SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @12:50AM (2 children)
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)
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
Sounds like the earth is flat but the local geometry is curved then.