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posted by mrpg on Monday February 18 2019, @11:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-blame-YOU dept.

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Rayleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.

Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

[...] Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @11:52PM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @11:52PM (#803235)

    I note that the popular rise in the belief in a flat Earth is correlated with the fraction of flat TVs and computer monitors on the market.

    I claim that had we stuck with CRTs, which are almost always curved, the bizarre belief in a flat Earth would be less popular today.

    Go ahead, prove me wrong.

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @11:59PM (17 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @11:59PM (#803241)

    As I've been explaining. The earth looks curved because it is seen only through curved lenses and eyeballs. If you look at the earth without any curvature interfering it would be seen as it really is.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:04AM (14 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:04AM (#803248)

      Wouldn't the bending of space-time make up for that?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:10AM (13 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:10AM (#803255)

        No, the bending of space-time makes no sense. What is the force doing the bending? No one knows. They just show a picture of a heavy thing on a sheet and say look at how it gets pulled down, now imagine that in 3D. Well, it gets pulled down due to gravity.

        If gravity is caused by the bending, it can't also cause the bending.That would be circular.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:28AM (12 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:28AM (#803267)

          No, the bending of space-time makes no sense. What is the force doing the bending? No one knows. They just show a picture of a heavy thing on a sheet and say look at how it gets pulled down, now imagine that in 3D. Well, it gets pulled down due to gravity.

          If gravity is caused by the bending, it can't also cause the bending.That would be circular.

          it's understandable that you're confused about this. It's really complicated stuff that only egghead incels care about. Wherever matter exists, it bends the geometry of spacetime. This results in a curved shape of space-time which can be understood as gravity. [kiddle.co]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:43AM (11 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:43AM (#803275)

            The images on that page are exactly what I am talking about. They don't explain anything.

            • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:56AM (10 children)

              by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:56AM (#803351) Homepage Journal

              Ignore the images:
                Wherever matter exists, it bends the geometry of spacetime. This results in a curved shape of space-time which can be understood as gravity.

              That's it. The whole of it.

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:09AM (9 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:09AM (#803355)

                Wherever matter exists, it bends the geometry of spacetime.

                No better than spooky action at a difference then. Nothing is explained here. And aren't people still looking for gravitons? How do those play into this "bending"?

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:23AM (8 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:23AM (#803362)

                  So. Now that you've shown how moronic you and what passes for your sense of humor are, perhaps you'll educate yourself.

                  Or not.

                  Here are a few suggestions:
                  https://www.google.com/search?q=general%20relativity%20for%20dummies [google.com]
                  http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/einsteins_general_relativity_and_gravitation.html [uci.edu]
                  https://www.class-central.com/course/coursera-introduction-into-general-theory-of-relativity-6543 [class-central.com]
                  http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maloney/514/ [mcgill.ca]

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:51AM (7 children)

                    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:51AM (#803373)

                    What is the name for the force that allows matter to bend spacetime?

                    It should be a one line answer. I bet you really want to say "gravity", but that would mean gravity is causing itself according to your earlier post:

                    Wherever matter exists, it bends the geometry of spacetime. This results in a curved shape of space-time which can be understood as gravity.

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @06:04PM (3 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @06:04PM (#803575)

                      What is the name for the force that allows matter to bend spacetime?

                      It should be a one line answer. I bet you really want to say "gravity", but that would mean gravity is causing itself according to your earlier post:

                      It's not a "force" per se. It is a *property* of mass/energy that distorts space-time and creates the effect we experience as gravity.

                      Hows that's for a one-liner?

                      Here's another one-liner for you:
                      https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/7955e0baf931b6d6f9c2e9d37dd9bb88d0a1eba8 [wikimedia.org]
                      (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity#Einstein's_equations) [wikipedia.org]

                      You can go ahead and continue trolling if you like. Or, on the off chance that you're just horribly uninformed, go ahead and learn the science/math behind Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

                      Or don't. It's no skin off my nose either way.

                      It really pains me to realize that you are almost certainly from the U.S. I am as well, and folks like you denigrate the rest of us in the eyes of the rest of the world. Sigh.

                      https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3009/how-exactly-does-curved-space-time-describe-the-force-of-gravity [stackexchange.com]

                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @12:50AM (2 children)

                        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @12:50AM (#803791)

                        Point #1 is actually straightforward to explain: objects simply travel on the straightest possible paths through spacetime, called geodesics. The paths only seem curved because of the warping of spacetime.
                        [...]
                        Now, I mentioned that spacetime needs to be warped in order for objects' trajectories to appear curved to us despite them actually being "straight."

                        https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3009/how-exactly-does-curved-space-time-describe-the-force-of-gravity [stackexchange.com]

                        So what looks obviously like curved paths to anyone who isn't crazy are actually straight lines? Hmm, this reminds me of another belief.

                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:55AM (1 child)

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 20 2019, @04:55AM (#803868) Journal

                          So what looks obviously like curved paths to anyone who isn't crazy are actually straight lines? Hmm, this reminds me of another belief.

                          What does "curved" and "straight" mean here? Straightness is with respect to the geometry of the space. If the space is nice and flat (or "Euclidean" as it is called), then the straight line is what we expect. But what if the space is not nice and flat? For example, on a sphere, straight curves are all great circles. In the three dimensional space that the sphere is embedded in, those are circles which are not straight.

                          On the sphere however, a traditional straight line won't stay on the sphere even a little bit. At best, you can get it to intersect the sphere twice. So that version of straightness is useless for describing curves on the sphere.

                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:28AM

                            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:28AM (#803943)

                            Sounds like the earth is flat but the local geometry is curved then.

                    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 20 2019, @05:28AM (2 children)

                      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 20 2019, @05:28AM (#803877) Journal

                      It should be a one line answer. I bet you really want to say "gravity", but that would mean gravity is causing itself according to your earlier post:

                      Wherever matter exists, it bends the geometry of spacetime. This results in a curved shape of space-time which can be understood as gravity.

                      It feels great when you answer your own questions, isn't it? "Gravity" is indeed the answer. What's going on here is that the general relativity model attempts, with a great deal of success, to describe mass and gravity both in terms of the geometry of the space. It's not pure geometry. The mass-energy flow curves space-time, thus warping the geometry, and that curvature is indeed gravity as advertised.

                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:18AM (1 child)

                        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @10:18AM (#803941)

                        The mass-energy flow curves space-time,

                        Right, this is not gravity. This is:

                        thus warping the geometry, and that curvature is indeed gravity as advertised.

                        The first thing is just an assumption, a postulate. No one has any explanation for it. I can just as well assume the earth is flat and derive all sorts of complicated math to make it fit what is observed.

                        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:17AM

                          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:17AM (#804311) Journal

                          The first thing is just an assumption, a postulate.

                          A model which happens to work very well at the non-quantum level.

                          No one has any explanation for it.

                          The only thing we can explain is what we observe.

                          I can just as well assume the earth is flat and derive all sorts of complicated math to make it fit what is observed.

                          That's already been done. For example, NASA uses flat map representations of Earth while tracking satellites (example in this photo [enterpriseirregulars.com] (see right side of wall display). But it doesn't make sense to use that for modeling gravity, and not just for the complex math.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:06AM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 19 2019, @12:06AM (#803251) Journal
      You also have the curvature of the Earth interfering with your perception. It's too round to look the proper degree of flatness. You just have to ignore that in order to get the right result.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 19 2019, @01:00AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @01:00AM (#803289)

    This reminds me of those graphs that show an inverse correlation between the number of pirates and global warming.