How Whales Prove a Flat Earth

Sooooo, if the earth were round then it would be light on both sides of the globe at the same time. Gotcha.

Nope.

Actually, optical fibres rely on total internal reflection, not diffraction.

Actually, optical fibres rely on total internal reflection, not diffraction.

You're right, after checking, it's not diffraction, my bad. Thanks for pointing out. But what's been said remains in substance.

Quote from: Nolhekh on November 09, 2012, 03:25:45 PM

Actually, optical fibres rely on total internal reflection, not diffraction.

You're right, after checking, it's not diffraction, my bad. But you're wrong too, it's not reflection either. It's refraction. Both for optical fiber and underwater long-distance sound propagation.

Total internal reflection is a product of a refractive angle that bends back into the medium.

@ Nolhekh : I changed my previous reply as i got lost with technical terms. As you said it : It bends back to its medium. That's how whales can be heard at such big distances even in a curved ocean. Now if conditions are not good, the song of the whale won't reach far and this certainly happens too. So whales don't prove nor deny anything in regard to FET / RET, which is the relevant point of the thread.

@ Nolhekh : I changed my previous reply as i got lost with technical terms. As you said it : It bends back to its medium. That's how whales can be heard at such big distances even in a curved ocean. Now if conditions are not good, the song of the whale won't reach far and this certainly happens too. So whales don't prove nor deny anything in regard to FET / RET, which is the relevant point of the thread.

In addition to bending back, it would also simply bend along the ocean floor in the form of diffraction.

Quote from: Olivier on November 09, 2012, 03:51:51 PM

@ Nolhekh : I changed my previous reply as i got lost with technical terms. As you said it : It bends back to its medium. That's how whales can be heard at such big distances even in a curved ocean. Now if conditions are not good, the song of the whale won't reach far and this certainly happens too. So whales don't prove nor deny anything in regard to FET / RET, which is the relevant point of the thread.

In addition to bending back, it would also simply bend along the ocean floor in the form of diffraction.

Yep, but the ocean floor being "rough" I think this would result in a quick loss of power. Whereas smooth bending between 2 different water layers can - I suppose - carry the sound really far.

I was thinking : If whales can communicate from pole to pole, this being a distance of about 20'000 km and the sound in water travelling at something like 5'000 km/h, the message would take 4 hours to get there... imagine 2 whales telling jokes, when whale 1 hears the laughter of whale 2 it will be 8 hours later and whale 1 would most certainly have forgotten about the joke, and wonder why whale 2 laughs so stupidly out of purpose 

Quote from: Pongo on November 09, 2012, 03:05:02 PM

Sooooo, if the earth were round then it would be light on both sides of the globe at the same time. Gotcha.

Nope.

You just got done telling me that light and sound can both travel in a randomly[sic] curved medium as a way if explaining how whales can be heard a world away. Let me list the facts your stating.

Sound can travel around the globe through a medium.
Light can travel around the globe through a medium.
Light cannot travel around the globe through a medium.

Do you see where your indoctrinated spaghetti logic fails when just a bit of common sence is applied?

Quote from: Olivier on November 09, 2012, 03:08:42 PM

Quote from: Pongo on November 09, 2012, 03:05:02 PM

Sooooo, if the earth were round then it would be light on both sides of the globe at the same time. Gotcha.

Nope.

You just got done telling me that light and sound can both travel in a randomly[sic] curved medium as a way if explaining how whales can be heard a world away. Let me list the facts your stating.

Sound can travel around the globe through a medium.
Light can travel around the globe through a medium.
Light cannot travel around the globe through a medium.

Do you see where your indoctrinated spaghetti logic fails when just a bit of common sence is applied?

I said in substance : Light can travel arround the globe through a medium. This implies : in given conditions that allow it.
You say in substance : If like can travel arround the globe through a medium in given conditions, then light always will, whatever the conditions.

Do you see where your indoctrinated BBQ sauce logic fails when just a bit of common sence is applied ?

One of the biggest misconceptions about oceans relate to the surface of Earth – the surface of Earth does not follow the shape of the land below the surface of the ocean.   The surface is the SURFACE, water included.   Why would we possibly believe that something as insignificant as land would actually determine the surface and shape of a planet where 99% of life lives in the water as opposed to on the actual surface?   We are the anomalies of [Earth], not water creatures.   We live on the visible surface area: they live in the invisible volume.   We interpret this invisible volume as sound, which is to sea creatures as light is to us.   And there is a LOT more volume than our surface area is even capable of detecting.   The only water on Earth we can see is the tiny bit which is trapped in the inner space, and even that tiny bit vastly surpasses the totality of land.

Oceans don’t fill in the gaps in the land; land fills in the gaps in the oceans.  This shift of perceptions makes all the difference in the world.

Let’s examine a few fairly obvious facts.   We ourselves are ¾ water and completely dependent on water to live.   Being submerged in water actually offers full six-directional three-dimensional motion, not the restricted, gravity-laden, one-dimensional existence we suffer on land.   Pressure increases as you dive underwater: pressure decreases as you rise into the sky.   Light and sound share a similar inverse relationship in the water and in the air.   Why do you think quantum “wave patterns” from the in direction can be described using waves of water? The familiarity of these concepts is not coincidental.   The “Planet Earth” is a literal mixture of two completely different worlds superimposed on one the backs of one another.   And the surface of the “planet” (not the surface of the land) IS the point of intersection.   We ARE water, so of course Earth is flat to our perception.

Lennox ESQ., Wolfgang Alexander  (2012-11-08). The Essential Field Guide to {Outfinital} Reality (Abridged Version) (The Book of Anthem) (Kindle Locations 1583-1595).  . Kindle Edition.

This is different from the theme of the last few posts, but I believe it's still interesting.

Clearly, stethoscopes work. A doctor puts a thingy somewhere on you, and the sounds bounce around a tube until they reach a doctor's ears.

The propagation of whalesong works the same way - a whale make a really, ridiculously loud sound (by far the loudest sound in the animal kingdom), and those sounds bounce around the ocean for a very long distance.

But what is it exactly that they bounce off of?

Total internal reflection, which is the concept on which things like stethoscopes and lasers and optical fibres work, is based on the difference in refractive indices between the two materials at the interface point. It's a little complex, but sometimes physics phenomena are just hard to understand. One of the coolest examples of total internal reflection is how, when you grip a glass full of water, you can clearly see where your fingerprints grip the glass if you look into the water. While the refractive index difference between water and glass isn't too much, the difference between those two things and air is. Where your fingerprints don't contact the glass, the light reflects off the glass-air interface back into the water. Where your fingerprints do contact the glass, however, light is absorbed by the fingerprints and that is why they are clearly visible.

Now, the ocean has a few different thermoclines in it, or layers which have different temperatures, and these thermoclines very gently change the refractive index of the water. We're talking very gently - the Earth curves only about 0.3mm for every kilometer of travel. This is about the width of the smallest possible mechanical pencil lead you can currently buy. It also means they only bend 0.03% for every kilometer. I can post the math for that conclusion if anyone asks, but it's not very hard to come up with yourself.

In everyday life, you can see how different temperatures change the refractive index of a material without changing the chemistry of the material itself - such as watching heat waves rise off of a hot road or a flame. If you look through those heat waves, the light gets all wavy and miragey. This is because hot air bends light slightly differently - but the waves are caused by that hot air moving. Now imagine air layers of different temperatures floating (mostly) stable on top of each other instead of rising up in waves - this sort of stratification phenomenon occurs in the ocean (and also on a large scale in the atmosphere too, as I'll discuss in a bit).

Knowing that total internal reflection is caused by an interface of two things with a different refractive interface and knowing that two layers in an ocean can contain an extremely slight refractive index difference, it's easy to see how sound emitted from whales bends around a spherical ocean.

This isn't my main point though. It is very important to note that the same thermal stratification occurs in the atmosphere. The lower layers are much warmer than the upper layers, which is something that's easily verifiable if you've ever been to some place with high elevation. Near where I live, there is a mountain that ascends 1,500m and at the top it is almost always 15c colder than at the base. 15c is a lot - you can tan at the base, but you'll need a heavy jacket at the summit.

With the total internal reflection of the ocean caused by thermoclines in mind, it is important to compare this knowledge to thermoclines which exist in the atmosphere. The same refractive index differences exist in the atmosphere, and the same sort of thermoclines also exist.

What can you expect from this sort of thing?

You can expect that, when looking out in a straight line away from you, the light from distant objects gets curved around the thermoclines much like a whalesong. It's not always perfect, so faraway objects always look a little wavy and distorted. But you can see objects that are just a little bit further beyond the horizon than you could see without the atmosphere. It makes the world look just a little bit - a tiny little bit - more flat.

So why am I bothering to put this explanation up, anyway?

Specifically because FE theory claims the exact opposite of this, with absolutely no mechanics to back it up. This model claims that instead of being able to see a little further, you actually can only see a lot less, and the only explanation given is the simple word "refraction" or the made-up term "aetheric edification".

The method proposed for why the horizon appears so close in a flat earth model has absolutely no bearing on reality, and though the model claims refractive phenomena for this sort of thing it is anything but.

While we should expect to see further beyond the horizon as the principle of total internal reflection shows, FE theory in fact states the exact opposite with no sort of evidence to back it up.

Haven't read everything here because I feel that the answer to this particular debate (whether whales prove FET or not) is easy to answer.

Has anyone considered that sound is generally confined to the medium in which it travels?   

Take a swimming pool for example. If one person swims to the bottom of the pool and shouts as loud as they can and another person stands out of the water at the pools edge and shouts back, very little or no perceptible sound will reach either person. Yet if both are underwater, then the sound becomes clearly audible.

Also, sound is generally audible not only in a straight line but in all directions depending on what it "bounces" of off. As the poster burdenofproof stated previously (and was ignored) a large wall will not stop a person from being able to shout to another person on the other side because the sound is travelling through the medium of air. 

In my view, this means that it doesnt matter what "shape" the medium fills (or whether it lies on a flat or curved surface), the sound will be carried through that medium to the best of its sound-carrying ability.

Therefore whales do not prove FET.

Haven't read everything here because I feel that the answer to this particular debate (whether whales prove FET or not) is easy to answer.

Has anyone considered that sound is generally confined to the medium in which it travels?   

Take a swimming pool for example. If one person swims to the bottom of the pool and shouts as loud as they can and another person stands out of the water at the pools edge and shouts back, very little or no perceptible sound will reach either person. Yet if both are underwater, then the sound becomes clearly audible.

Also, sound is generally audible not only in a straight line but in all directions depending on what it "bounces" of off. As the poster burdenofproof stated previously (and was ignored) a large wall will not stop a person from being able to shout to another person on the other side because the sound is travelling through the medium of air. 

In my view, this means that it doesnt matter what "shape" the medium fills (or whether it lies on a flat or curved surface), the sound will be carried through that medium to the best of its sound-carrying ability.

Therefore whales do not prove FET.

I can hear someone talking from the other side of the garden. Therefore I must be able to hear him if he's on the other side of the earth.

I can hear someone talking from the other side of the garden. Therefore I must be able to hear him if he's on the other side of the earth.

If the sound is loud enough, then why not?  After all, when Krakatoa exploded in 1883, the sound was heard some 3000 miles away.

I can hear someone talking from the other side of the garden. Therefore I must be able to hear him if he's on the other side of the earth.

You are the king of irrelevance. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make - it's not like you can hear someone talking from the other side of the Earth in FE theory, either. It's fairly obvious that louder sounds travel farther through media, and the point that kenobi was explicitly making is that sound travels farther & faster in water than in air, and also follows the shape of the water.

I guess you've never heard of the Bloop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop), an unexplained sound that was recorded simultaneously on multiple sensors as far apart as 4,800km.

As I have already posted, sound follows the shape of the ocean by bending around the very slight curvature of the thermocline due to the principle of total internal reflection. Again, the amount it has to bend is extremely negligible - only 0.3mm per kilometer of travel.

The posts which take the reflection of sound within a medium to mean that you should hear all sound which is uttered in the atmosphere are failing to take into account some fairly basic stuff that suggests they really have not a blind clue what they are talking about.
Firstly, sound is the oscillation and vibration of atoms/molecules which is transduced through the ears into the brain to create what we hear as sound. Simply put it is the transferrence of energy from one if many forms (chemical, electrical etc) to that of physical motion (kinetic energy).
Thus to transmit a sound a certain distance, you have to provide enough energy to allow the initial molecules which you vibrate to have sufficient energy to vibrate the next lot they touch etc etc. In different media this requires different amounts of energy. Water is denser than air (the molecules are more tightly packed together), so the movement of one molecule will have a more profound effect on the adjacent molecules than in air, where the molecules have further to vibrate before encountering another one to interact with. (If you have a bag of ball bearings which was full and somehow you moved the one in the middle, all the ball bearings would move as a result of this, however if they were a small distance apart (say 5-7mm), there would be a cushioning effect as each ball bearing would use up some of it's latent energy in traversing the distance to the next ball bearing, it would also miss some of the others and not move them at all as travelling through the free space would not affect the ones that did not come into direct physical contact with the moving ball bearing.)

Humans speak very very quietly in comparison to a whale, now the argument of whether a whale can hear it's best mate on the other pole of the earth notwithstanding (it would have to make an awful lot of noise) the fact that someone thinks it can does not in itself prove that the earth is flat. As mentioned before, the interaction of 2 fluids or any other medium creates a surface that sound reflects off. The best example mentioned here is standing above somoene who is underwater and yelling at them, very very little sound gets to them, yet they are only 1-2 metres away. The same happens in reverse but even more so, the sound we make is too low frequency and created in the wrong fashion to allow us to speak well underwater. The low quality sound we make dissipates very quickly. A whale however makes a different sound and does it in a slightly different fashion, thus has far more success in transmitting that sound, through water, over a large difference.

I can personally vouch for the reflectance of waves off of the earths atmoshphere/disc or whichever you believe in. When I was a kid I used to transmit radios on a 70cm wavelength (approx 433MHz) using a small 1W handheld radio. On a normal clear day, based in Aberdeenshire in North East Scotland, I could usually transmit and recieve over a distance of at most 40 miles. In certain conditions (when the ions from solar wind were in the atmoswhatever, they increased the electromagnetic reflectance of the portion of the air that my radiowaves reflected off of, and I could speak to radio users as far away as France. This was impossible 99% of the time, but when the weather allowed the waves to reach certain parts of the atmosphere, reflection was much easier. This is how 4m and 6m wavelength waves work or shortwave radios can transmit around the earth.

Water works in the same way. So a soundwave generated by a large whale can reflect off of different layers of water density (the water itself is in layers, just like the air) or off of the surface of the water (where it meets the air) and then off the seabed or a lower layer of water, and bounce their way around the oceans's depths.

The next part of the equation is reception of these signals. If you have heard Whalesong (I presume subscribers to this forum don't really have much time for Star Trek, but Star Trek 4 - the voyage home is a good place to sample whalesong if the Discovery Channel has not provided you with this yet...) you will understand that it is much unlike any other sound. It is tailored to be a frequency very unique to the environment under the sea. Thus, the ability to hear a sound is not necessarily the ability of that sound to be heard, but of your ability to hear it over all other sounds in the local area. Now if the sound you are trying to hear is unique, you don't have to have amazingly receptive hearing, but just be geared up to pick up that particular set of frequencies.
Funnily enough the only sound similar to whalesong you hear underwater is the human race's best attempts at imitating it, Sonar. That confuses whales no end.

I appreciate that for a first ever post in this forum, this is a VERY long one, however I am no genius yet these basic principles are easy to understand even for me. They thus disprove that the ability of whales to hear round corners means that the earth must be flat. Basic physics suggests this is not the case. Go jump in a swimming pool and yell at your mates who are outside it. That is all the proof you need. The rest is simple extrapolation of these basic theories.

Also, if you are standing at one side of a large 4 sided building and someone is around a corner and yells, you can hear them despite the fact that the wall of the building attenuates the sound completely and they are not within line of sight. This proves that sound can go around corners.

Excellent post.

Yes, the ocean magically refracts sound precisely the way RET needs it to.

Holy **** my radiator pipes are also magic, because I can clearly hear a knock on a pipe no matter how many stories down.
The main point is that sound is not a moving particle, it's energy moving as a wave through matter. It doesn't care if  the medium is bent or not.

Here is some more supporting facts of sound... Temperature affects sound. Ever been on a lake during the day, you see a bunch of people out on their boats, but you can't really hear them, then when you went out at night you can hear their conversations easily from across the lake? This means it makes it even easier for the soundwave to travel in the water where it's cold (hint: the water gets cooler the further from the equator). Wales use extremely large wave lengths, the bigger the wave length the lower the frequency, and when we hear a low frequency we hear it as a low pitch. Ever been to a rock concert near the sub woofers and feel your insides vibrating? And if you're still not convinced that sound travels through any medium you aught to look at the aftermath of a nuclear shockwave.


And I find this all pretty funny. If the earth is indeed flat, the waves the whales produce are still going to have to refract around islands and continents to get from pole to pole. Argue that.

Something else has just ocurred to me based upon my earlier comments on a 70cm radio transmitter. (See reply 45)
When the atmospheric conditions are not the magical way that I described earlier allowing the signals to bounce off the troposphere, the radio waves require line of sight to propagate to their recieving station.
If it were the case that the earth is indeed flat, with sufficient power, you would be able to transmit all around the world. You cannot, because the signals fly off in a straight line and due to the high frequency, usually go right though the atmosphere and dissipate.
This indeed happens however with 4m, 6m and 8m wavelength signals, because they are more suceptible to atmospheric bounce and it can be observed that if you use enough power, after a certain period of time (I forget, but it is the length of time it takes light to traverse the circumference of the globe) you can hear your original signal again. If the earth was flat, how would this be possible. Radio waves like this are absorbed by structures so they cannot bounce off the wall at the edges of the flat earth, they would be absorbed.
I suppose this is simply another construct of the governments and round earth lobby who listen in and re-transmit your signals to you?
They must be very clever, knowing how many watts you transmitted on and whether or not you are expecting to hear your signal as it comes around the globe.
Sneaky chaps these round earthers.

What if a whale sang it's song to a nearby whale, who sang the song to another nearby whale, who continued this until the whole bucket brigade reached the other side of the world? The world does not have to be flat for this to occur.

What if a whale sang it's song to a nearby whale, who sang the song to another nearby whale, who continued this until the whole bucket brigade reached the other side of the world? The world does not have to be flat for this to occur.

That's true, but marine biologists say that one whale can be heard ~12,000 miles.