Wilmore counts himself among the true believers. "My own convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable body of data that I have personally observed, and which I am still compiling," he said. During a lunar eclipse, Earth passes between the sun and the moon, allowing Earth to cast its shadow on the moon. That shadow is always, always, always a circle, no matter where you are on the planet, no matter the timing of the eclipse. Always. There’s no such thing as a mountain, they’re just optical illusions caused by light refracting off all the mind-altering chemicals in the air. Photograph: PR Eric Oliver is a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, local politics, racial attitudes and self knowledge. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which was Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has also authored numerous articles in journals.

If you use gravity to, say, trust your GPS to give you accurate positions and calculate trajectories, then that same force will form material the size of Earth into a ball. People who believe that Earth is flat aren't coming to that conclusion from the same types of observations. Instead, they believe that we are being misled and lied to, that scientists (including me) want you to believe that Earth is round, despite its flatness.

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rod said:Helio, in your post #7, I know some flat earth folks. Conspiracy can play a role but for many, flat earth is empirical too. I have studied flat earth videos on measuring the distance to the Moon using telescopes, angles obtained, and plane trigonometry vs. spherical trigonometry. FE folks are correct like the Flat Earth Society. The Moon will always be much closer to the flat disk earth using plane trigonometry. At most the Moon is about 3400 miles away and about 0.5 degrees angular size, so much smaller in size too. I don't know the trig approach they use, nor care to spend time on it, but the parallax would be 75x greater for a 3400 mile distance than actual. Two telescopes relatively close together could see this. Only one falsification is needed to debunk their model, but hundreds exist. Finding one element to be correct and hundreds false is not a scientific model, even if one element is found.

But in reality, humans have circumnavigated the planet in planes and ships, and no one has fallen into space. Rather, when ships traveling large distances on the ocean do appear and disappear on the horizon, they do so either mast or hull-first, respectively. If the Earth was flat, and you had the right optics, you could watch a ship sail from New York to Africa without losing sight of it. You can’t because the curve of the Earth makes the ship dip below the horizon. The Andes Mountains, 287 miles [462 kilometers] away, and although taller than the plane's altitude, lay below the sensible horizon, marked by the white horizontal line in the photograph," NASA officials wrote in a description of the flight. "The Earth's curvature explains this phenomenon, as described in the diagram accompanying the photograph. The Earth's curvature is also visible laterally in the photograph, although the effect is subtle as the image encompasses only 1/360 of the Earth's circumference."However, I stand by what I said about QM philosophy interpretation of nature. Applying to the macro universe leads to no objective reality and the space.com report does suggest this to me.If you remove the teeth from a dog then it won't bite. Redefining objectivity changes things. Objectivity is simply repeating tests by many others and agreeing on the results. And it helps to remember that not agreeing on results for clearly understood reasons, is what scientists look forward to, unlike many philosophies and religions. Of course, the Earth isn't flat. It's a sphere. There is zero doubt about this fact in the real, round world. To say the evidence is overwhelming is an understatement. HOT SPINNING BODIES So if you find yourself talking to a flat-Earther, skip the evidence and arguments and ask yourself how you can build trust. Additional resources yoongi wearing from a collection that criticised our new age of spreading conspiracy like virus,, then mentioning how their authentic words were twisted for an online phenomena with zinger words like “old, stop group activities” by media,, there are dots that connect there

And yet, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere; it bulges slightly at the equator. "Over a long time-scale, the Earth acts like a highly viscous fluid," says Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Earth has been spinning since it was formed, and "if you have a spinning fluid, it will bulge out due to centrifugal forces." You can see evidence for this at the equator, where the Earth's diameter is 7926 miles—27 miles larger than at the poles (7899 miles). The difference is tiny—just one-third of 1 percent. THE SHADOW KNOWS Karen Douglas is professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the U.K., specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories. Karen’s research regularly features in the media, and she gives public talks. She is a founding member of an international network of conspiracy theory scholars. Today the Earth is mostly solid with a liquid outer core, but when the planet was forming, some 4.5 billion years ago, it was very hot and behaved like more like a fluid—and was subject to the squishing effects of gravity.It didn't matter that astronauts like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong had been to space and verified that the Earth is round; Hughes didn't believe them. According to The Washington Post, Hughes thought they were "merely paid actors performing in front of a computer-generated image of a round globe." Don’t worry, these hallucinogenic compounds aren’t provided by evil “Big Pharma”; they’re actually secreted by the shape-shifting lizards that rule society. Why do you think lizards are in charge in the first place? They provide the secretions that keep the population in line, believing in things like the Earth is round and buildings exist. The few times people have actually tried to make a tall building like the World Trade Centre, it is destroyed by the government. Not every celestial body is a sphere, but round objects are common in the universe: In addition to Earth and all other known large planets, stars and bigger moons are also ball-shaped. These objects, and billions of others, have the same shape because of gravity, which pulls everything toward everything else. All of that pulling makes an object as compact as it can be, and nothing is more compact than a sphere. Say, for example, you have a sphere of modeling clay that is exactly 10 inches in diameter. No part of the mass is more than 5 inches from the center. That's not the case with any other shape—some part of the material will be more than 5 inches from the center of the mass. A sphere is the smallest option.

The ancient Greeks also knew Earth's size, which they determined using the Earth's shape. In the 2nd century BCE, a thinker named Eratosthenes read that on a certain day, the people of Syene, in southern Egypt, reported seeing the Sun directly overhead at noon. But in Alexandria, in northern Egypt, on that same day at the same time, Eratosthenes had observed the Sun being several degrees away from overhead. If the Earth were flat, that would be impossible: The Sun would have to be the same height in the sky for observers everywhere, at each moment in time. By measuring the size of this angle, and knowing the distance between the two cities, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the Earth's diameter, coming up with a value within about 15 percent of the modern figure. In fact, the ninth century Abbasid Caliph al-Ma-mun sent an expedition to do exactly that and used those observations to measure Earth's circumference. Engineers and architects also take the Earth's curvature into account when building large structures. A good example is the towers that support long suspension bridges such as the Verrazano Narrows bridge in New York City. Its towers are slightly out of parallel with each other, the tops being more than 1.5 inches further apart than their bases. If the Earth were flat, the bottom of the towers would be separated by the exact same distance as the top of the towers; the planet's curvature forces the tops of the towers apart. But you don't need a ship to verify the Earth's shape. When the Sun is rising in, say, Moscow, it's setting in Los Angeles; when it's the middle of the night in New Delhi, the Sun is shining high in the sky in Chicago. These differences occur because the globe is constantly spinning, completing one revolution per day. If the Earth were flat, it would be daytime everywhere at once, followed by nighttime everywhere at once.This flat Earth map drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893 is also considered the Bible Map of the World. (Image credit: CalimaX/ Alamy) Earth's shadow blankets the moon during a lunar eclipse on May 16, 2022 in this image taken from the International Space Station. (Image credit: NASA) She said all conspiracy theories share a basic thrust: They present an alternative theory about an important issue or event, and construct an (often) vague explanation for why someone is covering up that "true" version of events. "One of the major points of appeal is that they explain a big event but often without going into details," she said. "A lot of the power lies in the fact that they are vague."