I'm sure you can all agree that sunsets are truly lovely features of every single day. That bright orange disk disappearing below the horizon, and the sky lighting up with beautiful vivid colours.
Lovely jubbley.
But wait a minute, what's that? It looks an awful lot like the clouds are being lit from
underneath. The dark parts are on top! Time to go on a journey.
Sure..so?Well, the majority of flat Earth models presume that the Sun remains a roughly constant height of about 3000 miles
above the surface of the Earth, and
above those pesky clouds too. Bring on the diagrams!
Let's start at the basics - somebody standing at A sees midday and somebody at B a sunset. How does B see a sunset? Well according to FE theory, the light bends. Let's track some of it.
We can satisfy the person at A and the person at B by adding light which bends. B can't see the bottom half of the sun because the light coming from it bent downwards and didn't quite reach B. So far so good. Let's try lighting those clouds next.
Hmm. Something's not quite right here. Light appears to be doing something very special just for our clouds! Let's try something else.
A reflection - That's a little better. But why's that line all dottey? Well, that cloud at the front is blocking the light from getting through. If it was a reflection, we should see see large unlit regions where the light is being blocked by other clouds. Rain clouds would be lit underneath too. Let's look at that first image again.
Hmm, nope - it's not a reflection either. It's very overcast in this image yet we're still seeing it lit loud and clear. If it was a reflection, they would be lit from underneath during the day too.
So, we must've done something else wrong. Bendy light, maybe?
Ah yes of course; light must be travelling straight even over long distances. Ironically thanks to those clouds, we can see exactly where the light is heading. But that leaves us with a problem though - we made an assumption that light bends. Back we go!
Without bendy light, we can't make midday A and sunset B happy in these positions. Hmm. Time to gather up some facts.
- We know for sure that midday and a sunset happen at the same time.
- We know for sure that clouds are lit from underneath during a sunset.
- We know for sure that clouds are lit from the top during the day. Rain clouds are always dark underneath
in the day.
- We know for sure that light travels straight, even over the sorts of distances we're looking at here.
We need a model that fits to all of this, so stand by for some shuffling around!
Zestylicious! We have straight rays as seen by C, clouds lit from underneath, clouds lit from the top, midday and sunset at the same time - it's all fitting just right.
But, of course, there's a catch!
Can any Flat Earth satisfy all of these in one diagram too?Can't draw on a computer? That's fine!
