It’s Professor Dave, and I wanna show you the world.
Throughout this astronomy series, we’ve learned quite a bit about every object you
could hope to see in the night sky, as well as many others that you can’t.
So how does all of this fit in with the understanding held by the common public?
For one thing, just the way that an understanding of chemistry and biochemistry makes it easy
to refute things like alternative medicine, the understanding of astronomy we have just
gained will make it easy to refute similarly alternative cosmological models, most notably
the present fad that is the flat-earth model.
There exists a community of folks who believe that contrary to everything the human species
has learned over the past few centuries, the world is not spherical, but is instead flat,
and is also the center of the universe.
A knee-jerk reaction to this is often one of disbelief and even mockery, but rather
than go that route, let’s consider this model in a rigidly academic way.
Whether the earth is flat or round, we should be able to demonstrate it, and show how all
astronomical phenomena make sense in one model versus the other.
Let’s go through some of these phenomena now, and put them into context.
First, let’s just look at the celestial sphere.
We look up and we see stars and planets going around.
The flat earth model says we stay still while everything goes around us, and the round earth
model says we rotate, which is what causes the apparent motion of objects in the sky.
At face value, with no further investigation, these are two completely valid hypotheses.
Either of them could feasibly explain what we see in the sky.
Now let’s dig a little deeper.
What are some details we notice about the celestial sphere and certain earthly phenomena?
We experience night and day, alternating periods of light and dark that change over time.
We see the ecliptic.
This is the part of the sky that traces the sun’s path throughout the year, as well
as the paths of all the planets.
The path of the sun follows a slowly tilting pattern that lasts one year.
This length of time also outlines other cycles observed on earth, which we call the seasons.
These seasons go a particular way in the northern hemisphere, and the opposite way in the southern
hemisphere.
There exists a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect, whereby rotating masses like storms
rotate in one direction in the northern hemisphere and the other direction in the southern hemisphere.
Each hemisphere also sees an entirely different collection of stars.
These are just a handful of the observations we can make that beg to be explained.
Here is where the round earth becomes obvious.
All we have to do is understand that the earth is roughly spherical, spinning on an axis
tilted somewhat from the vertical, and going around the sun just like all the other planets.
This singular assumption makes all of the observations fall into place.
As earth rotates, it’s daytime when facing the sun and nighttime when facing away from
the sun.
The apparent motion of all these celestial objects utilizes elliptical paths, and can
therefore be predicted.
The seasons occur because of the amount of sunlight hitting one hemisphere versus the
other at any given time in earth’s orbit.
One year is also no longer an arbitrary amount of time, it’s equal to one revolution of
the earth around the sun, and the differing lengths of night and day are also explained
by the tilt in the rotational axis.
The Coriolis effect is just the result of simple physics related to rotating bodies
like the earth.
The hemispheres have different skies because they point out at different regions of space.
Everything we see makes perfect sense with one simple, unifying assumption.
That’s what science is all about.
In the flat earth model, all of these observations require their own separate explanations.
What is night and day?
If you try to place a luminous object like the sun above a plane like the flat earth,
how does light reach half the plane and not the other half?
Say you come up with a mechanism whereby light dissipates appropriately.
How does this then fit with other observations?
What are the seasons?
If you try to explain them by pulling the sun closer and farther from the earth, how
can it be winter in the north and summer in the south?
What is the Coriolis effect?
If earth is a plane, what magically alters the rotation of a storm in one half of the
plane compared to the other?
Shouldn’t we also all be seeing the same night sky, since our lines of sight all face
the same direction?
Flat earth subscribers do actually attempt to answer all of these questions, but beyond
the fact that the explanations are never mathematically or logically sound, the sheer fact that each
phenomenon requires its own independent explanation makes it unscientific.
If we invent a luminous sun-like object, and start tracing elaborate paths through the
sky, this is just the epicycles from the geocentric model all over again.
It’s assumption upon assumption, adjustment upon adjustment, all of which are totally
ad hoc, based in nothing but an attempt to fit observation.
This is very poor science.
When we say the earth is round and put the sun at the center of all this motion, not
only are all of these phenomena easy to explain, even to a layperson, but predictions can be made.
In 2017, a total solar eclipse occurred over the United States.
Using a modern understanding of astronomy, we can do math to predict any such event,
like eclipses, the return of Halley’s comet, or anything else.
This is done very simply, with the sun at the center, and using Kepler’s laws regarding
elliptical orbits, which involves basic algebra accessible to anyone.
Only in this model is the math so easy.
So when we operate under this framework and say that a solar eclipse is going to happen
at this time, on this day, in this place, and then it does match our prediction with
extreme precision, there can be no clearer vindication for this model of the solar system.
Game, set, match.
The flat earth model can never make such predictions, not just because the notion of an eclipse
has no logical basis, but also as there is no unifying mathematical system.
It’s a bunch of separate phenomena with separate explanations, if such explanations
even exist.
It doesn’t end there.
The flat earth model has a huge laundry list of other things to explain besides what we
have mentioned so far.
Everything we see in space is a sphere.
Why is earth the only thing that isn’t?
Things fall to the earth because of gravity, which attracts things to earth’s center
of mass.
If earth is not a sphere, why do things fall to the earth?
What is gravity?
The implications run so much deeper than just what rotates around what.
Ad hoc solutions are offered, like the idea that the flat earth is accelerating upwards
which an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared, and that’s why we all stick to
the ground.
But this doesn’t help, it actually makes things worse.
What is up?
What is causing the acceleration?
If it is constantly accelerating, we should be traveling the speed of light by now.
What is meant to be a simple explanation actually complicates things so much further.
Then there is the matter of the geometrical implications.
How do we slice up the globe to make it flat?
What places are far away that we thought were close?
How is it possible to fly or sail around the world, which has indeed been done by so many people?
Where is the edge of the earth?
Why hasn’t anyone seen it?
What about all the pictures we have of the earth from space?
Again, ad hoc solutions are required for all of these questions.
It is proposed that a huge ice wall surrounds the earth, which we call Antarctica.
No one can go there, because NASA is guarding it.
How?
Where is the personnel?
Where is the budget for such an operation?
NASA also fabricates all of the photos we see.
Why?
What is the motivation?
And how?
We have had photos of the earth from space since the 60s, which predates computer editing
software by several decades.
The logical hole gets deeper and deeper.
Because it is impossible to form a consistent framework for these observations, the model
must turn to conspiracy.
Now to be clear, I am a firm believer that outside-the-box thinking should be encouraged,
and we should always be ready to challenge institutions and governments, but the validity
of a conspiracy theory depends largely on how many people have to be in on it.
The notion that all the governments and all the scientists and all the airline pilots
and flight attendants and communication technology operators and thousands of others are all
in on it… it starts to get pretty absurd.
The manufacturing of a holographic sphere playing a movie of the heavens, which is operated
by unknown entities oppressing mankind into deception and slavery is really what we are
left with for the flat-earth model, and perhaps that realization makes the whole thing make
sense.
It is the desire to live in a science fiction movie and feel like the hero leading the fight
against evil forces that may be the best explanation for the motivations involved with those who
insist on this model.
So that’s all there is to it.
We do not say the earth is round because we’ve been told it’s round, or because we are
repeating scientific dogma.
We say it is round because it is the simplest explanation for what we see.
The earth is round because the round earth model makes perfect sense of every observation
we can make.
No ad hoc reasoning, just a bunch of puzzle pieces that fit together to form a coherent
view of the universe and everything in it.
This is the same reason that the heliocentric model replaced the geocentric model when Copernicus
and Kepler came around.
It just works better.
The orbits of the planets don’t have to be explained by epicycles upon epicycles.
If the sun is at the center of the solar system, the planets follow very simple ellipses, and
Kepler’s laws predict the positions of planets with much better accuracy and precision than
any previous model.
When the world is round, everything fits.
In contrast, the flat earth model has to come up with ad hoc modifications to explain each
and every observation in a different way.
All of these problems simply vanish with a round earth.
The earth is round, and what we see makes perfect sense.
The precise position of every celestial object can be predicted with great accuracy, far
into the future.
We can say that an eclipse will happen at a particular time on a particular day in a
particular place, and that’s exactly what we see.
This is the essence of good science.
A model or theory that correlates mountains of data to form a simple and cohesive explanation
for observations, and makes falsifiable predictions regarding phenomena.
If a model can’t do that, it’s not scientific, and the flat-earth model simply does not hold
up to scrutiny, so it must be discarded, as it was for the majority of the human race
a few thousand years ago.
Now that we’ve caught back up to what we already knew, let’s move forward and see
what else we can say about the public’s perception of space.