Greater thoughts...

Ok, heres something I just thought of, however couldnt work out how to narrow it down to be searchable...


Your flat earth, you all believe to be some sort of conspiracy. Its a disk that shoots upwards at a uniform accelleration, as does everything else around it, and theres no other possible explanation for it.
really its a stupid concept IMHO
However, with all this conspiracy talk etc, and so many unaccountable explanations for so many different things, you're more likely to have this as a model:


The whole flat earth is a cordoned off section of a much larger planet. It has a large wall as a boundry, possibly some sort of dome over the top. This would explain all the inconsistencies with your physics problems, because gravity and everything else would be a result of the overall planet, as would volcanics and tectonics. Also, the natural curviture of the earth could be explained easily as its a portion of this other planet.



Still, however, if you where to turn around and believe that, I would be very very worried about your mental state. Seriously, to believe that you're contained within some huge wall with no means of escape and everythings a conspiracy, you'd have to have had some deep, deep psychological traumas as a child that lead to some crazy arse insecurity problems.

You'd be surprised what some of these loonies are willing to believe.

I've been thinking if the Earth is flat, shouldn't I be able to afix a laser on a level tripod on the "East" Coast of the US and have that beam transmit clear to Africa, or the UK?

I've been thinking if the Earth is flat, shouldn't I be able to afix a laser on a level tripod on the "East" Coast of the US and have that beam transmit clear to Africa, or the UK?

Yes, if you have a laser that's powerful enough to cross the Atlantic and there's nothing in the way in the path of the beam.

^um, what about air?

Also, the natural curviture of the earth could be explained easily as its a portion of this other planet.

if this was the case we would get different results than we do when calculating the size of the earth

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Around 235 BC Erastosthenes measured the size of the Earth. He had learned from the archives in the Great Library of Alexanderia that the Sun appeared directly overhead on the summer solstice in an Egyptian town called Syene. In fact, one could see the image of the Sun at noon reflected directly back upward from a deep well there. You and I know that this means that Syene must be located at 23.5 degrees north latitude. Erastosthenes measured the angle of the Sun's shadow cast on the same day in his town of Alexandria as 7.2 degrees. He also knew that the distance between Syene and Alexandria was 800 km north (along the same arc of longitude). Great! He now had a triangle. Let's look at diagram 2.



This distance of 800 km corresponds to 7.2 degrees. So, What distance corresponds to 360 degrees (a full circle ... circumference)?

Earth Circumference / 800 km =   360 degrees / 7.2 degrees

So, Earth Circumference = 800 km * 360 / 7.2 =   40,000 km

This means the Earth's diameter is 40,000 km / 3.14 = 12,740 km

This has come up before and it's also important to note that many people are very skeptical of these results because:

"Although Eratosthenes' method was well founded, the accuracy of his calculation was inherently limited. The accuracy of Eratosthenes' measurement would have been reduced by the fact that Syene is not precisely on the Tropic of Cancer, is not directly south of Alexandria, and the Sun appears as a disk located at a finite distance from the Earth instead of as a point source of light at an infinite distance. There are other sources of experimental error: the greatest limitation to Eratosthenes' method was that, in antiquity, angles could only be measured to within about a quarter of a degree, and overland distance measurements were even less reliable."

And considering "The exact size of the stadion he used is no longer known"

I think there is good reason to believe he wasn't as accurate as is reported.

Its a disk that shoots upwards at a uniform accelleration, as does everything else around it, and theres no other possible explanation for it.

It almost gets boring saying "the exact same thing is true of RE gravity" over and over. Almost.

There's no possible explanation for why mass attracts other mass to which it has no physical connection, but it does.

As for the "section on a larger sphere" idea, it's been proposed before, along with a lot of other gravity-based flat earth models. I myself proposed something that looked like a flat disc sitting on a very long narrow cylindrical pole (extending out under the north pole) and connected to a significant mass a million miles away (or something). Like I said, there's been bunched of these, and they're all fine, but not FE canon. We like the acceleration model, so that's what we talk about.