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Originally Posted by Wdnesday
Thanks, Nanoda, for the link. That means I lost this argument completely. Glad I didn't bet anything!
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Well, here's one you can get him back with!
If he still doesn't believe that light can bend, tell him that at the exact moment when the sun appears to touch the horizon at sunrise or sunset,
it is actually physically still below the horizon! The position of the sun is an illusion!
The Earth's atmosphere refracts sunlight approximately 35 arcseconds when the sun appears to be on the horizon, but the disc of the sun itself is around 30 arcseconds in diameter. This means that when the sun is physically just below the horizon, refraction still allows us to see it.
If you were looking at the sunrise at the precise moment that the bottom edge was on the horizon and someone then magically took away all of the atmosphere, the sun would instantly disappear back below the horizon, only to re-emerge a minute or so later as the Earth rotated it's true position into view! 8)