flat Earth premises but like arguing and winning over people who don’t know better.

 

 

I was at lunch, on site at a large Dutch Steel works on the coast of Holland, working in their Labs.

There was 6 of us at the table and one was, slightly but forcefully, extolling the virtues of the Flat Earth arguments.

I politely listened as I was a guest. Eventually I could take not more, but remembering I was a guest, I had to think of a simple thing that they all knew and could relate to.

I says: -

 

“If I’m going down to the beach and I see a ship on the horizon from the top of the dune. Why does it disappear when I get to the bottom of the dune?”

Ah, he replies, because it’s moved further away and become so small you cant see it any more.

“But if I then climb up the dune, the ship comes back into view exactly where it was.”

Again he replies confidently that the ship can come and go as it pleases.

“How does the ship know if I am climbing up or down the dune, and how fast can this bloody ship go as it only takes me a few seconds to climb the dune?” I says.

That’s not proof though is it? It could have.

“What if I left some members of a group of intelligent open minded people, say a class of 10 year olds, at the top, scattered some half way up and down the dune, and the rest at the bottom? What if I asked everyone to shout out if they could see that ship? What if, after listening to the fact that only those near the top of the dune could see the ship, everyone run around swapping places but could only shout out if they can see the ship? I bet the kids would all have fun, and learn for themselves, that the Earth is at least curved?”

 

He shut up after that as every one of them had run up and down the dunes (very are close by but probably a long time ago now) and watched ships, sailing boats, rigs(!), etc come in and out of view depending upon how high they were up above see level and how near to the horizon they were.

 

 

Kev.

 

[Alex TM]

12 minutes ago, maico said:

This spherical excess is because you are dealing with a spherical triangle.

Ah, non-Euclidian geometry ... I've not long got over that headache .....

[Reorte]

There was an experimental claim in the 19th century that the Earth's flat, based on observations on a suitable stretch of calm water (Bedford Level Experiment). The Old Bedford River was used as a long, straight, calm and very slow flowing stretch of water, so providing a practical site with no height surveying needed and a 6 mile long uninterrupted view.

 

The first results did indeed suggest that the Earth was flat, by observing a boat through a telescope from just above the water level as it retreated along the canal. The boat had a mast and flag; no sight of that getting lower was seen. Later explanations showed this result to be due to atmospheric refraction.

 

[burgundy]

17 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

In fact, and I mean verifiable fact, Columbus knew perfectly well that sailing due west would get him to land; not only was he fully aware of the planet's spherical nature, but he was also conversant with the historical voyages of Eric the Red, and Lief Ericson, Prince Madoc, and the Irish input, the Ossianic Oceanic legends and the monastically recorded, if a little fantastic in detail, voyages of the various saints.  He was in Limerick before the first Transatlantic voyage and was shown the recently discovered corpse of an 'Indian' and the canoe he had arrived in on the Irish Atlantic coast, the canoe being of a type unknown anywhere in Europe. 

 

Moreover, many of his sailors, supposedly terrified of sailing over the edge, would have been aware of the knowledge of Breton, Cornish, Galician, and Irish fishermen who had been to the Grand Banks that vegetation in the water and land birds had shown that a land mass was close at hand.  The 'falling off the edge' thing seems to have been a 19th century invention of Washington Irvine, the American writer, who wrote a biography of Columbus; it is this, and it's inclusion in American school curriculae, that has fostered the impression that Columbus proved that the earth was round. 

 

As any Bristolian will tell you, John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto) "discovered" America. He just had the wit to keep quiet about it, knowing that it would promptly be turned it into a Royal Monopoly if word got to London. 

Best wishes 

Eric  

[Wheatley]

I once shared an office with a conspiracy theorist and a Freeman of the Land. Whoever invented ipods and headphones has my undying gratitude. 

[steve1]

Well , one flat earther nearly proved himself wrong and made a valiant attempt at a Darwin Award at the same time...

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil)

 

steve

 

 

[Wheatley]

Flat earther ? Or just very good at parting flat earthers from their money to pay for his toys ?

[maico]

Flatardians don't like this photo of the Utah salt flats...

[jbqfc]

i was going to put this in the jokes thread 

[Steamport Southport]

43 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

I'm not sure where the confusion caused by Columbus in this comes from.  You could still have America and a flat earth, and if you wanted to get to the Indies, the Spice Islands, which was the intention as Muslims had cut the Silk Road, you could get there by finding the edge and going around it, keeping a few miles in from the actual lip.  In fact, and I mean verifiable fact, Columbus knew perfectly well that sailing due west would get him to land; not only was he fully aware of the planet's spherical nature, but he was also conversant with the historical voyages of Eric the Red, and Lief Ericson, Prince Madoc, and the Irish input, the Ossianic Oceanic legends and the monastically recorded, if a little fantastic in detail, voyages of the various saints.  He was in Limerick before the first Transatlantic voyage and was shown the recently discovered corpse of an 'Indian' and the canoe he had arrived in on the Irish Atlantic coast, the canoe being of a type unknown anywhere in Europe. 

 

Moreover, many of his sailors, supposedly terrified of sailing over the edge, would have been aware of the knowledge of Breton, Cornish, Galician, and Irish fishermen who had been to the Grand Banks that vegetation in the water and land birds had shown that a land mass was close at hand.  The 'falling off the edge' thing seems to have been a 19th century invention of Washington Irvine, the American writer, who wrote a biography of Columbus; it is this, and it's inclusion in American school curriculae, that has fostered the impression that Columbus proved that the earth was round. 

 

Christopher Columbus was not a chap that was backward in coming forward in the matter of self promotion, but he never claimed to have proven any such thing, nor did he feel the need to as everybody already knew this.  He claimed, because he knew no better, to have found a route to the Spice Islands, and proved it by bringing some Caribbean spices home with him; he never knew that what he had discovered was a different continent, and that what the Viking and Welsh expeditions had found was not, as he'd thought, the northeastern extremity of Asia. 

 

It was Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian, who first sighted and named for Europeans the Pacific Ocean, and not until Magellan's attempt was the misidenetified continent proven to be separate from Asia, and even then there was no reason to suspect that it did not connect with Asia in the far northern latitudes.  In the event, the Bering Straits were discovered in the early 18th century by Bering, who was a Swede working for the Russians,  The Russians, using English and Swedish captains on occasion, had been for hundereds of years gradually exploring the Arctic Siberian coast, in small ships called Koches, which were shaped to be pushed on to the top of the ice rather than crushed by it so that the expeditions could overwinter.  The European exploration of North America had not reached Alaska at that time, and found Russian colonies when it did.

 

Magellan's expedition (he was killed in the Pacific by hostile islanders) proved that if you sail west and keep going, you get back where you started, but the earth could still have been cylindrical, or had holes at the poles.  But both the poles were reached in the 20th century and there are no holes, neither is the planet cylindrical.  Columbus never even landed on the mainland of the American continent, he only heard about if second hand from the Carib 'Indians', who were rapidly wiped out by pathogens that he'd carried with him on the ships and with the crews. 

 

Asked about the civilisations he was expecting them to know of, the Chinese and South East Asian societies that Marco Polo had written about and which he thought were not more than a short distance away further west and south, the Caribs were able to inform him that great and wealthy civilisation did indeed exist exactly where Columbus thought they were, but they were Aztecs and Incas. and the Caribs mentioned that they had a fair amount of gold.  This proved very unfortunate for those people over the next century...

 

Columbus never proved that the world wasn't flat, or that the Amercias were not the far east of Asia.  He never thought the planet was flat, or anything other than a planet, but without a reliable means of establishing longitude had only a vague idea how for west he was, and since he was expecting to find far eastern Asia. that's what he thought he'd found.

 

It's believed that America was named after a Welshman who was a funder of John Cabot

 

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

 

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

 

Where the Amerigo Versucci claim falls down is you don't name places after first names unless they are royal or religious (such as a pope). 

 

Columbus and most others called them The Indies. Also the fact is he never even set foot in America he spent all his time messing about in the Caribbean.

 

[Reorte]

19 minutes ago, maico said:

Flatardians don't like this photo of the Utah salt flats...

 

A slight volcanic dome, deep under there.

 

They'll latch on to any explanation no matter how implausible.

 

Nice picture BTW.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Reorte

[maico]

It's basic geometry really...

 

I remember in my last year at primary school going on a field trip to Devon. The teacher bought along a transparent tube. You bend the tube and fill it with water. Stand by the sea and sight across the top of the levelled and horizontal water at the front and back of the tube. The horizon is about 4 miles away and level with the top of the tube's water. Walk up the cliffs behind the beach and you can see out to sea much further. The horizon is always bellow the tube's water level. A simple proof of curvature for 10 year olds.

 

Edited November 10, 2020 by maico

[rdr]

Flat earth?...Nah ah

[The Johnster]

17 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

It's believed that America was named after a Welshman who was a funder of John Cabot

 

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

 

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

 

Where the Amerigo Versucci claim falls down is you don't name places after first names unless they are royal or religious (such as a pope). 

 

Columbus and most others called them The Indies. Also the fact is he never even set foot in America he spent all his time messing about in the Caribbean.

 

Yes, I managed to get my explorers muxed ip.  It was Magellan who named the Pacific Ocean, not Amerigo Vespucci who I believe was the first to sight it, 'from a hill in Darien'.  Risiart ap Meurig, Richard Amerikke in the anglicised form,  may have partly sponsored the Cabot expedition and was probably the owner, or principal owner, of the Matthew.  The expedition was I believe funded by the Merchant Venturers, and it is surprising that this august body, implacable enemy of the Welsh who they considered pirates and wreckers (not completely without justification) let ap Meurig anywhere near the project.  He apparently drew the chart, using information from Cornish fishermen whose language he almost spoke (it is similar to Welsh and from the same Brythonic root), and signed it, with the 'ap Meurig' on the putative land mass, which, according to this version, was the cause of the land mass being known as 'Apmeuriga'. 

 

There is a good bit of confusion about this and an objectively definitive answer will probably never be forthcoming.  Ap Meurig was no doubt conversant with the Madoc story, from about 200 years earlier, and this is given credence by the fact that Madoc's mother was a direct decendent via the Dublin Vikings of Lief Ericsson's daughter, the first ethnic European born in Vinland and thus the first European born on the American continent.   Marriage between Dublin Norse and Welsh nobility was common in medieval times.

 

Madoc, a junior noble unlikely to inherit much in the way of land or position, and despairing of the state of Wales following the Edwardian conquest, sailed from Conway with a fleet of 5 ships and found a fertile land drained by a mighty river (this fits possibly the St Lawrence, Chesapeake Bay, or even the Mississipi); it is known that he sailed southabout Ireland and due west, but was blown north of this course, though kept his heading due west.  He found no suitable landing place and turned south along the coast of the land he encountered. 

 

He returned to Conwy without loss of men or ships (remarkable in those scurvy ridden times) and mounted a second expedition with the intention of colonising, and canvassed for volunteers.  These set sail in a larger fleet and were never seen again, but as they had stated that they intended to never return, this does not mean that they came to grief.  Queen Elizabeth used the expedition to promote an English claim to the entire continent as occupied then by the Spanish (the Portuguese, our allies, were to retain Brasil).  The Mandan native American people of the central Mississippi, who are fair skinned and genetically have occasional blue eyes and light hair, claim a founding father myth of white skinned people from across the 'great sea', and have some words in their language that sound like Welsh and mean the same as the Welsh equivalent, which has led to claims that they are the actual descendents of the Madoc colony.

 

Some of this stuff sounds as likely as a flat earth to me, but you never know and it's difficult to decisively disprove.

[NorthBrit]

Flat Earth?  Flat Earth?

 

I go up to London

Upstairs
Down town

 

I could go on an on  ---

[AndyID]

38 minutes ago, NorthBrit said:

Flat Earth?  Flat Earth?

 

I go up to London

Upstairs
Down town

 

I could go on an on  ---

 

I only recently realized why trains go "up" to London. Doh...

 

[AndyID]

Let's keep Utah out of this