1

Flat Earth Q&A / Fruit Smoothie--an Unexplained Phenomena

« on: June 18, 2009, 08:47:14 AM »

So, I'm sitting here with a blueberry and blackberry smoothie--I call it a "Black and Blue" that I just made. It's very cold and delicious as I made it with frozen fruit. Now, I'm drinking out of a porcelain glass that I got as a gift when I graduated high school (I will not divulge the year on the glass). As I hold the glass, I observe that condensation has built up on the outside of the glass. One particular bead of condensation is clinging to the bottom of the glass. As it gets bigger (from water sliding down the side of the glass into a sort of pool), it droops more and more until it falls off.

Now, the tendency of the water to run down the side of the glass until it eventually falls off is explained perfectly well by Gravity. I don't understand how FE theory would explain this however.

Can anyone help me out?

2

Flat Earth Debate / Direct Observation of Stars

« on: June 05, 2009, 03:10:28 PM »

I've noticed that when you go out and look at the stars--not taking other people's word for it, but actually doing the observation yourself, it's possible to gather a lot of data lends evidence to the shape of the earth.

First, and most convincing of all, there are diferent stars and constellations observable in the northern and southern hemispheres. In fact, if you were ever so bold as to take a road trip--take several different road trips across different years, in fact--you might notice a few things. Take Polaris for example. Polaris is an easy enough star to identify; it is at the tip of the little dipper. If you were to drive from east to west across the country, staying somewhat close to the same latitude as you traveled, making note of the position of Polaris each night when you stopped, you would notice that it was in relatively the same position each night. So, say you drove from Seattle to Boston along interstate 90. The position of Polaris would not change much from one night to the next. The hight of the star in degrees above the horizon would equal your latitude.

This phenomenon--that of Polaris's height above the horizon equaling your latitude--would also hold true if you were to drive from Bangor Maine to Key West Florida. In that scenario, the position of Polaris in the sky would go from very high in Bangor to quite a bit lower in the sky in Key West. In fact, if you were to continue your travel further south, say as far as Rio de Janeiro, Polaris would have sunk below the horizon and no longer be visible to you. So, in northern latitudes, Polaris is circumpolar. In southern latitudes, Polaris is not visible at all.

Furthermore, if you were to invest in a telescope, you would be able to directly observe a number of phenomena that suggest that the universe is more than just a flat earth orbited by celestial bodies of a fixed distance. Locate on a star map any open star cluster then observe it in your telescope. Clearly, you would be able to tell that some stars were further away than others. While you were in Rio de Janeiro, you might point your telescope at the Magellenic clouds and observe a similar depth of field. Other observations, including a several hour observation of a planet moving through the Milky Way would clearly offer evidence that planets are much closer to the earth than stars. Further observation of the same planet in conjunction with the moon would illustrate how the planet is clearly much further away than the moon (much greater than the proposed 100 miles) based on the fact that it travels at a different rate and provides much less detail of the surface than does the moon. One might also observe in planets such as Jupiter or Saturn that these planets are orbited by moons of their own.

Clearly, all of these direct observations suggest that many of the Flat Earth model's assertions are incorrect.

We don't need photographs taken by astronauts or assertions made by NASA officials to tell us what the nature of the universe, and thus the Earth is. We can observe it for ourselves. Of course, to do so, we would have to log off of our computers and venture out into the world. Scary, scary.