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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: 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
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (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.