For instance in once such occurrence, there was a periodic fluctuation in the strength of the gravitational field at one of these detectors. It occurred exactly the same time as the local university held its football match. As the device was located underneath the stadium, it was determined that the mass of the people above in the stadium was actually effecting the gravitational field enough to be detected by this device.
Those are some dumb scientists. I would not trust anything they say.
Since your User name is TheEngineer, I assume you have some knowledge of engineering?
Well, in FE (or RE) will an object "fall" the same rate in a vacuum?
If it does, then I can prove that there is an attraction between Masses (which we call gravity), although the equipment is probably a bit hard to build yourself, but if you have enough technical engineering expertise, then you could make one.
The device is simple really.
All you need to do is have a vertical column (the longer the better, but the more effort it will take to extract the air form it)
Inside this column is a mirror and a winch attached to this mirror.
The mirror is raised up to the top of the column and the air is evacuated form the column. This will allow the mirror to free fall without air resistance.
Next, at the bottom of the column is a laser range finder that measures the distant a beam of light travels form the laser, to the mirror then down to a detector.
The mirror is released and allowed to fall, the laser range finder tracks the motion of the mirror, specifically its velocity and acceleration.
Now, according to the theory that Masses exert a force of attraction between them, then if you place a large mass above or below this detector, then if Masses exert this force, then the mirror's acceleration (and hence velocity) will be different form when the mass was not there.
If on the other hand there is no such thing as an attractive force between masses (gravity) then this will have
absolutely no effect on the equipment at all.
There are also other machines that measure gravity and are accurate down to one thousandth of one billionth of the Earth surface gravity. that is it can detect variation in force 0.000 000 000 0001 of 1 G.
See here for a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GravimeterThat is easily enough to measure the masses of 100,000 people.
So the sensitivity of these machines are enough to detect the variations.
And not only that, they are easily able to do this for known masses. Using this we can determine the strength of this attractive force for a given mass.
Now, lets assume that the Earth is Flat. We know that it must have a certain minimum depth or the mines we have dug would have broken through to the other side. This is about 1km
The Area of the FE is estimated (using the data from the FAQ) at around 155,002,503 square miles (usign Pi * R
2, where R is equal to approximately 12,450 miles).
As rock has an approximate density of the Earth is around 5515kg/m
3So lets calculate the amount of attraction (as confirmed by direct experiment as to the amount of force/unit of mass):
Approximate Radius of the Flat Earth: 20,036km
Minimum depth of the Flat Earth: 1km
Area of the FE: 401,441,299km
2Area in metres: 401,441,299,000 m
2Minimum Volume of a Flat Earth: 401,441,299,000,000 m
3multiplied by density: 2,213,948,763,985,000,000 kg
At the known strength of the attractive force, this would cause the Earth to collapse into a ball. So as Mass has been experimentally determined, and that this mass has an attractive force between other masses, then by this, the Earth
can not possibly be flat, and would ahve to be Round.