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Interesting bit to be found at The Conversation:
Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham: the UK's first ever public Flat Earth Convention. It was well attended, and wasn't just three days of speeches and YouTube clips (though, granted, there was a lot of this). There was also a lot of team-building, networking, debating, workshops – and scientific experiments.
Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts. The weekend in no small part revolved around discussing and debating science, with lots of time spent running, planning, and reporting on the latest set of flat earth experiments and models. Indeed, as one presenter noted early on, flat earthers try to "look for multiple, verifiable evidence" and advised attendees to "always do your own research and accept you might be wrong".
While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don't trust is scientists, and the established relationships between "power" and "knowledge". This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers.
Interestingly enough, the author delves into philosophy, particularly the work of Michel Foucault, who, for those not familiar with him, traced the relations between knowledge and power, especially in The Archaeology of Knowledge.
In the 21st century, we are witnessing another important shift in both power and knowledge due to factors that include the increased public platforms afforded by social media. Knowledge is no longer centrally controlled and – as has been pointed out in the wake of Brexit – the age of the expert may be passing. Now, everybody has the power to create and share content. When Michael Gove, a leading proponent of Brexit, proclaimed: "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts", it would seem that he, in many ways, meant it.
Ah, that explains so much beyond Brexit! Alternative Knowledge!
And for those who will never read the entire article, bit of the take-away:
In many ways, a public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our time; a reflection of our increasing distrust in scientific institutions, and the moves by power-holding institutions towards populism and emotions. In much the same way that Foucault reflected on what social outcasts could reveal about our social systems, there is a lot flat earthers can reveal to us about the current changing relationship between power and knowledge. And judging by the success of this UK event – and the large conventions planned in Canada and America this year – it seems the flat earth is going to be around for a while yet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @06:43PM (15 children)
So you basically admit that to see the supposed curvature you need to use looked through a curved object like a camera lens, balloon, or eyeball?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @07:09PM (14 children)
Oh fuck, all flat things are actaully curved! The eye ball only makes them look flat!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05 2018, @07:14PM (13 children)
Yes, the image on the retina is inverted by the lens.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday May 05 2018, @10:27PM (12 children)
I can't tell if you legitimately think you provided a valid reason for why humans would be unable to tell if something was spherical or flat.
In any case there are ways to measure or observe the curvature of a surface via math. The distances traveled along the surface of a sphere or a plane when moving across it can be used to measure the flatness. As well concepts such as what a straight line means can change for curved surfaces.
These techniques were used to prove that the Earth is a sphere and later used to prove that space-time is curved with general relativity. It's really hard to argue with general relativity because we can describe and measure it extremely well and it keeps working.
Have you ever done parallel transport of vectors?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @12:27AM (11 children)
Yes, and there are also ways to convert between flat and spherical earths via math [wikipedia.org] so this proves nothing.
The same general relativity which requires the universe to be made of 95% invisible stuff to "work"? For which there is no evidence besides that GR makes wrong predictions: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles/ [scientificamerican.com]
And also by the way, general relativity was used to prove the universe is indistinguishable from flat:
https://www.space.com/34928-the-universe-is-flat-now-what.html [space.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 06 2018, @06:42AM (6 children)
The same General Relativity that explains the orbit of Mercury that could not be explained with Newtonian gravitation. The same General Relativity that predicts the bending of light when passing the sun, which then was actually observed. The same General Relativity that has to be considered to make GPS work. The same General Relativity that predicted the gravitational waves that have been detected recently.
Dark matter OTOH is independent of General Relativity (except insofar as you can derive Newtonian gravitation as low-density, low-speed limit of GR). Newtonian gravitation perfectly suffices (and is commonly used) to calculate star orbits in galaxies.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @09:14AM (5 children)
These are all post-hoc "predictions" that are also made by Le Sage theories of gravity:
http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V15NO3PDF/V15N3BER.pdf [vif.com]
This is a real prediction, but afaik there has never been independent verification of one of these gravitational waves. Ie we need to see a gw and supernova of appropriate size and location at the same time.
In GR the effects of gravity travel at the speed of light. In Newtonian gravitation it is instantaneous. These are two fundamentally and totally different universes so I don't see how you can derive one from the other.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday May 06 2018, @03:32PM (4 children)
I don't know where you're getting your "science", but colliding black holes (the only thing "loud" and "fast" enough to detect with current gravity wave detectors) won't create a supernova, so that's not really possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @04:23PM
The inspiraling black holes they keep observing are conveniently not thought to be detectable in any other way... However they do think neutron stars should allow for verification and there is one paper about that: https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW170817.php [ligo.org]
Unfortunately, for that paper someone else saw a gamma ray burst, alerted ligo, then they searched through the data and found something that had been rejected as noise (because it only passed the threshold in one detector) that matched up in timing. So it was not independent verification.
Here is more about that one (including mention of a supernova):
https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW170817Progenitor/index.php [ligo.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
I guess they are calling it a "kilonova".
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24291 [nature.com]
Also, in contrast to the original model it keeps getting brighter:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/22/2150247 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday May 06 2018, @07:19PM (1 child)
Nope, that's neutron stars, which generate gravitational waves that are weaker by probably several orders of magnitude. With black holes virtually all the energy of collision would be within the event horizon, and thus incapable of escaping. Full stop. No known force in the universe is capable of overcoming gravity once the event horizon is crossed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @01:00AM
What are you disagreeing with? Ligos claim to detect gravitational waves from a neutron star binary?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 06 2018, @07:04AM
You don't know what you're talking about, just tying together ideas you don't understand.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Monday May 07 2018, @12:10AM (2 children)
In an effort to get something useful from your comment (for other readers, you are obviously a lost cause) I'll add that the Mercator projection [wikipedia.org] is one of many transformations that can produce a flat representation of the spherical Earth. All of the transformations include distortion because it isn't actually possible to make a perfect transformation from a 3d to 2d space.
The distortion that happens to the Mercator projection, which is the projection most often seen and as the one used by Google Maps, is that any landmass not near the equator is over represented in size. The US and Russia are not nearly as large as they would seem to be on that map. It does allow for easy navigation between points however which is a major accomplishment for a flat representation of the sphere we are on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @04:33PM (1 child)
Yes, transforming from 2d to 3d will cause distortions of reality.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Monday May 07 2018, @06:07PM
I wanted to extend my sincere gratitude for you taking the time to explain this all to us. You personally output gibberish on par with Markov chains but despite your best efforts people who follow your thread will actually learn stuff.