All of us have had it drilled into our heads since school that our planet is round, but we are forced to take our word for it. If they tell you: provide evidence of the sphericity of the Earth, then this question will baffle many. Even now, in 2017, there are many societies where people truly believe that our planet is flat and limited by glaciers, behind which unknown lands are hidden by us. As a rule, these people believe in a conspiracy theory that they are all being deceived and do not disclose information under pain of death. They also put forward a lot of dubious evidence, which is based on unverified calculation data. So, our task in this work is to dispel all myths and provide 5 proofs of the sphericity of the Earth. To check this, it is enough to look around with the naked eye and make sure many times that our planet is not flat with one hundred percent probability!
Evidence 1. Moon
The first evidence of the sphericity of the Earth was presented in the distant past by Aristotle, and it was based on a lunar eclipse. So, earlier people, since they were uneducated, believed that our Moon was some kind of deity who was playing with us like that. Some ancient Greeks were able to determine from the Moon that our planet is spherical.
In addition, Aristotle was able to prove that in addition to being round, it is also spherical. The evidence was elementary. Lunar eclipse- this is the moment when it is possible to see the shadow of our planet on the Moon, from which it is easy to determine that the Earth has the shape of a ball.
Evidence 2. Embankment
Try it yourself, provide evidence of the sphericity of the Earth by observing ships. Many people love walks along the embankment, especially beautiful moments - a ship slowly rising above the water, it seems that it is literally coming out of the water. Why do you think this is happening? visual illusion? Everything is very simple, this is another proof of a round planet.
Try an experiment: take an orange or any other round fruit or vegetable and place an ant on it. As it rises, it will slowly appear. If you plant the same ant on a flat surface, it will look a little different; the ant will gradually materialize.
Proof 3. Stars
As in the case of the Moon, Aristotle made this discovery by observing the changing constellations, and his trip to Egypt helped him. Returning from his trip, he noticed that the constellations there and in the northern regions are very different, and this can only be explained by the fact that we do not look at the sky from a flat surface.
Try to track this yourself and experimentally provide evidence of the sphericity of the Earth, because many, especially in the summer, go on trips, so spend this time profitably. There is such a pattern - the further you move away from the equator, the more the constellations familiar to us move towards the horizon.
Proof 4. Horizon
Try and provide evidence of the sphericity of the Earth using observation. Just look into the distance, what do you see? But try to climb higher, what will you see then? It is better to conduct this experiment outside of an urban area, so that the view is not obstructed by high-rise buildings.
In principle, this experiment is very similar to the second one, where we observed ships. The higher you go, the more you will see, this is due to the fact that the Earth is not flat, if it were otherwise, this effect would not exist.
Evidence 5. Sun
If you have at the moment noon, then midnight on the far side of the planet. How can this be explained? The Earth is round, if the planet were flat, and the Sun was a kind of spotlight, then we would observe our star from many kilometers away, even if we ourselves remained in the shadow.
At the end of September, the domestic program “The Most Shocking Hypotheses” aired on REN-TV, which excited the public.
A whole 45 minutes, in all seriousness, specialists, experts and even a whole former employee NASA proves to the viewer that planet Earth actually flat.
If you don't believe me, here's the show, enjoy:
Ask any schoolchild what shape our planet is. Average answer: spherical. And why all?
- Yes, they teach us that at school.
Stop fooling us! WITH light hand REN-TV everything more people start to believe in a flat earth.
Earth figure
Any child will say that the Earth is round. Well almost. Officially, our planet has the shape of a geoid, that is, a ball slightly flattened at the poles.
Adherents of revolutionary theory deny this. Among them it is believed that we live on a flat disk with curved edges, which is covered with a dome on top. The North Pole is located in the center of the disk, and the South Pole does not exist as such. This is a kind of ice wall that protects us.
Doesn't remind you of anything?
In Game of Thrones, for example, the world is also flat. And the border is a huge wall, beyond which wildlings live, and white walkers rule the roost. Who knows, maybe this is not fiction, but real story.
Why don't we know anything
There is an opinion that NASA is constantly misleading us ordinary people.
In the program “The Most Shocking Hypotheses,” ex-NASA employee Matthew Boylan himself claims that the Earth is flat and its real appearance can be seen on the UN flag.
For several years he painted a blue round planet and passed it off as reality. So, in his opinion, the department exists only to promote the theory of the sphericity of the planet.
The only way to check is to get a job in the department.
Curvature
Scientists came up with the curvature parameter. In reality, neither architects, nor militaries, nor planners ignore the fact that the planet is spherical. When calculating, it is assumed that the Earth is stationary and flat. And everything works out: the shells fall where they should, the buildings are not destroyed. If we live on a geoid, then why doesn’t this fact count?
In practice I can give an example: The city of Chicago is visible across the bay from a distance of 140 km, which contradicts science.
If the Earth were a ball, the city would sink about 1.5 km down relative to the observer.
Check it out for yourself
In May 2017, American Darryl Marble was able to simply and easily prove the flat-earther hypothesis while flying on an airplane.
If the Earth is spherical, then the ship should fly along a curved trajectory; thus, at certain intervals, the pilot needs to lower the nose of the aircraft so that it does not fly into space or into the upper atmosphere.
Darryl took a building level with him on the flight. However, throughout the 23 minutes or 326 km of travel, the plane never lowered its nose. Means, it flies exactly in a horizontal straight line, and the Earth is flat.
Try it too. Launch the construction level on your phone during your next flight.
What about space flights?
Everything is set up! The filming was edited, fortunately technology allows it. In fact, humanity has never left the near-Earth dome.
Pictures are taken using a Fisheye lens. So any straight object in the photo will become spherical. The videos are generally all edited using chromakey technology. Attentive observers notice air bubbles, studio lighting, and reflections in spacesuits.
Is everything we know a myth?
You will say that ships sooner or later disappear on the horizon. Yes, but this does not happen because the surface is curved. We simply cease to clearly distinguish objects due to the density of the atmosphere.
They say gravity doesn't exist either. Our disk simply flies upward with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s 2 and thus keeps us on the surface. True, it is not yet entirely clear why birds remain in the air, for example.
Admit it, you didn’t hold a “candle” in space. There is no 100% evidence that the Earth is spherical. This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite. Did this really happen? Was the satellite really launched into space? Or is everything rigged and we are being deceived?
It’s up to you to believe long-proven truths or become supporters of a shocking hypothesis. As they say, “trust but verify”! Whose side are you on?
NBA legend and center Shaquille O'Neal said he shares the position of Cleveland point guard Kyrie Irving, who said the Earth is flat.
“This is the honest truth. The earth is flat. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate consciousness: with the help of what we read, see and hear. The first thing we are taught at school is that Columbus discovered America. However, think about it: when he got here, he met red-skinned people with long hair smoking peace pipes. This means that Columbus did not discover America,” O’Neal said during his podcast The Big Podcast. The legendary basketball player, after this discouraging statement, continued to egg on his co-hosts.
A few weeks earlier, Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving made a similar statement, but later said he was just joking. Similar comedic comments famous athletes caused a stir in the American segment of the Internet, because, as it turned out, the Society of Supporters flat earth is becoming more and more popular.
The Flat Earth Society is a fringe organization even according to various conspiracy theorists and alternative historians in the United States, following the trail of UFOs, Bigfoot and Masonic conspiracies. Thus, the popular conspiracy channel on YouTube Secure Team has almost a million subscribers and regularly posts videos with supposedly alien objects and murky photographs of alien bases on the Moon. In one of the published materials, the channel's authors expressed regret over the "growing number of people who have regressed to this ancient faith." The channel was immediately attacked by thousands of Flat Earth Society followers.
The society itself states on its website that it is guided exclusively by scientific principles. According to adherents of the theory, resorting to the method of Cartesian skepticism, the burden of proof lies with anyone who believes that the Earth is spherical. They regard the evidence for this as insignificant or fabricated. At the same time, they are happy to publish videos from low orbit, allegedly proving that the Earth is flat.
“The most reliable evidence for a flat Earth is the Bedford level experiment. Conducted many times over a six-mile stretch of water, it has produced results which prove the absence of curvature. earth's surface“, says the society’s website.
The experiment the organization refers to was conducted by the English inventor and founder of the society, Samuel Rowbotham, in 1838.
- Bedford experiment
Members of the society claim that our planet is a flat disk 40,000 kilometers in diameter, centered around the North Pole. Also, adherents of this theory deny the existence of gravity and the South Pole, instead of which a huge wall of ice extends around the disk.
Followers of this theory claim that all photographs of the Earth from space are computer-generated, and the belief in a spherical Earth supports a global conspiracy of governments and scientists. Space flight is a hoax, and the moon landing was filmed jointly by Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky from a script by Arthur C. Clarke.
The society produces huge amount Internet content, literally bombarding its supporters and opponents with a variety of “evidence”: from obscure mathematical formulas to lists of quotations from the Bible. It got to the point that even fundamentalist Christians took up arms against flat Earth followers. Radical Baptist preacher Stephen Anderson, himself a peddler of world government conspiracy theories, launched an angry tirade against the society's followers.
Many alternative journalists, historians and conspiracy theorists have suggested that behind the Flat Earth Society itself there may be government intelligence agencies who want to make ridicule of any alternative views on the world.
RT turned to Alexander Neveev, candidate of psychological sciences, for comment. The scientist explained that there are two reasons why people may suddenly begin to take anti-scientific postulates seriously.
“The first is external to the person. We receive a huge amount of information in the form of specially prepared information packages. We are simply told about something and we take it on faith. This is completely normal, since we don’t need to know absolutely everything. own experience. You don't need to go to America to find out how people live there. But the side effect of this is that people have misunderstandings and fears that some forces may distort any information. The media saturates people with news and facts, but no one is concerned with developing an understanding of them. As a result, we have a similar situation. No one has seen our globe with their own eyes, only in photographs, so a huge number of insinuations are possible,” said the psychologist.
“The second reason is that our minds are inherently built with error systems—cognitive biases and heuristics. Under the influence of these distortions, we tend to believe that our version of events is the most plausible. A person does not seek a refutation of his beliefs. Our mind operates on the principle of cognitive ease - we tend to consider what does not bother us as truth. This is actually an illusion. Conspiracy theories exploit the problem that we cannot directly show a person evidence to the contrary - send him into orbit and show that the Earth is round. It is very difficult to explain to them mathematically and astronomically the parameters that forced scientists to come to such a conclusion. It’s very easy to say that scientists lied and the Earth is flat, and it’s very easy to accept it,” the expert concluded.
In the middle of the last century, these people united in the Flat Earth Society and have now generated so much evidence for their theory that they have even appeared on the pages of respected publications like the BBC and The Guardian. We talk about the strangest conspiracy theory of our time.
What kind of people are these?
If we do not take into account the ancient ideas about the structure of the world and all the “scientific” calculations of those times, the first person who made a major contribution to the emergence of the Flat Earth Society was Samuel Rowbotham. This is an English inventor who lived in the 19th century. In addition to inventions, Samuel spent his life disproving the heliocentric theory of the structure of the Universe and proving that our planet is actually a flat pancake.
During his life, Samuel developed several important “evidences” and gained fans who, after the death of the inventor, continued his brave work. Fans founded their own communities (among them the Universal Zetetic Society and churches), and somehow cherished Rowbotham's “flat” ideas until the middle of the 20th century. In 1956, the Universal Zetetic Society was reborn as the International Flat Earth Society under the patronage and presidency of the American Samuel Shenton.
In those days, the community's ideas were spread through leaflets, newsletters, magazines (the first dated 1931, and the rest were published after 1977) and word of mouth, but the society's audience grew steadily. The Internet has made tools for disseminating the ideas of society accessible - websites, forums, publications in online publications, our own encyclopedias and Wikipedia pages.
As science developed, the discovery of space programs and the first extraterrestrial successes of mankind, the Society had to deny more and more things and find flaws in the material evidence. According to followers of the flat Earth idea, NASA is lying, there was no landing on the Moon, all photographs of the Earth from space are fabricated (by the location of some details in the photographs, in particular shadows, this can be easily proven, members of the society believe), airplane pilots are in cahoots with physicists, and the idea of an ellipsoidal Earth exists only to fool people and waste taxpayers' money on other dubious things.
What's the point?
The main ideas of society are:
- The earth is flat as a pancake and has a diameter of 40,000 kilometers.
- The diameter of the Sun is 50 kilometers, it is located at an altitude of several hundred kilometers (and not 150 million) above the Earth and moves along a complex trajectory (the trajectory can be seen in the last video in this article) above the planet.
- The stars also move above the Earth, somewhere behind the Sun, along their own complex trajectories.
- There are no two turtles and three whales, no one holds the Earth in space. There is no gravity either, the disk simply flies upward at a speed of 9.8 m/s. The sun and stars, presumably, do this with her.
- At the center of the flat Earth is the North Pole, with continents and oceans around it. All this is surrounded by a dense wall of ice (alas, without flame). Therefore, it is impossible to fall over the edge of the earth and therefore water does not flow over it. And the South Pole does not exist at all. Airplane pilots lie by spending more time in the air than they should when they can fly. shortcut between continents of different hemispheres. By the way, this picture of the world is the logo of the community.
Flat Earth Society
LogoThe society sees its mission as promoting and initiating discussion about the flat Earth theory, and offers its forums as a platform for encouraging free thinking and discussion, where “free thinkers” could “bravely and intelligently” confront supporters of the globe.
The ideas of the Flat Earth Society are received with a bang by some religious people, because, unlike classical theory, do not contradict the scriptures, and do not require deep knowledge of physics. More precisely, rather the opposite - they require serious ignorance in scientific matters.
The society already has its own official website and pages on social networks ( Facebook And Twitter ), as well as a gallery at Flickr. Judging by the site, the guys who run the organization have an excellent sense of humor, style and proportion, and they are great at bringing out all the internal demons of the followers of this “free-thinking”, because on thorny path evidence, followers of the society famously cross divine theories with naked physics at the level of Baba Mani and mathematics at the level of God.
A caravan of delightful arguments
Over the years of the society's existence, plenty of “evidence” has accumulated. Some of the society activists even produced a two-hour proof film in which as many as 200 arguments are presented. Strong in spirit and those who know English can study it completely.
Conventionally, they can be divided into two groups: funny and similar to the truth, and those that make the hair on end not only of physicists. The official website of the society and unofficial forums of followers in English, Russian and other languages are teeming with evidence. We've selected a few of the most egregious ones, but we're not sure if everyone on this list is part of official theory, not fan versions.
- If the Earth were not flat, then taking off along a certain trajectory, planes would rise higher and higher above the Earth and eventually fall into space. The most amazing thing about this theory is that, according to society, all pilots are in cahoots with NASA and the company. However, that is not why conspiracy theories exist to provide logical arguments.
- If the Earth were round, bridges would be built to allow for bending (actually, long bridges and are built taking into account it, but most bridges, due to their small size, simply do not need this).
- The earth cannot be round because the horizon is always level and at eye level. On a round planet it should always be below eye level (presumably due to the rounding).
- There are places on the planet, for example, the city of Genoa in Italy, from which in good weather you can see islands at a distance of 80–125 miles (130–200 km), which, according to society, is impossible in a round Earth.
- On routes between southern Africa and South America or southern countries Oceania and Africa, planes usually fly very north, in major cities and from them - again to the south, which is completely illogical from the point of view of the globe, but fits perfectly into the theory of a flat Earth (and to hell with economic considerations and features of the relief and climate).
- If the Sun were as far from the Earth as astronomers say, then hot climatic conditions, which contains most of the African continent, and the extremely cold Antarctica next door would be impossible. After all, from the Sahara to Antarctica is a stone's throw by planetary standards, and the temperatures there are completely different.
- If the Earth were an ellipsoid, then at the North and South Poles there would be similar temperature regimes, the seasons would change in the same way, there would be a similar solar cycle, flora and fauna were more similar to each other. In fact, the average annual temperature at the South Pole is -50 degrees Celsius, at the North Pole - -15 degrees Celsius. In summer it’s even relatively “warm” by the standards of one of the coldest places on Earth. According to society, this is all because the North Pole is located in the center of the planet, and it receives much more sun. And the ice and permafrost encircling our flat planet, according to a conspiracy of scientists, are passed off as the South Pole.
- There is no fixed most “western,” “eastern,” or “southern” point on the planet. There is only the northern one - at the pole. This is all because there is no west, east and south, and “north” is located strictly in the center of the planet.
- Magellan did not prove that the Earth is round, because, according to his description of the route, it is very difficult to travel on a round Earth, moving straight all the time, and return to one point. But on a flat plane it’s easy. It's just a circle around the North Pole!
- It's not just because of the blocks of ice that you can't fall off the edge of the Earth. Between the earth and the sky lies the event horizon, so to someone watching a person on the edge of the flat earth, it will seem as if he has been standing there forever. In general, this place is a space-time anomaly where physical laws do not work or work differently.
How to join the community
If these arguments impressed you and you yourself would like to take part in lively discussion about the shape of the Earth, this can be easily done on the Internet. Dozens of forums are returned by search engines for the query “Flat Earth Society.”
There are currently 555 associated members on the society’s official website (for comparison: the organization’s Facebook page has more than 50,000 followers, and 4,000 on Twitter). To become one of them, you need to leave a request on the website (by this link), it's free. The second option is to become a friend of the society, and "friendship" will cost $12. After successful registration and payment of the “friendly” commission, you will be sent by regular mail an identification card, a certificate signed personally by the president of the organization, and a bag of all sorts of branded joy - stickers, refrigerator magnets, etc.
So is it really flat?
Video blogger Vsauce, who regularly dives into such depths of science that not every video of his can be understood at first viewing, wondered what would happen if our planet really were flat. What would happen to gravity, to objects that fell on the edge of the Earth or were close to it, and why, in the end, from the point of view of physics, the existence of a flat planet is impossible - look in his video.
However, for the average member of the Flat Earth Society, the phrase that in space conditions no large physical object can not be a ball is an empty phrase, since the society denies both all cosmic theories and gravity. If we take as a basis the idea that the Earth is a big pancake that moves upward at a speed of 9.8 m/s, then we can assume that our entire existence will end at the moment when our giant pancake crashes into another one at full speed pancake, which may well move at a different speed. And then our whole wonderful, cloudless life will end in one big “wake.” Between us lie tiny stars and the hot ball of the Sun. No giant meteorites and Bruce Willis on a rescue mission, no romance. Burns, suffocation and crushing. It seems that fans of the flat Earth theory should show themselves in cinema.
American rapper B.o.B is raising money for satellites to find evidence that the Earth is actually flat. And on September 25th federal TV channel REN showed an episode of Igor Prokopenko’s program, which says that filming from space is computer graphics, and the video with the astronauts on the ISS is studio shooting on chromakey with further processing. The Flat Earth Society regularly appears in news headlines. Who are all these people and what to do if they are trying to prove to you that the Earth is not a geoid or even a sphere - in the material of “Futurist”.
“If the Earth were a ball, the waters would flow down from it and people would die of thirst and plants would dry up. The earth, O most worthy and noblest of teachers and mentors, was and is in the shape of a flat disk and is washed on all sides by a majestic river called “Ocean”. The earth rests on six elephants, and they stand on a huge turtle. This is how the world works, O teacher!” - this is what the answer of Volka Kostylkov, the hero of the fairy tale “Old Man Hottabych” looked like at a school exam in geography. The teachers decided that the head of the astronomical circle and a diligent student was sick or worried, but in fact, the culprit for Volka’s failure in the exam was fictional character, a genie named Hassan Abdurrahman ibn Hottab, released after 3.5 thousand years of imprisonment in a bottle and decided to help his deliverer.
A flat map of the Earth drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893. The map contains several references to passages from the Bible, as well as arguments against the sphericity of the Earth
It's hard to believe, but people who would rate such an answer as "excellent" still exist. The Flat Earth Society is increasingly making headlines. According to members of the society and their followers, the Earth has the shape of a flat disk with a diameter of 40 thousand km, in the center of which is the North Pole. The South Pole does not exist at all, and what we call Antarctica is an icy mountain that runs along the edge of the Earth, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Supporters of the theory support their conclusions with ancient maps depicting a flat Earth. They claim that all photographs and videos of the Earth from space are falsified by space agencies as part of a conspiracy theory - and in general, space does not exist. There is also no gravity within the framework of their cosmology: objects are attracted to the Earth, because it supposedly constantly moves upward with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s². And finally, there is no atmospheric pressure.
Who are all these people?
In ancient times, people really believed that the Earth was flat. This concept appears in the cosmogonic myths of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Scandinavian mythology. However, already early scientific research gave an idea that the Earth has the shape of a ball. For example, Aristotle in 330 BC. e. provided evidence of the sphericity of the Earth. In particular, he noticed that the starry sky looks different at different latitudes.
In the Middle Ages, views on the structure of the Universe were varied. In the writings of the church fathers, the Earth appears either as a pancake or as a ball, hovering over the sea under a spherical dome, and in illustrations from the book of Cosmas Indicopleustos, the surface of the planet is inscribed in a tabernacle - a camp tent where the church could be located - and the Sun rises from behind a large mountain and sets for her. However, Ptolemy's idea dominated: the Universe is a closed system, in the center of which is a stationary spherical Earth, surrounded by nine rotating heaven-spheres, which are located one above the other. This idea is reflected in " Divine Comedy» Dante.
However, there have always been people who claimed that the Earth is flat. As a rule, these were religious fundamentalists, illiterate people or charlatans. In 1956, Briton Samuel Shenton created the International Flat Earth Society (IFERS), better known as the Flat Earth Society. The organization was to become the successor to the Universal Zetic Society, which was founded by English writer Samuel Rowbotham. This man, who lived in the 19th century, lectured for a long time on the flat Earth under the pseudonym Parallax and wrote the book “Zetetic Astronomy - The Earth is not a Globe.” During one of his lectures, in which he could not explain why the masts of ships remained visible on the horizon while their hulls disappeared, he had to flee. And in one of the experiments, he falsified the results, saying that the lighthouse lantern on the horizon was completely visible, although in fact only half of it was visible. Contemporaries called him a charlatan, but noted his wit and skill as a storyteller.
Shenton deeply embraced Rowbotham's ideas. Shortly before the launch of the first satellite in the USSR, he said: “Will sailing around the Isle of Wight prove that it is spherical? It’s the same with these satellites.” Because of the space race, the ideas of society did not gain popularity. But with the arrival of a new president, journalist Charles Johnson, the flat Earth theory gained many supporters. Johnson acted as a professional media man: the Apollo program became an information source for popularizing the ideas of society. Society leaders publicly claimed that the moon landing was a hoax, filmed in Hollywood from a script by Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick. The society gained several thousand supporters and existed until Johnson's death in 2001. It was later revived by Samuel Shannon's namesake, Daniel, as a website.
In the United States, flat Earth ideas were championed and propagated by religious fundamentalists such as John Alexander Dowie and Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who led the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, founded by Dowie in 1895. In one of Russian speaking groups Flat Earth supporters on VKontakte write that the community was created “to counter pseudoscience that encroaches on the foundations of the biblical world order” and is called upon to fight everyone who preaches “atheism and obscurantism.” They describe their worldview as “Scientific Orthodoxy.”
At the same time, many church representatives criticize their views. Thus, the Tsargrad TV channel published critical material about Igor Prokopenko’s film “But the Earth is Flat!”
With the advent of popular Internet services such as YouTube and Twitter, it has become much easier to spread such ideas. Previously, members of the public had to drop leaflets, but now it is enough to post a video or post a tweet.
“We are pleased to see that the gender bias in the representation of the flat Earth theory is disappearing. Just look at this cool woman!”
Rapper B.o.B. started posting tweets in support of the flat Earth theory last January. In particular, he wrote that if the Earth were spherical, the horizon would be curved, but this is not the case in reality. The young man believes that all videos and photos from the ISS and frames from space telescopes were shot with a wide-angle lens (fish-eye), which distorts real contours objects.
Science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson responded to B.o.B’s tweets and began explaining to the musician that it’s all about the low viewing angle.
However, the musician was not convinced. The rapper recorded the song Flatline, where he appears as a man who revealed the truth about the flat Earth to the world and therefore became the number one target for the intelligence services. B.o.B included a recording of his opponent’s lecture in which Tyson talks about the sphericity of our planet. And he recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to launch satellites that would photograph the Earth and test its shape. The rapper does not have a concept for satellites, but he managed to collect $2,136 out of 1 million.
Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal also voiced his views on the shape of the Earth, following his colleague, Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyrie Irving. However, Irving later said that he was just joking and did not think that his words would be taken seriously. But O’Neill is confident that he is right.
“I drive from Florida to California all the time, so it's flat for me. After all, I don’t move up and down at an angle of 360 degrees, I don’t feel gravity and other nonsense. Have you seen all these buildings outside of Atlanta? Are you saying that China is under us? This is wrong. The earth is flat,” O’Neill said on the Internet radio station podbay.fm.
The solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 led to numerous YouTube videos showing how the details of the eclipse proved that the Earth is flat.
And in Arab scientific and educational circles Recently, a scandal erupted when a Tunisian graduate student tried to defend his thesis that the Earth is flat, motionless, at the center of the Universe, and is 13,500 years old.
On September 25, the federal TV channel REN showed an episode of Igor Prokopenko’s program dedicated to the flat Earth theory. It says that filming from space is computer graphics, and the video with astronauts on the ISS is studio filming on chromakey with further processing. As stated in the film, flat earthers even launched a rocket, and it broke through the dome, but no one at NASA believed them.
Andrei Bukharin, presented in the credits as a “science popularizer,” appears as an expert in the program. In fact, this man is engaged in astrology. He has his own website on which he tries to popularize astrology as an exact science - while modern science denies the effectiveness of its methods, and in the American evaluation system “Science and Engineering Indicators” astrology is completely the standard of pseudoscience.
How to argue with them?
Only the most basic arguments are given here.
“The horizon is straight, but photographs with a curved horizon are shot with fish-eye.” It just seems to us that the horizon is straight. We are on the surface of the planet, and we have too much short stature and the viewing angle of the eyes is too narrow to perceive the curvature of the line. But it can be seen from an airplane window or from the roof of very tall buildings.
“Photos and videos of space are fake!” It turns out that not only the leaders of NASA and Roscosmos are involved in the global conspiracy, but also ordinary cosmonauts who personally broadcast from the ISS, and amateur astronomers who photograph deep space objects and other planets without any remuneration. Strange logic. Flat Earthers often cite the following video as an example of the use of chromakey. Indeed, chromakey of this kind is used as a substrate for 3D animation. However, the grid looks different: the cell sizes in it are different. A video grid is used to video record the trajectory of objects against a clear background.
“There is no gravity, the Earth is simply moving upward with universal acceleration.” Let's assume that if a person jumps, the Earth will not pull him back (there is no gravity), but will itself rise up. Then how do birds, insects and airplanes fly? After all, according to this theory, nothing can remain in the air for a long time, since the disk is constantly rising.
“The sun is located only 4,800 kilometers from us and has a size of approximately 51 kilometers.” How then to explain the change of seasons and the duration sunny day, as well as climate zones? The Earth's surface would always receive the same amount of heat and light.
“How can planes land on a runway if the Earth is round and constantly spins on its axis? By the time of landing, the runway would have moved far from the intended landing site.” Atmospheric pressure drags along everything that is in its field of action. That is, everything that enters the atmosphere flies along with the surface of the Earth.
“There is no atmospheric pressure.” Invite your opponent to climb the mountains and monitor his well-being at high altitude. After this you can solemnly read to him school course physics.
"The moon is a hologram." At this point, you can apologize to the person and end the conversation. Let him think that you are at the same time with them - it’s more fun.