Originally Posted by pizzaguy

Ok, I take it back - he MIGHT have believed it. But I think it was a means of raising money, nothing more.

Originally Posted by LurchGS

How do the flat-earthers explain it? If the sun is (for the sake of this argument, we'll use the dimensions in the image, but anything of a size to make part of their woowoo work would display the same issues) 27 miles across... why is there night?

Originally Posted by Roy Batty

Well I don't think he made much. Lived & died in a camper van IIRC.

Originally Posted by LurchGS

[...] IIRC the Egyptians - in the pyramid dynasties - knew not only that the earth was round, but also had a pretty good estimate of the diameter.

Originally Posted by Gillianren

Down by the river?

Originally Posted by snarkophilus

(Chris Farley): And you, little girl... what do you want to do when you grow up?

(Christina Applegate): I want to live in a van down by the river.

[Hilarity ensues.]

Originally Posted by snarkophilus

Here's how I figure a flat Earth must work. The Sun starts in the East at a (nearly) infinite distance. It comes roaring toward us first thing in the morning, eventually coming close enough to be barely visible on the horizon. This is the crack of dawn. Now, the speed at which it moves is inversely proportional (actually some slightly more complicated function, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader) to its distance from the Earth. That means it slows down as it passes overhead, then speeds up as it goes West. It gets off the edge of the Earth and screams away, eventually disappearing from sight.

Of course, as it comes toward us, it exceeds the speed of light, and a lot of the photons coming off it are delayed. They're also blue-shifted, which is why the daytime sky is blue. When it moves away, it's going so fast that it appears red-shifted, which is why sunsets are red.

In addition, there are some residual, very low energy photons as it moves away to infinity. These account for the CMB anisotropy.

What happens to the Sun after it's disappeared to the West? Well, I'm not exactly sure. It could be that it just keeps going, and we get a new Sun every day. Or it could be that it moves back to the East, taking some long, circuitous path that is beyond our field of vision. If it took a different path every time, then that would account for the CMB: the photons from the Sun moving at that distance a long time in the past would only be getting here today. You could even calculate the distance at which it must be travelling during the night based on those observations.

Oh, yes... and what about time zones, and the fact that you can go around the world? You can't, really. It's a conspiracy. Only the rich can afford to do that, and they like to keep the rest of us ignorant. Duh.


Aside: you can actually measure the curvature of the Earth with pretty basic surveying equipment. A friend and I were thinking of doing it while hiking this summer. There's a really neat book on the development of the metric system called "The Measure of All Things" that describes it well (at least, I think that's where I learned it). Even better would be flying a plane between two cities, taking the flat map route once, and the great circle route the other, and measuring the distances travelled.

Aside 2: I love Discworld. I am reading "Thud!" right now.

Originally Posted by parallaxicality

I've been reading up on the history of the flat Earth... is it a hypothesis? I'm not sure.

Originally Posted by mugaliens

Actually, sea-farers for perhaps the last 20,000 to 50,000 have known the earth was round...

Originally Posted by mugaliens

Is this a joke?