In reading this thread and the reason it was started was ... Lawrence bringing the message of the flat earth has been taken as sacrilege.
So ban (kill) the messenger was my understanding of this thread.
Did you view the Video I posted? Was that a threat to you? Tell me about it.
However, if we look intelligently at Lawrence's message we should not be alarmed, rather a process of understanding should tale place. We have been taught that the sun is moving through space at 450 miles per hour while the earth is corkscrewing around it at 67,000 miles per hour yet if we go out each night there is Polaris in the same spot! Can we not understand then, that these are two mutually exclusive statements?
Only one can be correct. As Oscam would suggest, with Polaris there every night the simplest answer is the earth is stationary. It could be a ball or it could be flat... but it is not moving.
Ron
Sometimes I have trouble believing that certain posters on this website can be so ill-informed and ignorant.
Let's examine that argument about Polaris, for example. It betrays a vast degree of ignorance about astronomy. There is nothing "mutually exclusive" about the fact that Polaris, and indeed all the other stars, seem to be in (nearly) the same place in the sky, even though the Earth is moving through space. The stars are quite distant, after all!
Come, let us calculate together.
Polaris was found, by the Hipparchus sky survey using parallax methods, to be about 433 light-years from Earth. Translated into kilometers, that is roughly 4.1 x 10
15 km distant. (if google did the math right.)
Let us imagine that the Solar system is moving in a direction at a right angle to the direction of Polaris, at a velocity of 450 mph, or about 725 km/hr. In one year, containing 8766 hours, therefore, it will have moved about 6.4 x 10
6 kilometers.
Now draw the triangle, with P representing Polaris, E representing Earth, and B representing the position of the Earth (or solar system) after one year. And further assume that the angle PEB is a right angle, so you get the most "bang for your buck". Now find the angle BPE. Would you expect to be able to see the difference in Polaris's position due to the motion of the Solar system after one year? How about after ten years? A hundred? A thousand years?
In fact, Polaris is not always in the same position in the sky, since it is not exactly at the True North Celestial Pole. It appears to rotate around the TNCP daily. It also has its own "proper motion" through space just as our old sun Sol does, and its apparent position at any given instant is a result of all these motions. Many years ago it was not the "North Star" and many years from now it will not be the "North Star" again.
There are many other true and observable facts of observational astronomy that completely disprove "flat earth" silliness (I can't bring myself to call it a "theory"). But of course it is useless to attempt to discuss them, because the FE-ers will just tell you that all the real evidence (like the distance to Polaris used in my example) is faked.
Even though you can see for yourselves that the stars rise 4 minutes earlier each night, and the moon rises 50 minutes later each night -- both observations that anyone can make easily enough -- the significance of these facts is lost on the FE-ers. They need to postulate increasingly convoluted and contrived systems of fakery in order to account for simple observations like these, when in fact the simplest explanation that fits _all_ observational facts is that of conventional astronomy: planets including the Earth are (roughly) spheres, stars are very distant, the moon is not a hologram but is a real satellite, the Sun is 93 million miles away not 3000, etc etc. William of Ockham is LOLing in his grave from being misused ( and misspelled).
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Topic: Banning ltseung888? (Read 23108 times)
