Back when I was a FE-er, I tried to spread FE-ism on some other forums, and I was convinced that FET is wrong. Here are the arguments I used, and I know many others use them, and their refutations. I won't be refuting jokes like people in Australia shouldn't be able to see stars (if it's absolutely needed to say, they see different stars than we do, because the Earth is encompassed by the stars), but arguments that might convince some people.
If the Earth were spinning at a very high rate, everything would fly off into space.
This is probably a joke, but, here we go. The formula for the centrifugal force is Fcf=m*v*v/r. And the radius of the Earth is 6400 km. The equator is therefore 40000 km large. Since it turns around itself once in 24 hours, it is moving at 1667 km/h = 463 m/s. So, the centrifugal force on 1 kg on the equator is Fcf=1*463*463/6400000=0.033N. And the gravitational force is 9.81N. That's negligible. The Earth is just too big for the centrifugal force to be visible.
Horizon seems to be rising with you as you climb.
Your eyes and your head are not perfectly tilted machines, and they, when you look forwards, look towards the horizon, no matter where it is actually.
So, the horizon isn't always at your eye level?This may be the most important part. Thinking that the horizon is always at my eye level is what stopped me from thinking around the corners when thinking about the perspective.No. The difference is usually imperceptible though, because the Earth is very big.
It's a simple trigonometry. The angle at which you see the horizon is:
alpha=90-arcsin(R/(R+h))
where R is the radius of the Earth and h is the height on which you are. That's that simple. So, at the Mount Everest, the angle at which you see the horizon is, for example, 2.49 degrees. You can measure it, even better in the airplanes, with a gyroscope and a camera.
The tops of the clouds are illuminated during the sunset as well as the bottoms. You can see this from an airplane. that proves our postulates about the perspective.
No it doesn't. The horizon you see from an airplane is not a true horizon. It's almost always completely hidden by the clouds. So, when you see the sunset from an airplane, it's not the actual sunset. That's the time when the tops of the clouds stop being illuminated and bottoms start to be. See the diagram.
But how can you then see the sunset twice if you watch it while sitting and then quickly stand up?Because the horizon slightly drops as you stand up, and the sun stays at the same apparent angle. By the way, according to your explanation of this phenomenon, that the sun is only 3000 miles up in the sky so the angle at which you see it changes, it would have exactly the opposite effect. And you hide such problems by not drawing the diagrams. That's very dishonest, if you ask me.
Ships over the horizon reappear when you look at them through a telescope.
This has never been shown in controlled environments. But, for those you show, refraction plays a very big role. The temperature of the lake could have been very low, and the temperature of the air could be very high, and that could cause the observer to see a small mirage through the telescope. As for those videos showing how zooming has the same effect, the camera could be moving slightly up or down, so that the horizon is not always equally distant. And your explanation of the bottom of the ship merging with the sea before the top does because the visual angle of the bottom being smaller than the visual angle of the top makes no sense: if you move higher, the bottom of the ship reappears, yet it's visual angle is even smaller. I've made a thread about that, and didn't get a satisfying answer.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66522.msg1774114#msg1774114OK, but aren't the waves the simplest explanation for the ships disappearing bottom first?No, they are bellow your eye level, so they can't hide anything above your eye level. Try drawing a diagram.
The illuminated part of the moon doesn't always appear to align with the sun. I've once seen the north part of the moon being illuminated right after the sunset!
And if you had been visualizing things correctly, that's exactly what you would have expected.
OK, if the Earth is round, and the Moon gets its light from the Sun, where is the Sun during the full moon? Right bellow us? Then the Earth would stop its light from even getting to the Moon, and we would always see a lunar eclipse instead of a full moon.
The sun, the moon and the Earth aren't always on the same line. They are only when an eclipse happens, and it's very rarely. It might be hard to visualize, since it's in a big three dimensional space. See the diagram.
But they would still have to be if the full moon is in zenith.And it never is!
If the gravitational energy were real, the rain would start boiling before it gets to the ground! That proves the universal acceleration!
No, it doesn't. Heat comes from collision, not from speed. The effects would be exactly the same. By the way, your explanation for the relativistic effects of gravity, that is, stars having small gravitational fields, make no sense: they would have exactly the opposite effect!
The horizon on high-altitude photograph is elliptical, and not circular, as it would be if the Earth were spherical.
The earth isn't spherical, it's an ellipsoid! And your explanation for that makes no sense. Let's put it in some different context: If you are exactly bellow a lightbulb, you can't see anything that isn't illuminated by it. See, it makes no sense. There is also another problem: if the Earth is flat, why aren't street lights from other continents visible on high altitude photographs? I made a thread on it, and didn't get any answer.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=65482.msg1748143#msg1748143The RE astronomy can't explain the moon transparency, reported by some ancient people.
Actually, it can. It's called moon fountains.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/30mar_moonfountains/I've made a thread on this, and didn't get an answer.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66496.msg1773600#msg1773600If the sun were 150'000'000 kilometers high, the sun rays would appear parallel.
And they are parallel. They only appear not to be parallel because of the perspective, for the same reason as the rails appear to converge in the distance.
But what when they are vertical, as on some photographs?
They aren't vertical, they appear vertical because of the clouds. They would be vertical only if the sun were in zenith. And even if they were vertical, they would still appear to converge. See, when we think about the perspective, we usually depict the image plane as a straight plane.
But it's very rarely the case. First of all, the retina of our eye is a sphere. And even on the photographs, the image plane is curved by the Petzval field curvature. The rule that the objects with greater visual angle appear bigger is way more accurate than the rule that the objects with the greater projection they would have on a straight image plane appear bigger. Think of it this way: a bird in the sky appears smaller than a bird on the ground with the same size and ground distance.
Look out through the window!
Well, I see the sky being round, and the apparently highest point in the sky always directly above me, and I know that the sky and the ground never intersect. That could be a proof of a round earth. But, of course, there are ad-hoc hypotheses.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66524.msg1774119#msg1774119Conspiracy proves Flat Earth!
OK, let's say there is a conspiracy. The evidence of the Earth being round is all around you: ships disappearing bottom first, shifting constellations, lunar eclipses, highest point in the sky being always directly above you… How does it matter whether people can get to the Moon or not? And there is no conspiracy. The arguments for it are debunked again and again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theoriesBut wide-angle lenses can't make the shadows appear to intersect at some random points on the ground. They converge less than they would with a rectilinear lens, so they can only intersect above the horizon.No. See, what distortion does is making the lines curved. And the shorter lines, like those of the shadows, are just the segments of the larger, obviously curved, ones. So, that's like saying that if two circles don't intersect, their tangents can't intersect either. Makes no sense.
And the notion that all of the parallel shadows would intersect at the horizon also isn't true not even if you take only the perspective into account. Vanishing lines appear only when the ground plane his a straight plane perpendicular to the image plane, and, in photography, that happens very rarely.
But the light can't be scattered into shadows by the ground. On the Earth it is scattered in the shadows by the dust, and it's called Tyndall effect. The light being scattered into shadows would go against the law of reflection.
You don't need air to have dust particles above the ground. It just takes them to be electrically charged with the same charge.
But wouldn't then the suits get polarized and start attracting those dust particles?No. The polarization doesn't occur in homogeneous electrical fields.
Also, the ground is uneven, so it should reflect the light at different angles. And the light actually reflects diffusely, as you can see by there being no mirror images of the objects on the ground.
But if America managed to get people on the moon back in 1969, why hasn't Croatia done it half a century after that?
Because it's not involved in a cold war and it won't spend money on space races. It's very expensive.
Nobody can have enough knowledge to engineer a rocket. You need to know astronomy, astrophysics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, advanced geometry, chemistry, psychophysics, physiology, informatics…
… and maybe that's why it involved hundreds of thousands of people.
How the hell would you make them all work together?!Pay them large amounts of tax money!
Well, when you engineer, you make all kinds of errors. When you engineer an electronic device, you can test each part you make. But how would you do that if you engineer a rocket? You can't just put each part into space to see if it works!
Trial and error. A lot more rockets have crashed than we know it now. It's not like they engineered a rocket for the first time and put a human into it.
But wouldn't the Occam's razor favor the conspiracy theory?
No. We know that rockets are possible. We use them in fireworks. You can't assume they don't exist. What you can assume are massive conspiracies that delude public about the space exploration with them, and then the burden of proof is definitely on you.
Occam's razor doesn't justify the personal incredulity fallacy.And why are conspiracies so unlikely?Because people are very bad at keeping secrets. The largest conspiracy ever discovered was Operation Snow White, involving around 5000 people. More people there are in conspiracy and longer that conspiracy lasts, more likely is someone to feel bad and blow the whistle and everything falls apart.
But sometimes it doesn't all fall apart with a single whistle-blower. Think of the holocaust.Well, it was a war time and nobody trusted anyone. They couldn't provide evidence, and holocaust was an extraordinary statement. And they were victims. If they had been a part of the conspiracy, rather than victims of it, they would have provided more evidence.
Isn't it unnecessary to discuss whether or not a human being can get on the moon for the same reason as it is unnecessary to discuss whether or not it can breathe under water?
Yes, and it's called scuba diving. Nobody claims that people got to the moon by jumping from a high mountain and flapping their hands. It's technology, of course.
But the engines with the reaction mass couldn't make the rockets move at a straight line. If you burst a balloon while it's still in the air, it doesn't move at a straight line.
Because you, when you burst a ballon, almost always apply a torque to it and give it angular momentum. Plus, of course, the air movement affects balloons way more than it affects the rockets because a balloon has way smaller mass.
Bernoulli's equation shows that an engine which uses a fluid as a reaction mass would go against the law of conservation of energy.
(…)
The v in Bernoulli's equation isn't a speed relative to a stationary observer, it's the speed of the reaction mass relative to the rocket.
But according to the Torricelli's law, the fluid should be moving at a constant speed. Since the acceleration is zero, the force it applies to the rocket is also zero. The rocket still can't move.Torricelli's law says that the fluid will be moving at a constant speed once it leaves the rocket. Of course it needs to accelerate to that speed!
The force the reaction mass applies to the rocket isn't external, so the rocket, according to the Newton's first law, can't accelerate.
External doesn't mean outside versus inside, it means external relative to the whole system. And the change in momentum is zero, the rocket goes to the opposite direction of the reaction mass, but with the same momentum, so no external force is needed.
But you can't move exactly vertically in the air as the rockets are supposed to, the lift force, being perpendicular to the direction they are moving at, is going to act on them to move aside.
No, it's not. That phenomenon is called gravitational drag. Basically, the air itself is going to accelerate downwards because of gravity and therefore the directions of the lift force and the drag force aren't going to stay the same relative to the rocket as if it were moving horizontally.
But the Earth circling around the stationary Sun would contradict the law of conservation of momentum. In order for the momentum to be conserved, the Sun would have to move in a direction opposite to the Earth's revolution.
First of all, there are other planets in the Solar System, all moving counter-clockwise, and they are sometimes on the opposite side of the Solar System, so are moving in the opposite direction than the Earth does. Secondly, the Sun does indeed move around the center of the Solar System.
What do I loose by being a FE-er, even if I am not right?
Well, conspiracy theories teach us that people are dishonest, that you can't accomplish anything, that everyone who claims to have accomplished anything is lying… Just look at what happens if you try to spread FE-ism IRL. Seriously, stop living in some imaginary world in which nothing makes sense, it drives you to insanity.
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=65982.0But there are lots of the people who say things like "NASA was on the moon, therefore I can do X.", and are then shocked when they fail.That means they are idiots, not that NASA wasn't on the moon.
They did a really great job by not trying to debunk FET, but actually asking me why I think the Earth is flat and explaining me why my reasons are wrong. There is always an ad-hoc hypothesis. I think that FE-ers should start some topics trying to argue for FET, to see if their reasons are sound, instead of RE-ers trying to debunk FET with apparently contrary evidence. This way this forum makes people idiots. It makes them think they are free thinkers, when they are just repeating what they have been told by the FES.
The weirdest thing here is that there are people who know science way more than I do, like those computer-scientists, and they still believe the Earth is flat. So, what are your reasons for believing the Earth is flat? Or have I made some errors in the science?