I got the following post from parsec on another related thread and I felt that it belonged here.
I must note that this is a straw man argument. The OP is clearly more confident in computer systems and uses this strenght to divert the question from the main issue, namely, the rectilinear propagation of neutrinos and their arrival at two distant points on Earth's surface. This is used to deduce that the outer surface is convex. But, there are two hidden assumptions.
Well, in the forum you posted this in, I was providing hardware specs for a neutrino detector because Johannes asked for them.
The first one might seem as a bit of a desparate attempt from nitpickers, but, nevertheless, it is important. We have seen on this website a theory that proposes that light actually travels along curved paths being put forward. In this respect, the position of the Sun is not exactly where it appears to be on the sky. But, they use they 'prove' that neutrinos travel along a straight line by saying that the observed neutrinos come from a position where the sun appears to be on the sky. All I can deduce from this, in light of the above mentioned theory, is that neutrinos travel along the same path as light rays from the Sun.
I am not using the idea that solar neutrinos appear to come from the direction of the Sun as a proof that they travel straight. Previously in this thread it was mentioned that the direction of observed neutrino events can be interpolated to point in the expected direction of the Sun in RET,
assuming they travel in straight lines. The assumption of straightness can be made because neutrinos are observed to travel in straight lines over short distances, and there is no reason to believe that they curve over long distances except due to gravitation. Neutrinos have no observable charge and the upper limit on their mass is very small, so without invoking some new yet unobserved force I can think of no reason for them to bend.
Secondly, they always ommit to mention that the detector itself is not on the Earth's surface, but underground, and, for that matter, deep underground.
I have never personally visited the Super K site, but according to their website it is not actually underground relative to sea-level. The website states that the Super K detector has a 1000m overburden of rock, and is located under the peak of Mt. Ikeno-yama, which has a height of 1360m above sea level.
http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/location-e.htmlThis is also illustrated in the second slide of the T2KFGDDAQ presentation in my previous post. It shows the far detector Super K suspended in the mountain ranges as it says on the Super K website.
Therefore, even straight paths for neutrions allow for detection on a Flat Earth.
Of course they can! If the Earth was flat and you shot neutrinos horizontally from one side you might expect them to be detectable straight across the Earth because of the low influence of gravitation (or UA or whatever). Of course, the experiment I am referring to is T2K, which shoots neutrinos at a downward angle of about 1 degree from sea level. The receiving end is in the mountains slightly above sea level, about 300km away. In my previous post I showed that a downward angle of 1 degree over 300km would require Super K to be 5.2km below sea level on a flat Earth, assuming neutrinos travel in straight lines.
The purpose of T2K is not to test if the Earth is round, it is to observe neutrino behavior over long distances. If the Earth was flat we wouldn't bother with the downward angle, we would just shoot them straight. Of course Tom Bishop has said that this is the case, we are just wasting our time, and T2K will fail (I assume he means fail to produce events at both detectors, but he can correct me if I am wrong).