Fixed Flat Earth?

[DrEvil]

Stef said:

I do know about quite a lot of sciency things, and that didn't just happen. I read about them, and read about how innovative (non-mainstream!) thinkers worked them out, and those theories make sense to me.

I'm not mocking or wanting a fight, Stef - but I'm interested to know what makes you accept that the current theories are any less ridiculous than FET, which itself was absolutely 'correct' and accepted by mainstream science for aeons?

That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[coffin_dodger]

Thanks Dr - I didn't know that. But can wiki be trusted?

[slimmouse]

Thanks Dr - I didn't know that. But can wiki be trusted?

A brief while back a video was posted by smoking since 1879, which suggested in an entirely rational fashion that Big Bang theory is somewhat, if not entirely off base, suggesting that galaxies essentially reproduce via quasars, which are their own siblings.

Im wondering what the relatively mainstream in our midst made of that particular claim?

Im wondering if Alpmans claim that mainstream cosmologists appear incapable of touching this with a very long bargepole, since it smashes almost everything we believe we know about everything into a zillion pieces is genuine?

Cmon you real scientists out there in our midst !

On further edit, Im also wondering if this might have something to do with all the recent flat-earth sensationalism?

Are we Muons or Morons?

[Elvis]

I'm not mocking or wanting a fight, Stef - but I'm interested to know what makes you accept that the current theories are any less ridiculous than FET, which itself was absolutely 'correct' and accepted by mainstream science for aeons?

With all respect, dodger, this is not quite right; "mainstream" science didn't really get off the ground until after Galileo in the 17th century. Before that, in Classical Greece, for example, the Earth was mostly accepted as spherical.

I'll post the other side of the coin of Dr. Evil's "FET" Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BC, when it was mentioned in ancient Greek philosophy,[1] but remained a matter of philosophical speculation until the 3rd century BC, when Hellenistic astronomy established the spherical shape of the earth as a physical given. The paradigm was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

[ . . . ]

"the experience of travellers that suggested such an explanation for the variation in the observable altitude and the change in the area of circumpolar stars, a change that was quite drastic between Greek settlements" around the eastern Mediterranean Sea, particularly those between the Nile Delta and Crimea.[10]

And for anyone with doubts, this should be a clincher:

Aristotle observed "there are stars seen in Egypt and [...] Cyprus which are not seen in the northerly regions." Since this could only happen on a curved surface, he too believed Earth was a sphere "of no great size, for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be quickly apparent."

...not to mention:

The shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round.

In general: I'm not one to blindly cling to rigid, institutional scientific thinking, and have frequent discussions with scientist/hardcore rationalist friends about it. Occasionally they get the idea that I'm an anti-science, anti-intellectual Luddite and stubborn old dope. Except for the last part, it's untrue. Galileo was one of my childhood heroes, I repeated as many of his experiments as I could (at age ten I planned to be a scientist), as well as experimenting in chemistry, looking at tiny critters under microscopes and a little 'rocket science' to boot. So I have a pretty good grasp of the scientific method, but I also know what it's like to be called "anti-science" and accused of "magical thinking." While there's a lot I'm reluctant to dismiss out of hand, poking around flat-Earth notions runs its course early, and as I've said, there are much better ways to challenge the authority of the prevailing 'rationalist' mindset.


Edit: And yeah, where's Slomo? SLOMO, MOP-UP ON AISLE FOUR!

[coffin_dodger]

Elvis:

Occasionally they get the idea that I'm an anti-science, anti-intellectual Luddite

Yes, I get that, too. Challenging the status quo on scientific fundamentals is usually a no-no - accompanied by cries of 'what are you, a christian fundamentalist or something'?

Incidentally, FET is silly, because we live in a totally spherical-dominated Universe, so I have no beef with accepted wisdom on that fact.

I think I'll start a thread addressing the validity of modern scientific theory, if there are no objections.

[norton ash]

Christ on a pogo stick, please just look through a fucking telescope at the other planets and the stars and tell me we're not on a spinning sphere, unless that mean old Demiurge and his minions in the PTB have us bamboozled. Tell me it's only a paper moon floating over a cardboard sea.

[stefano]

I wasn't on that flight. It's not something I can verify or trust as true. I have no idea.

Wow, next level. OK, I'll leave it at that... or maybe I'll just drop that normal human existence requires trusting as true things that we cannot verify first-hand, but submitting those things to some sort of test to determine their likelihood. “Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it,” sez Betrand Russell, and I couldn't agree more.

There are lots of facts that contradict the established theory and you ignore it while claiming I'm some sort of troll.

Like what, please? And please don't say 'it looks flat'.

I assumed RI was open to anyone who wants to participate in an ongoing discussion in exploring the truth of our reality...to question the discontinuity, and the perceptive cracks in the narrative.

It absolutely is, that's what it's for. Stick around.

[Searcher08]

I'm not mocking or wanting a fight, Stef - but I'm interested to know what makes you accept that the current theories are any less ridiculous than FET, which itself was absolutely 'correct' and accepted by mainstream science for aeons?

With all respect, dodger, this is not quite right; "mainstream" science didn't really get off the ground until after Galileo in the 17th century. Before that, in Classical Greece, for example, the Earth was mostly accepted as spherical.

I'll post the other side of the coin of Dr. Evil's "FET" Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BC, when it was mentioned in ancient Greek philosophy,[1] but remained a matter of philosophical speculation until the 3rd century BC, when Hellenistic astronomy established the spherical shape of the earth as a physical given. The paradigm was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

[ . . . ]

"the experience of travellers that suggested such an explanation for the variation in the observable altitude and the change in the area of circumpolar stars, a change that was quite drastic between Greek settlements" around the eastern Mediterranean Sea, particularly those between the Nile Delta and Crimea.[10]

And for anyone with doubts, this should be a clincher:

Aristotle observed "there are stars seen in Egypt and [...] Cyprus which are not seen in the northerly regions." Since this could only happen on a curved surface, he too believed Earth was a sphere "of no great size, for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be quickly apparent."

...not to mention:

The shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round.

In general: I'm not one to blindly cling to rigid, institutional scientific thinking, and have frequent discussions with scientist/hardcore rationalist friends about it. Occasionally they get the idea that I'm an anti-science, anti-intellectual Luddite and stubborn old dope. Except for the last part, it's untrue. Galileo was one of my childhood heroes, I repeated as many of his experiments as I could (at age ten I planned to be a scientist), as well as experimenting in chemistry, looking at tiny critters under microscopes and a little 'rocket science' to boot. So I have a pretty good grasp of the scientific method, but I also know what it's like to be called "anti-science" and accused of "magical thinking." While there's a lot I'm reluctant to dismiss out of hand, poking around flat-Earth notions runs its course early, and as I've said, there are much better ways to challenge the authority of the prevailing 'rationalist' mindset.


Edit: And yeah, where's Slomo? SLOMO, MOP-UP ON AISLE FOUR!

Love this.

My thought is that it is an opportunity to model good scientific thinking and engagement, and also talk about epistemology, a subject which reductionists and hyper-rationalists are often twitchy around. The only stupid question is one not asked. It seems some of the people showing an interest in it do not have a maths or physics background, unlike some folks here, but do have more sense of philosophy of science questions than some here, so swings and roundabouts.

My personal preference, rather than spending dozens of hours in FE stuff, is to spend time learning maths, like category theory. Great free classes by a wonderful Barbadian. Just fab.



I found it changes the way one sees the world profoundly, into seeing patterns AND transformations between patterns.

[Rory]

Thank you all for a thoroughly entertaining collaborative work.

Special shout out to the #trollulz clique who are performing wonderful art in their pursuit of keeping rigint cutting edge and relevant. Big love, homies

[slimmouse]

Ive just read your post searcher, and without even viewing the video, I suspect that the inevitable conclusion is that the Universe, ergo nature, ergo mankind, is built upon mathematical symmetry.

If I'm wrong I will gladly stand corrected.

If Im right, then WTF is all that about?

[stefano]

I'm not mocking or wanting a fight, Stef - but I'm interested to know what makes you accept that the current theories are any less ridiculous than FET, which itself was absolutely 'correct' and accepted by mainstream science for aeons?

An argument isn't a fight!

'The current theories' is very broad, and a lot of it goes over my head, so I'm definitely not one to assert that the all consensus theories are true. I've taken out library books on quantum theory several times, and couldn't get to grips with that. But older stuff makes sense to me and I'm comfortable in believing it's true. Newton's law of universal gravitation - maybe the single most important thing in all of this stuff - elegantly explains why the sky looks the way it does, with clusters of matter separated by vast expanses of emptiness. That's really it - I've never come across something that I confidently think is true that contradicts dominant theories. All these supposed 'knockout blows' come apart completely when you look into them - that has been true for the ones I've looked into every single time.

There's also the fact - and it absolutely is a fact - that all these theories were once alternative and radical, an pooh-poohed (if not harshly suppressed) by the establishment. Then more and more people looked into them, and tested them, and they became accepted as true. If you want to challenge the current orthodoxy, then at least you have to do a bit of homework, because hundreds if not thousands have done the hard work before you. Coming back to Sheldrake again, because he pops up a lot in this context - he's just never done real work on his theories, only speculated. That's why he gets the response he does and I think it's fair.

[DrEvil]

Thanks Dr - I didn't know that. But can wiki be trusted?

Funny you should ask (green be damned).

http://www.livescience.com/32950-how-ac ... pedia.html

How Accurate Is Wikipedia?

When you Google the question "How accurate is Wikipedia?" the highest-ranking result is, as you might expect, a Wikipedia article on the topic ("Reliability of Wikipedia").

That page contains a comprehensive list of studies undertaken to assess the accuracy of the crowd-sourced encyclopedia since its founding 10 years ago. Of course, if you find yourself on this page, you might worry that the list itself may not be trustworthy. Well, the good news is that almost all those studies tell us that it probably is.

In 2005, the peer-reviewed journal Nature asked scientists to compare Wikipedia's scientific articles to those in Encyclopaedia Britannica—"the most scholarly of encyclopedias," according to its own Wiki page. The comparison resulted in a tie; both references contained four serious errors among the 42 articles analyzed by experts.

And last year, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that Wikipedia had the same level of accuracy and depth in its articles about 10 types of cancer as the Physician Data Query, a professionally edited database maintained by the National Cancer Institute.

The self-described "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" has fared similarly well in most other studies comparing its accuracy to conventional encyclopedias, including studies by The Guardian, PC Pro, Library Journal, the Canadian Library Association, and several peer-reviewed academic studies.

Still, because anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, they "can easily be undermined through malice or ignorance," noted BBC technology commentator Bill Thompson. Vandalism of Wiki entries is common in the realm of politics. In 2006, for example, slanderous comments were added to U.S. Sen. Bill Frist's biography page; the IP addresses of the computers used to make the edits traced back to some of his political rivals' staffers. To counter such activity, Wikipedia places editing restrictions on articles that are prone to vandalism.

A Small Study of Our Own

To add to the debate, Life's Little Mysteries carried out its own, albeit small, test of Wikipedia's accuracy by consulting experts from two very different walks of life: theoretical physics and pop music.

Life's Little Mysteries asked Adam Riess, professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University and one of the scientists credited with proposing the existence of dark energy , to rate Wikipedia's "dark energy" entry.

"It's remarkably accurate," Riess said. "Certainly better than 95 percent correct."

This is not true, however, of the page about the indie pop band "Passion Pit," according to its drummer, Nate Donmoyer. Donmoyer found 10 factual errors on his band's page ranging from subtle to significant. Some information even appeared to have been added to the page by companies or organizations in search of publicity.

"It's kind of crazy," Donmoyer told LLM. "I don't think I can trust Wikipedia again. The littlest white lies can throw its whole validity off."

It may make sense that Wikipedia would have more reliable articles about academic topics than pop culture ones, considering that the latter are more prone to rumors and hearsay. On the other hand, there's no Passion Pit entry at all in Encyclopaedia Britannica. With more than three million English-language entries, Wikipedia very often wins our preference by default.

Or if you prefer - here's the Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

[stefano]

My personal preference, rather than spending dozens of hours in FE stuff, is to spend time learning maths [...] I found it changes the way one sees the world profoundly, into seeing patterns AND transformations between patterns.

Oh, this too. Grounding in maths makes a difference. I'm not very hot on maths (although I've done formal logic, which is maths of a sort), but when reading about the history of science it comes out strongly how people who are highly numerate were able to pick out these grand patterns thanks to that. It's constant that all the famous figures in science were maths whizzes, and spent years of 12-hour (or more) days working shit out on paper before coming up with what they came up with.

I read Richard Feynman's The character of physical law this year, I cannot recommend a better book if you are really curious. This is from that:

To summarize, I would use the words of Jeans, who said that "the Great Architect seems to be a mathematician". To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. C.P. Snow talked about two cultures. I really think that those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once.

It is too bad that it has to be mathematics, and that mathematics is hard for some people. It is reputed - I do not know if it is true - that when one of the kings was trying to learn geometry from Euclid he complained that it was difficult. And Euclid said, "There is no royal road to geometry". And there is no royal road. Physicists cannot make a conversion to any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form; we are not so unhumble as to demand that she change before we pay any attention.

All the intellectual arguments that you can make will not communicate to deaf ears what the experience of music really is. In the same way all the intellectual arguments in the world will not convey an understanding of nature to those of "the other culture". Philosophers may try to teach you by telling you qualitatively about nature. I am trying to describe her. But it is not getting across because it is impossible. Perhaps it is because their horizons are limited in this way that some people are able to imagine that the center of the universe is man.

[Elihu]

And for anyone with doubts, this should be a clincher:

Aristotle observed "there are stars seen in Egypt and [...] Cyprus which are not seen in the northerly regions." Since this could only happen on a curved surface, he too believed Earth was a sphere "of no great size, for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be quickly apparent."


...not to mention:

The shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round.

alot of this needs a little more thought. is the perth joburg flight more or less contra global spin? check the globular calculated mileage against flight telemetry. the distances would have to be the same those numbers have to add up. rhetorically 1000 miles an hour of spin the atmosphere in lockstep weather or no weather the to and back journey could not be the same time. could it? why wouldn't they have diverted even a little south polish? and this business about antarctica a continent supposedly biggisher than the conus and nobody flies over it? by international treaty? anecdotally can anyone think of another treaty with such a spotless record of compliance? not even a beef? and we thought the fed was obscure. and water the oceans. what happens to water on the surface of a sphere? impart some topspin to a soaking wet tennis ball and observe. the spherical explanation is that cartwheel of departing water is uniformly held in place by the effect of what amounts to the attraction of a singularity at the center of our spinning sphere a powerful force indeed. we know how heavy water is. so the inward and outward forces cancel so perfectly that a baby duck can paddle awwwwwwwwwwwwww whatever. as far as what you are seeing through those telescopes, the stars and planets could be moving in a nice circular pattern and earth is still.

the moon has phases. those are not shadows of a round earth as cast by the sun. watch everyday not just eclipses. would take some awesome refraction to produce what i observe where i live. peace enjoy

[coffin_dodger]

Having studied the undoubted beauty of equation, got into it. Then, unexpectedly struck by it's direct comparison to religious scripture written in a language that few understood, fled.

Mathematicians (quickly replacing priests in a secularized society) now have the whispered voice of 'the Great Architect' at their disposal - and obviously the greatest secrets exist in a language known only to high practioners, that few can understand, let alone dispute.

And their power is immense and shall not be questioned. I know better than to try.