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I'm going to give a brief overview of Einstein's Relativity in simple non-mathematical layman's terms.

Light

Light is a massless particle with a constant speed to all observers.  It has momentum.  It acts as both a wave and a particle.

To explain the problem prior to Einstein's work with light speed I will use a simple example.  Lets say Alice is standing 1000 feet away from a light source, and Bob is moving at 10ft/sec towards the light source.  Both of them can detect the speed of things, because they are just cool kids.  Common sense tells us that light will be observed by Alice to be light speed, and light will be observed by Bob to be light speed ( c ) - 10ft/sec.  However, they both observe light speed to be the same ( c ).  This seems like a paradox of sorts, but Einstein shows us how this works, among other things. 

The faster things travel the more massive to an outside observer they get.  Furthermore the faster they travel, the slower time seems to be passing to the object compared to an outside side observer.  This is known as time dilation.  As things approach the speed of light, they get more massive (and thus harder to accelerate) and seem to be passing slower to outside observers.  Since to reach the speed of light their mass would need to reach infinite mass, they cannot break this barrier.

This time dilation is what makes the speed of light constant.  Even though Bob is moving faster towards light than Alice, time dilates and he measures the speed the same.

Gravity

Gravity also dilates time.  In fact, Einstein says that Gravity (or more accurately, gravitation) is equivalent to acceleration locally.  That is to say, if you are in a closed box and feel something pulling you down there is no way to tell if you are accelerating upwards (as in an elevator) or if you are being pulled down by gravitation.

Heres where it gets messy.   Remember time dilation?  Well, lets look back at Alice and Bob to expand on that a bit.

Lets say Alice and Bob are in the middle of space with no stars, gravitation, or any place marks to tell ones position.  Bob starts moving away from Alice at a constant speed.  However, from Bobs frame of reference, he is not moving at all, and it is Alice that is moving away!  So, to bring it together, since Alice is moving faster than Bob from his Frame Of Reference, Alice actually has her time moving slower and she is more massive!  It is also true that from Alice's Frame of Reference Bob is slower and more massive.  This may again seem like a paradox, but it is not.

So what does this all have to do with gravitation?  I promise, all of this will come together at the end.

Back to the Equivalence Principle – you know, that says that gravitation is the same as acceleration.  Lets say you are in a closed box moving a constant speed.  This is known as an inertial frame of reference.  Now, lets say you are in a closed box accelerating upwards at the rate of 1g (about how fast you accelerate to the earth if you jump.)  This is known as a non-inertial frame of reference.  This is because you are being acted upon by a force that is unexplained by what you know.  In reality though, this is not a “force” at all.  It is actually what is known as a pseudo-force.  Here is how wikipedia explains it:

“When a car accelerates hard, the common human response is to feel "pushed back into the seat." In an inertial frame of reference attached to the road, there is no physical force moving the rider backward. However, in the rider's non-inertial reference frame attached to the accelerating car, there is a backward fictitious force.”

Now here is the kicker.  Einstein says gravity is a pseudo-force caused by taking a non-inertial frame of reference to be an inertial one.  That is to say, we think that its a force acting on us, but really we are just accelerating through space.

Now why would we accelerate for no reason towards mass?  This is most likely the most often explained part of Relativity as it relates to gravitation.  Energy distorts space time, much like a bowling bowl would distort a taught sheet.  Remember, energy is mass! (E=mc^2). This is why accelerating also distorts space-time!  In mathematical terms, the space is no longer flat (or Euclidean) but is now non-euclidean.  This means two objects traveling parallel to each other may not end up being parallel further along the line and may even eventually hit each other.   Straight lines are no longer “straight” but follow these distortions in space time.  When objects follow these “non-straight” straight lines, they are said to follow their geodesics.

An important consequence of this is that you don't need mass to be affected by gravitation.  You simply need momentum – to keep on traveling in a straight line.

So there we have it, Gravity is not a real force according to Relativity.

[Someone please read over this, I'm sure I have made mistakes]

There are a lot of problems and misconceptions about the conspiracy, mainly because we know so little about it.  Therefore, most of our theories about the conspiracy are not fully pinned down, but are the result of educated guesses and logical conjecture.

Who they are:
What the conspiracy is NOT is a group of mysterious powerbrokers out to create a New World Order or any such thing.  They are simply criminals who just want to make money.  The conspiracy probably consists of the top few leadership positions of NASA and the other primary space agencies.  They possibly have a high-ranking politician or military officer in their ranks to help cover their bases, but the important thing to remember is that this is not a government conspiracy.  If you know someone who works in the government, or even at NASA, they’re probably not a conspiracy member.

Their motive:
Not being in on the conspiracy, it’s difficult to try and determine something like this, but the most logical answer is probably money.  What probably happened was that NASA’s leadership was corrupt from the beginning, and they saw the space agency’s grants as perfect objects for embezzlement.  So they stole the majority of the money allotted to them, and used some of it to fake photographs and research, and bribe people like astronauts.  Whether or not NASA knows or cares if the Earth is flat is unknown.  Either way, with space travel impossible over a long period of time, and having already stolen a lot of money and lied about it, they would have no choice but to continue maintaining the Earth was round.

Conspiracy members:
Again, this is not an easy question to answer, but there would not need to be as many people in the conspiracy as critics say.  The top few leaders, yes, they would need to know, obviously.  Astronauts?  Maybe not.  When you become an astronaut, they don’t immediately send you to the moon.  The Earth would look round because you aren’t very high for your first few missions, then only as you became more senior would you find out the truth, and then probably get to join the conspiracy.  The top few people in charge of research would also need to know, to help fake space research results.  But without inside information, it’s hard to know who else.

<If I’m missing anything, let me know.  It’s hard to write stuff about an secret organization we know barely anything about.>

Universal Acceleration

It is important for the novice zeteticist to understand, within the context of a debate, that different schools of Flat Earth Theory exist, and the criticisms which weaken one may not do so for another.

Since I am best acquainted with the model of Universal Acceleration of which I am a proponent (the model widely held by members of the SouthWest of England Flat Earth Society), it is this model which I shall describe - though it should be noted that other models exist which deal with similar underlying principles but different specifics.

It is held, according to the model to which I subscribe, that the Earth, as well as the other planets ("stars" fall under the category of planets for the purpose of this model - a confusing muddle of semantics, I freely confess), rest upon a blanket of "dark matter", which may or may not have infinite horizontal extent, known as the Universal Accelerator. The aeteological origination of this state of affairs is a subject few agree upon, and in this writing I shall not deviate into the ongoing debate on the subject, for the sake of brevity. "Dark matter", in the sense in which we use the term, interacts with standard matter in a fairly common-sense way. It is subject to friction and certain other worldy forces, though its exact nature is unknown purely for lack of scientific scrutiny towards it by those not involved in the Conspiracy (the extent of the Conspiracy's arcane knowledge on the nature of dark matter is, for obvious reasons entirely unknown to us, but we can safely assume it's greater than ours). We know by empiricism that it is transparent. Many of its properties, for the purpose of constructing the FE model, appear irrelevant, because the important thing is not what it is, but what it does.

What the Universal Accelerator does is accelerate. The vast "blanket" of dark matter on which the Earth and much of the matter of the universe rests upon accelerates upwards at a consistent rate of roughly 9.8 metres per second, squared, and has done so for much, if not all, of cosmological history.

This has a knock-on effect for everything on Earth. If an object pushes upwards, away from the Earth, it is no longer being pushed by the Universal Accelerator, and consequently the rest of the Earth quickly catches up with it. We refer to this phenomenon as "falling", and we usually intuitively think of it in terms of the motion of an object towards the Earth (unsurprising given our scale in comparison with the Earth itself), when in fact the reverse is true. The Earth rises to meet a so-called "falling" object, which actually engages in no downward movement - what little movement it may engage in is upward, and results from whatever caused its temporary suspension in the first place.

This, from a human perspective, is the importance of the Universal Accelerator. It causes what globularists refer to as gravitation, and for which they have developed an obtuse, complex theory involving invisible forces, the bending of space and time, subatomic particles or any number of other outlandish ideas depending on whom you ask.

Universal Acceleration, by comparison, is a fairly simple concept to grasp, but a lot of people seem to have problems with it. I hope this article clears things up.