rigorousintuition.ca

AlienSpaceBat » Mon Sep 05, 2016 2:46 pm wrote:

maco144 » 05 Sep 2016 00:10 wrote:

dada » Sun Sep 04, 2016 1:57 pm wrote:The globe is big. People and planes are small. Flying at 30k feet is barely getting above the surface of the planet. Five or six miles is not very far, I think we can all agree on that. The horizon naturally still looks like the horizon.

You can just use your mind for this one. Picture an apple one mile in diameter. Put a little ant on it. Apple looks flat from ant's perspective. Now bring ant ten, twenty feet away from apple. Apple still looks flat to ant.

Or maybe we're not supposed to trust our own imaginations.

So when was this flat earth with no stars universe created? I'm guessing around six thousand years ago.

I agree with being a few miles above not being very high at all. When do you think the height should have relevance? You can watch rocket videos go 3-4x higher than a plane does and will still observe the same things being the horizon always rises to the eye and there is no visible view down the side of a globe.

On a globe one thing that would be clearly noticeable from a distance is that buildings such as skyscrapers would be angled away from the observer. If you were the ant on the apple and you were approaching Antropolis at the distance you first saw them until you got relatively close they would be tilted away from you as they would lie on the curve. We only perceive buildings as being completely vertical from afar because the earth is flat.

As to the age of the earth, I do not have any insight or even much speculation.

Lets see: Two buildings the height of the Burj Khalifa (830m) situated 20km apart on a globe 40,000km in circumference would have the tops 2.6m further away than the bases, measured in straight lines. This is 0.013% of the horizontal distance. Obviously lower buildings (or lower point of view) and closer distances would make this effect smaller.

I very much doubt that this 1 in 8000 change would be clearly noticeable to you.

On Antarctica’s coast, where our stations are located, there are usually a couple of weeks in mid-winter (around 21 June) when the sun does not rise, and a couple of weeks in summer around Christmas when there is 24-hour sunlight.

Since the Amundsen–Scott Station is located at the South Pole, it is at the only place on the land surface of the Earth where the sun is continuously up for six months and then continuously down for six months. (The only other such place is at the North Pole, on the sea ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.) Thus, during each year, this station experiences one extremely long "day" and one extremely long "night". During the six-month "day", the angle of elevation of the Sun above the horizon varies continuously. The sun rises on the September equinox, reaches its maximum angle above the horizon on the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, around December 20, and sets on the March equinox.

What if Earth were a cube?

POSTED Aug 15, 2011
by Robert Lamb


Original art by Robert McLaren

Back in 1884, a Swiss astronomer by the name of Arndt made headlines when he claimed to have discovered a very curious planet in an orbit beyond Neptune -- a surprisingly cubical planet.

You know, like Bizarro World from the Super Man comics.

Of course even in 1884, everyone knew this was bunk. The New York Times even ran a piece titled "The Cubical Planet" in their Nov. 16 edition. As informative as it is stuffy, the Gilded Age article interviews physicist Dr. Theodore Vankirk, who first dismisses the prospect of a square planet as pure hooey, and then proceeds to wax scientific about just what a cube world would be like.

It all comes down to gravity. On our spherical Earth, gravity pulls "down" us toward the planet's center of mass. So on a flat surface, we naturally stand up straight.

A hypothetical cube world, however, would feature six square faces and you'd only encounter up/down gravity toward the centers of these regions. As you traveled closer and closer to the edge, it would feel like you were walking up an incline and it would be difficult to stand up straight because the gravitational pull would draw you toward the center of the massive cube, which wouldn't lie directly beneath your feet. Standing on the "edge" of this cube world would feel like standing atop a mountain range.

Contemporary cosmologist Dr. Karen L. Masters also finds the topic of cube worlds fascinating -- especially the atmospheric possibilities. As she explains in Cornell's Ask a Physicist feature, all six faces of the planet would boast temperate weather, centralized bodies of water and none of them would feature polar or equatorial weather. What's more, the pointy edges of the cube would actually poke through the planet's atmosphere like titanic mountains. Here's her explanation:

Dr. Karen L. Masters wrote: Let's assume that the atmosphere goes up 1000 km above the Earth (when it is a sphere), and so is a sphere itself of radius 6400km+1000km=7400km. This should be about the right number. A cube with the same volume as the spherical Earth would have a side 10,000 km (6,400 miles) long so the corners are 8700 km from the centre! They would definitely stick out above the atmosphere.

As I was poking around the net on this topic, I also ran across this amusing tidbit from a 1964 edition of the Rice University campus paper. A mysterious, well-dressed gentleman had been observed hanging out around the Houston-area campus, distributing literature about an alien, cubical planet.

The man claimed that the planet was called Aocicinori and that it was the 63rd in a system of 96 planets. He showed off maps of the world, as well as some colorful illustrations of the creatures that lived there. The Rice University article reveals that these materials were created by Scotland L. Moore, an outpatient form the Houston State Psychiatric Institute.

As best I can tell, these are the maps and sketches in question. Oh, and be sure to check out our podcast episode on this topic.

http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blog ... a-cube.htm

The Cubical Planet

Published: November 16, 1884
Copyright © The New York Times

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-fr ... 94659FD7CF

backtoiam » Tue Sep 06, 2016 2:52 am wrote:maco144 if the earth were flat how come nobody lives on the edge? Why don't people know where the edge is? How come nobody has flown over the edge in a jet and videotaped it taken pictures of it or described it? How come nobody ever falls off of it? If you walked far enough, even if the edges were rounded like a doughnut, at some point you would start falling downhill and just fall into space wouldn't you? How come we don't have satellite images of it?

It is both flat and 'round', depending on the perspective (and traveling speed) of the observer.

82_28 » Tue Sep 06, 2016 2:54 am wrote:How much daylight is there in Antarctica during summer and winter?

On Antarctica’s coast, where our stations are located, there are usually a couple of weeks in mid-winter (around 21 June) when the sun does not rise, and a couple of weeks in summer around Christmas when there is 24-hour sunlight.

http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-anta ... ight-hours

Sorry, dude.

Since the Amundsen–Scott Station is located at the South Pole, it is at the only place on the land surface of the Earth where the sun is continuously up for six months and then continuously down for six months. (The only other such place is at the North Pole, on the sea ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.) Thus, during each year, this station experiences one extremely long "day" and one extremely long "night". During the six-month "day", the angle of elevation of the Sun above the horizon varies continuously. The sun rises on the September equinox, reaches its maximum angle above the horizon on the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, around December 20, and sets on the March equinox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen% ... le_Station

tazmic » Tue Sep 06, 2016 7:49 am wrote:If the edges did all reach through the atmosphere it would make for a grand 6 fold evolutionary experiment.

I wonder how they would explain to themselves how things look flat but feel bowl like when 'climbing' the periphery.

But would it feel bowl like? Do you have to evolve on a sphere to naturally interpret gravity as down? Or would cube folk just feel the incessant inward pull (like walking in high winds) warning them away from the dead zone?

Imagine the shock when their tech allowed them to finally get over an edge - 'well the world is kinda flat, yes, but it's not quite that simple...!'