Eratosthenes

So, what is the distance to the Sun.  As pointed out earlier, the "normal" FE claims do not work with simple trigonometry when tested against reality.  Let's start simple, what is the distance and how is that derived. 

Still waiting for that distance answer.

Well, Eratosthenes measured the shadows at noon at two spots separated along a meridian by 500 miles. He got a difference of 7.2 degrees. So, which model are you going to assume is true when analyzing his data?

If you assume a Flat Earth model, you get 4000 miles for the sun's distance.

If you assume the sun is way, way far away (an assumption made with no proof — Eratosthenes seems to have adopted Aristarchus' postulate as true, not as the hypothesis it was), then you can conclude a Round Earth and calculate a 4000 mile radius.

In either case, are we not just assuming the answer we want to get?


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EDIT: My bad. Aristarchus was not postulating. He actually calculated Earth-Sun distance using observations of the moon. I'll post a correction below. Round Earth wins!
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Thank you for your well thought out post.

Related, here is a poster we did a limited run of back when I had the American Branch:

So how does this poster of the American FES tie in with this then?

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/41-our-solar-system/the-earth/orbit/87-how-do-you-measure-the-distance-between-earth-and-the-sun-intermediate

This shows how the true distance of the Sun has been measured.

So how does this poster of the American FES tie in with this then?

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/41-our-solar-system/the-earth/orbit/87-how-do-you-measure-the-distance-between-earth-and-the-sun-intermediate

This shows how the true distance of the Sun has been measured.

Yes, exactly. Thanks, Solarwind, that is the webpage I was going to post as my correction to my own Reply #60. Nice job.

From that page:
Historically, the first known person to use geometry to estimate the Earth-Sun distance was Aristarchus (c. 310-230 BC), in ancient Greece. He measured the angular separation of the Sun and the Moon when the Moon was half-illuminated to derive the distance between Earth and Sun in terms of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. His reasoning was correct, but his measurements were not. Aristarchus calculated that the Sun is about nineteen times farther than the Moon; it is actually about 390 times farther than the Moon.

On the other hand, this approach only gives the relative distances of the Sun and Moon as a ratio, not as absolute distances. Still, it validates the "Sun is way, way far away" finding. So, all is well. RE still wins. They found reliable absolute planetary/solar distances in the 17th & 18th centuries.

Related, here is a poster we did a limited run of back when I had the American Branch:

Which repeats the same falsehoods.
You don't need to assume a round Earth and large sun.
You can conclude the sun must be very far away based upon observations of it.
With that conclusion (not assumption), we can then determine that Earth must be round, not flat.

The right side of the images instead assumes Earth is flat, with no basis, and relies upon completely defying the zetetic method by inventing magic to explain why the sun sets, and ends up with a false model.

Now perform the same experiment more to the North and again in the Southern hemisphere by a couple thousand miles.  Your results will vary dramatically if you assume a flat disc. 
Use the same formulas you decided to determine the distance to check at different times of the year, different times of the day and still assume a flat plane.  Perform it simultaneously with others more North and South.  Use the same formula, each will get different results as to the distance if you assume a flat plane. 
If you take the data and map it on a sphere, it will work, if you map it on a flat plane it will not. 
There is a video out there that included shadow angles from multiple people from many parts of the world on the same day at the same local time that does just that.  It shows how that assumption of a flat plane and a near sun doesn't work.  BTW before you claim the same tired conspiracy BS, quite a few of the observations came from actual open minded FE people who truly wanted to test their ideas. 
Well, some of them are now former FE people. 
Cherry picking small subsets that can possibly be twisted into not countering your ideas, claiming conspiracy, fakers, misrepresenting actual data and scientific methods are all standard for the FE con artists.

Side note, John, I do not agree with the conclusions made by you, but the non Euclidean  space attempt is still by far the closest thing to plausible FE idea yet, it isn't in my opinion, but it does a damn site better job at at least trying to account for all the observations that completely destroy all the rest of the FE notions.

Now perform the same experiment more to the North and again in the Southern hemisphere by a couple thousand miles.  Your results will vary dramatically if you assume a flat disc.

Why would you assume a flat disk when we know it isn't from other methods already described?

If you take the data and map it on a sphere, it will work, if you map it on a flat plane it will not.

So what would you conclude from that then? Again backed up by results from other methods.

This is where I find it incredulous that flat Earth believers place more importance and more significance on their false obsessions about a big conspiracy taking place about the shape of the Earth than they do to the simple results of the data.

Cherry picking small subsets that can possibly be twisted into not countering your ideas, claiming conspiracy, fakers, misrepresenting actual data and scientific methods are all standard for the FE con artists.

  Hear hear!

Quote

Cherry picking small subsets that can possibly be twisted into not countering your ideas, claiming conspiracy, fakers, misrepresenting actual data and scientific methods are all standard for the FE con artists.

  Hear hear!

Many of what you describe is routine in what you might call "actual science." Consider the take aways of studies like this one (there are many others:) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483899/

Quote from: Solarwind on October 07, 2021, 11:38:11 AM

Quote

Cherry picking small subsets that can possibly be twisted into not countering your ideas, claiming conspiracy, fakers, misrepresenting actual data and scientific methods are all standard for the FE con artists.

  Hear hear!

Many of what you describe is routine in what you might call "actual science." Consider the take aways of studies like this one (there are many others:) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483899/

I found this when working at a lab. Our supervisor loved pretty little graphs and plucking out data that didn't do the research any favours

From your link

It is not always easy for researchers to decide when uncorrected errors in the data become outright falsification. How do scientists actually clean their data? They often rely on their experience, cleaning out unanticipated findings and preserving what they “know” they would find:

    “One gray area that I am fascinated by … is culling data based on your ‘experience.’ … there was one real famous episode in our field … [where] it was clear that some of the results had just been thrown out … [When] queried [the researchers] … said, ‘Well we have been doing this for 20 years, we know when we’ve got a spurious result …’ [When that happens] … Do you go back and double check it or do you just throw it out … [and] do you tell everybody you threw it out? I wonder how much of that goes on?”

One young scientist described the advice she was given by a more senior colleague:

    “I was defending my master’s thesis and I was doing a poster presentation, and the external examiner came and had a look at some of my graphs. And he said, ‘You know, well I’d be much more convinced by your data if you’d chopped off the last two data points …’ I was like, well, I wasn’t sure that you could do that kind of thing (laughter) … for me it’s being honest about what you found and … my work may be more convincing had I lopped off the last two data points, but those two data points may be more interesting than something that has happened before.”

Pissed me off seeing my supervisor boast on the news about some BS new therapy she was working on and I knew full well it was just false hope because the real world results amounted to sweet fuck all. Of course, her research never saw the light of a clinical trial. She kept getting grant funding because she'd word salad some new and promising detail she found during her unsuccessful attempts. Oh and she was also one to take all the fame and glory for anything her Honours or PhD students worked on.

You get the idea


Merck, manipulated their data to make Vioxx appear far more safe then it was. And that data manipulation cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of lives

Quote from: Solarwind on October 07, 2021, 11:38:11 AM

Quote

Cherry picking small subsets that can possibly be twisted into not countering your ideas, claiming conspiracy, fakers, misrepresenting actual data and scientific methods are all standard for the FE con artists.

  Hear hear!

Many of what you describe is routine in what you might call "actual science." Consider the take aways of studies like this one (there are many others:) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483899/

Sure it is easy to find anecdotal occurrences that didn't follow the prescribed methods in any field.  The problem being you give examples of what goes wrong with not following the methods that are there to ensure incorrect outcomes are as mitigated as possible to try to say that the method is invalid.  That's pretty illogical and very dishonest.  Of course I would expect nothing better than that from most supposed FE proponents.
And thank you for proving my point about misrepresenting things to fit your narrative.

Yeah we can all drudge up shit when shit is in high supply. Bring something to the table, then ask us why we believe it to be flat.

... Bring something to the table, then ask us why we believe it to be flat.

Why do you believe the Bedford Canal is flat?

Yeah we can all drudge up shit when shit is in high supply. Bring something to the table, then ask us why we believe it to be flat.

Normal, mundane, truth doesn't sell advertising revenue.  Bad actions sell, the fact that you can find "shit" posted on the internet isn't a function of there being a lit of it out there, it is a function of it being sensational.  It is sensational because it is bad.  Again, finding reports of times that the method was not followed and bad results were found is not evidence that the method is wrong.  The reason it is sensational, ie sells, is because it is wrong doing.  The fact that in relation to the amount of things that are done with said method is of a amount so vastly higher in magnitude to the few instances that you can find of wrong doing, and that those are juicy stories to tell should show a logical person that maybe the rest that doesn't get into news stories are actually valid.  It isn't 1 apple spoils the whole bunch, especially when it is 1 or 2 amongst billions.  But you keep on cherry picking.  Keep on proving my point about sticking to your ideological narratives. 

Quote from: Mikey T. on October 04, 2021, 01:19:48 PM

So, what is the distance to the Sun.  As pointed out earlier, the "normal" FE claims do not work with simple trigonometry when tested against reality.  Let's start simple, what is the distance and how is that derived. 

Quote from: Mikey T.

Still waiting for that distance answer.

Well, Eratosthenes measured the shadows at noon at two spots separated along a meridian by 500 miles. He got a difference of 7.2 degrees. So, which model are you going to assume is true when analyzing his data?

If you assume a Flat Earth model, you get 4000 miles for the sun's distance.

If you assume the sun is way, way far away (an assumption made with no proof — Eratosthenes seems to have adopted Aristarchus' postulate as true, not as the hypothesis it was), then you can conclude a Round Earth and calculate a 4000 mile radius.

In either case, are we not just assuming the answer we want to get?


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EDIT: My bad. Aristarchus was not postulating. He actually calculated Earth-Sun distance using observations of the moon. I'll post a correction below. Round Earth wins!
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Well said - none. You are to assume none. That is fucking science man. The rest is politics, and think we learned enough about that the last few years. I assume, are we are about around the 2020s?

Its a bit rough to pull a terry p.

Quote from: Thunderwolf on October 05, 2021, 12:23:51 PM

... ...

If you assume a Flat Earth model, you get 4000 miles for the sun's distance.

If you assume the sun is way, way far away ...
(an assumption made with no proof — Eratosthenes seems to have adopted Aristarchus' postulate as true, not as the hypothesis it was) ...,
then you can conclude a Round Earth and calculate a 4000 mile radius.

In either case, are we not just assuming the answer we want to get?

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EDIT: My bad. Aristarchus was not postulating. He calculated an actual Earth-Sun distance using observations of the moon. I'll post a correction below. Round Earth wins!
---------------

Well said - none. You are to assume none. That is ... [expletive deleted] ... science man. The rest is politics, and think we learned enough about that the last few years. I assume, are we are about around the 2020s?

You are 100% correct that we need no assumptions here:
Round Earth was confirmed by measurement 22 centuries ago!

I initially thought that Eratosthenes, in 240 B.C., did not know the Sun-Earth distance and so one needed to be assumed. I was in error and corrected my error with an edit and a follow-up post. Eratosthenes had a value for solar distance from Aristarchus' earlier work and absolutely knew the Sun was far enough away that the Sun's rays were effectively parallel to each other when they reached Earth. He therefore also knew the correct model to use was the RE one on the right in the diagram above, not the FE one on the left. No assumptions were necessary to make that choice. Hence, he calculated a remarkably accurate value (within about 2% of the modern, accepted value) for the Earth's diameter. If we ignore reality (i.e., Aristarchus' discovery and zillions of confirmations since) and assume Flat Earth Theory as true, then we "calculate" an FEer's version of the Sun-Earth distance that is embarrassingly inaccurate:

4,000 miles ÷ 93,000,000 miles = 0.00004 ; FE misses the accepted value for distance by 99.996%.

4,000 ÷ ∞ = 0 ; FE misses the accepted value for diameter by 100%.

Just imagine for a moment what was like to be around during Eratosthenes day. Access to information and knowledge was so incredibly limited compared to what we have today. He couldn't just look stuff up on the Internet in moments like we can today. He lived in an era when if you wanted to know something you had to go and figure out a way of finding out for yourself.  And that's exactly what he did. Today I can repeat many of the observations done by the likes of Galileo four centuries or so ago but with much, much better equipment. That helps me to appreciate how skilled those guys were in observing.

To reach an answer which was so very near the modern figure that we have reached today then clearly Eratosthenes knew a thing or two about what was doing.  And quite possibly had a mental idea of what figure he would get. His experiment then simply confirmed that answer. That evidenced to him that his reasoning was correct and his measurements were correct. Part of a method which scientists today follow still.

In school or college assignments they often say 'assume this or assume that' but that is mainly to do with making the calculations a tad easier.  For Eratosthenes, he didn't need to 'assume' the Earth was a sphere because he respected what Aristarchus' had said about the Sun being much further away than the Moon.  Therefore a more distant Sun would produce parallel rays from a great distance and so that combined with his own observations and measurements led him to a figure for the circumference of the Earth. A figure which if we could travel in time could go back and confirm to him was the correct answer. We know it is the correct answer because we can use several methods now to determine the circumference and all of those give us the same answer.

He had the entire library of fucking Alexandria. His work was lifted five times over and base as fuck. But enjoy your caveman mentality. I'm sure the wheel seemed novel the tenth time someone figured it out.

Such a shame you feel the need to resort to such primitive language to try and emphasize your point.

Regardless of what library Eratosthenes had access to it only contained the information known of the time.  That led him to conclusion (or assumption if you prefer to use that word instead) that the Earth was actually round, and therefore he knew he was calculating the circumference of the Earth.

No library contains information about what is not known. That's as true today as it ever was.

Such a shame you feel the need to resort to such primitive language to try and emphasize your point.

He's just a troll with a (self proclaimed) title.

He had the entire library of ...[expletive deleted]... Alexandria.

I'd say that good library access means that E. was undisputedly aware of Aristarchus' proof of a distant Sun. Thanks for confirming that.

His work was lifted five times over and base as ...[expletive deleted].

What does that even mean? How often has Samuel Rowbotham's work "been lifted" (whatever that means)?

But enjoy your caveman mentality.

Thanks for saying so. We enjoy yours, too.

I'm sure the wheel seemed novel the tenth time someone figured it out.

Again, we defer to your firsthand experience.
 

There is a striking difference between what we understand about Eratosthenes and the flat Earth movement of today.  Anyone care to take a guess at what that difference is? Actually come to think of it there are many differences but I'm just thinking about the most obvious one here.

He had the entire library of fucking Alexandria. His work was lifted five times over and base as fuck. But enjoy your caveman mentality. I'm sure the wheel seemed novel the tenth time someone figured it out.

Do you only post drunk now?  We are lucky (?) if you even produce a coherent point.

... His work was lifted five times over and base as f___ ...

Having never encountered it before, I had to look up the meme "base as f___."  It means "agreeable" and "worthy of support." So, I guess we all respect Eratosthenes; we just disagree with our assessments of what his work actually was. Where are people getting the notion that E. proved a Flat Earth? Why do folks believe that? What is the source material for that interpretation? That view seems in opposition to every reference out there, and in opposition to descriptions of the experiment itself. These questions are asked in the spirit of debate. A considered, reliable FE response is requested.

Edit: I was unable to find a meaning for "... lifted five times over."

Let's be clear. Flat Earthers are not interested in any evidence which counters their belief. They would much rather take the easy route in life and say hey, the Earth looks flat to us and so therefore it is flat.  Seeing is believing as John has previous said.  Go by what the senses tell us I believe the statement claimed.

Well if only it was that simple and easy.  The Sun and Moon look the same size in the sky according to what our senses tell us, so they must be the same size right?  Well that would satisfy the flat Earth point of view but that doesn't actually prove they really are the same size does it.  As soon as it was evident that the Sun was much further away than the Moon then that dashed any ideas that the two could be actually the same size. The Sun is actually 400 times larger than the Moon but also 400 time further away. That astounds the flat Earther so much that they are convinced it must be all one big lie.  But why?  The Moon and the Sun have not always been the same apparent size.  It just so happens that right now they are.  In the past the Moon looked bigger. In the future it will look smaller?  How do we know? Because we have measured the distance between the Earth and the Moon over many years and we know it is receding from us at a rate of 4cm per year.

People who lived during Eratosthenes time and even before had precious little to go by. If anything they had much more reasonable grounds to believe the Earth was actually flat. But others before him had collected data which to Eratosthenes implied that the Earth was not flat. He based his conclusions purely on what he studied and came to his own decisions about what that data implied was the most likely answer to what shape the Earth was.  And so Eratosthenes concluded that everything pointed to the Earth being a globe. He didn't know it was but equally he didn't have any pre-contrived beliefs which he then tried to make the data fit in with.  He allowed the data to lead and his brain to do the rest.

The fact is that FE cannot explain sunsets.
If the Earth was flat then no one in the notehrn hemisphere would ever see the sun as being less then 10-15 degrees above the horizon.

In addition, daytime durations don't make any sense in FE. Draw a circle on a peice of paper, the draw another circel of the same size such that the cnter of the first circle isn't inside the other, less then 1/3 of the outside of the first circle will be inside the second. Even if you remove the same size restriction, this value still has to be less then half.
If the earth was flat, then during decemebr it would be impossble for the southern hemsiphere, (or anywhere for that matter) to experience more then 12 hours of sunlight.

FE 'theory' is not about what can or cannot be explained.  That is irrelevant since it is all about 'belief'. If you believe something strongly enough then you can convince yourself quite easily that that something is true.

Flat Earth believers look out across the ocean and see that the surface looks flat. Because what they see backs up (visually at least) what they believe in then that observation is proof (to them at least) that the world is indeed flat.

To explain other things like sunsets as you mention, they come up with some new and totally unconventional theory which supposedly bends light in just the right way to 'explain' why the Sun appears to set and rise despite the Earth being flat. There are no documented experiments that have taken place with published results which show that this 'electromagnetic acceleration' even exists beyond the imagination of flat Earth believers. Light simply does not 'accelerate'.

The more evidence you present to a flat Earth believer the more they will deny that evidence and dismiss it as faked or lies. That's fine. 

If your next door neighbour was adamant that fairies lived at the bottom of their garden who are we to argue?  If it makes them happy then so be it.

Quote from: John Davis on October 18, 2021, 01:37:41 AM

... His work was lifted five times over and base as f___ ...

Having never encountered it before, I had to look up the meme "base as f___."  It means "agreeable" and "worthy of support."

Does it now... perhaps you need to review the definition of base. And while you are at it, lift.

Who cares what someone did in ancient times! He proved the earth was a sphere 2000 years ago which was a big deal then. It’s not a big deal now and only holds some strange fascination for flat earth believers as the man in question did it with a couple of sticks! It’s an experiment anyone can do and that’s the rub. Flat earth believers don’t like that. They can’t throw a conspiracy blanket over it instead they have to attack the science on which it was based and get into arguments about light and how it behaves. The real question here is how would any flat earther proceed to disprove our current theories of light that appear to validate the Greek guy and his sticks. What flat earthers have to resort to is made up mumbo jumbo.
Has any flat earther published validated light experiments that prove their point and over turn conventional science …… No.
Just leave the Greek Guy alone he was right, good for him but it was a long time ago so get over it.