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you know... I was thinking about it, we start off with these simple observations " why are the stars inverted in the southern hemisphere " and the only explanation that actually fit the observed data is people walking around on a sphere. but that doesn't make any fucking sense if you don't know anything about *the context of the sphere itself* so for thousands of years this conversation was the status quo. P1 : " this ball model is the only model that explains the data. " P2 : "lol, that's ridiculous what keeps people from falling off the ball?" from the 18th and 19th century advances in lenses etc made it clear that the flat earth hypothesis was doomed as the logical gymnastics had to increase as observational data was gathered. but it's only the early 20th century that we get general relativity and data to *actually show* there IS a "force" holding people on the ball. iow, we get the context for the sphere people are walking around on. flat earthers are fucking retarded, they don't even understand that there is basic observational data which contradicts their model of the world. data people have been trying to explain since we were sailing around in dug out canoes, but its kinda understandable retardation if you think about the time frame it took to actually get here. they don't understand GR and to them, physicists are just priests of a new religion. lacking understanding about how the data was collected or how to verify it themselves, what recourse do they have except to ooga booga about it?
Enki's avatar Enki
Man, that's enough brain cells lost for me. Flat earthers are just about as bad as foaming at the mouth Bitcoin maximalists. 😂
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Replies (79)

↩ replying to Hanshan
They are thinking critically, they just don't have the same assumptions. One could spend a long time arguing back and forth on whether or not the Earth rests on the backs of 4 elephants sitting on a turtle. The argument isn't important. What you should try to understand is why they are arguing for it on both sides. The proponent of the turtle theory is professing their world view as expressed by their religious leaders. There are benefits and detriments to having a society believe this. It gives people a common mythology and builds social cohesion. If they believe in the turtle theory, they might also believe in the other religious aspects such as loving and respecting each other. The flat Earthers similarly are professing their believes. Beliefs are a religion. They are building social cohesion based on this belief that others refute. They are forming these believes because the World has been lying to them on so many things. The Scientists have lost credibility in their eyes due to their corruption and subservience to corrupt elites. When you espouse reasonable arguments sourced from scientific theory this hardens their resolve. They spend copious efforts to try and refute your claims. Again they have very different assumptions and your differences will never be resolved but it is incorrect to say they are unwilling to put in the work. If they accept what you say and accept scientific reasoning, what do they gain? They lose the social cohesion of their fellow Flat Earthers. They lose the sense of belonging they have found. To believe in Science you don't understand (referring to them not you), is to believe in nothing. Understand the man not the problem and you will answer your questions in a more meaningful way. image
↩ replying to npub16dsu...h6vy
except I didn't enspouse reasonable argument sourced from scientific theory. I asked them why the same constellations look different in the southern hemisphere. and received no response. I studiously avoided any non-personally verifiable theory for the very reason you mention. at least until much later when it became clear that they weren't going to talk about basic observational data anyway. It is better to lose the social cohesion of mistaken viewpoints and acccept personal responsibility for developing a viewpoint of the world that is coherent with observational data, then it is to just languish in cultish agreement for the sake of belonging.
↩ replying to Hanshan
Sure but there are levels. If someone denies gravity and jumps off of a cliff, their beliefs will be very short lived. Most concepts have little or no consequences if you disbelieve them. If the flat Earthers tried to circumnavigate the Earth by the stars they would realize their errors but I guess they will not. On the point of suspension of personal responsibility and critical thinking, I don't think that is a fair framing. From their perspective that they are not suspending personal responsibility and critical thinking. From their perspective they believe the opposite, that they are the one exercising the highest degree of personal responsibility and critical thinking. Their thinking doesn't align with a coherent and well argued scientific reasoning but they believe they are engaging in deep thought. I would posit that Flat Earthers engage in more thought on these matters than the vast majority of people who passively believe Science even tho they don't understand it. If one considers all of human history much effort and thought has been put into belief systems. Was no critical thinking put into early human history just because it doesn't align with current Science. If a scientist from the distant past was alive today and arguing for the science of their time because he couldn't grok modern Science, would you call him out for suspending personal responsibility and critical thinking?
↩ replying to npub16dsu...h6vy
I started with this today.
Hanshan's avatar Hanshan
you know... I was thinking about it, we start off with these simple observations " why are the stars inverted in the southern hemisphere " and the only explanation that actually fit the observed data is people walking around on a sphere. but that doesn't make any fucking sense if you don't know anything about *the context of the sphere itself* so for thousands of years this conversation was the status quo. P1 : " this ball model is the only model that explains the data. " P2 : "lol, that's ridiculous what keeps people from falling off the ball?" from the 18th and 19th century advances in lenses etc made it clear that the flat earth hypothesis was doomed as the logical gymnastics had to increase as observational data was gathered. but it's only the early 20th century that we get general relativity and data to *actually show* there IS a "force" holding people on the ball. iow, we get the context for the sphere people are walking around on. flat earthers are fucking retarded, they don't even understand that there is basic observational data which contradicts their model of the world. data people have been trying to explain since we were sailing around in dug out canoes, but its kinda understandable retardation if you think about the time frame it took to actually get here. they don't understand GR and to them, physicists are just priests of a new religion. lacking understanding about how the data was collected or how to verify it themselves, what recourse do they have except to ooga booga about it? View quoted note →
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There was a theory of gravity well before GR, and I doubt many of us (certainly not me) know much of anything about GR. Was thinking about your inverted constellation thing this morning, as it was new to me. I assume before good comms, sharing such observations wasn't common, might explain it in large part. Like, before we had phones or whatever, it'd be hard to verify its night time halfway around the world while it's daytime for me
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↩ replying to Hanshan
I don't know the history or timing of it well at all, but it was precisely calculated from experiment with the constant x m1 x m2 / d^2 thing, I believe. I assume that was around for a 100+ years, and I think it wasn't derived from theory of globe earth but to explain Keplers 3 thingies...which I'm not sure about the timing of (maybe Kepler was post globe earth...). Looking to you to educate me, as I've got important things to do!
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↩ replying to YODL
I don't know about Kepler but wasn't Cavendish the first recorded person to measure gravity? in like the 17th century? but I think that was just that mass generally has gravity, ie distorts spacetime (he didn't call it that of course) not the local gravitational acceleration of the Earth. I think Newton generally measured that. and a bunch of people also at the end of the 17th century refined the actual measurement. (and they also noticed that it was *different* at different elevations, destroying my guys "gravity is an inertial force due to upward acceleration" hypothesis)
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↩ replying to Hanshan
Cavendish rings a bell. And while GR/space-time distortions may work, I don't know more about it than like a single diagram and analogy of marbles on a rubber sheet thing. Certainly they didn't thing about it back then. The classical formula works very well, and I seem to remember Kepler having three laws of motion that were explained by maybe newton using calculus and the one classic gravity formula, but am very very hazy on details and timing
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↩ replying to Hanshan
Hate to be the AI dump guy, but there's a good overview: Big picture first The classical understanding of gravity wasn’t a single leap—it was a three-stage convergence: 1. Kinematics: how things move (Kepler, Galileo) 2. Dynamics: why they move that way (Newton) 3. Empirical grounding: what the constants actually are (Cavendish) By ~1800, the formula F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2} was no longer speculative—it was overdetermined by astronomy, mechanics, and laboratory experiment. 1. Galileo Galilei (c. 1600–1638) — Gravity as uniform acceleration Key ideas • Falling bodies accelerate at a constant rate (ignoring air resistance) • Horizontal and vertical motion are independent • Motion can be described mathematically, without invoking purposes or essences What gravity was not yet • No force law • No dependence on mass of Earth or object • No connection to planetary motion Why Galileo mattered He reframed gravity as a quantitative physical phenomenon, not a philosophical tendency. This made later force laws even possible. ⸻ 2. Johannes Kepler (1609–1619) — The planetary clues Kepler’s Laws 1. Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus 2. Equal areas in equal times 3. T^2 \propto a^3 Why this was explosive Kepler gave exact, data-driven regularities that screamed: “There is a central force pulling planets toward the Sun, and it weakens with distance.” But Kepler did not know the force law. He suspected something like magnetism and thought the force weakened with distance—but not exactly how. ⸻ 3. Isaac Newton (1665–1687) — The synthesis This is the true birth of classical gravity. Newton’s key insights • If a force causes circular or elliptical motion and Kepler’s 2nd law holds, the force must be central • If Kepler’s 3rd law holds, the force must fall off as 1/r² • The same force explains: • Falling apples • The Moon’s orbit • Planetary motion The inverse-square law emerges From orbital mechanics alone, Newton showed: F \propto \frac{1}{r^2} Then he generalized it to: F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2} Important nuance Newton did not measure G. He only needed the product GM_\oplus, which could be inferred from orbital motion. What cemented Newton’s law (1687) • Exact recovery of Kepler’s laws • Quantitative prediction of tides • Correct explanation of projectile motion and pendulums • Predictive power across terrestrial and celestial physics After the Principia, competing gravity laws were basically dead. ⸻ 4. Henry Cavendish (1797–1798) — Weighing the Earth Cavendish performed the first laboratory measurement of gravitational attraction between masses using a torsion balance. What he actually measured • A tiny torque between lead spheres • From this: the density (mass) of Earth • Implicitly: the gravitational constant G This was the final missing piece. Why this mattered • Gravity was no longer inferred only from astronomy • The same inverse-square law held at human scales • G became a universal constant, not a fitting parameter After Cavendish, Newtonian gravity was: • Universal • Quantitative • Experimentally verified in the lab ⸻ When was F = G m_1 m_2 / r^2 truly “cemented”? Short answer: 1687 conceptually, ~1800 empirically
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↩ replying to 𝕞ptf
jfc dude. you need a basic high school physics class. okay I'll do some basic explanation. you don't feel like you're moving 500 mph in an airplane either right? likewise the accelerometer in your phone is measuring contact forces. it won't measure 500 mph either once the plane has completely accelerated. however there's 9.8 m/s ² of potential energy always pulling down on you. You're absolutely right about that. when that potential energy is converted to real (like in free fall or plane reaching cruising velocity) it shows zero. so your accelerometer shows that there's that amount of potential energy existing. it does NOT show that that's due to an upward acceleration, just that there's a force acting on it. very curious how you got to that conclusion. we would have to be *constantly* accelerating at 9.8 m/s squared in order for that downward force to be maintained (like how you feel acceleration when the plane takes off, but not when it's cruising). so in less than a year (after this acceleration began) we would be traveling AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT. so your model is this: we are hurtling through space on a flat plane at an UNCONCEIVABLE velocity that is constantly increasing but all that velocity is completely unpreceivable in any way. and for some reason that downward pressure is lower at higher elevations on the Earth. and you think this is a completely plausible explanation that doesn't require any magical thinking 👍
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↩ replying to Hanshan
The accelerometer shows an UPWARD vector or you saying accelerometer only shows acceleration only when not resting on earth? 😅 The earth is moving at a constant velocity but requires constant accelerstion to keep the veloxity. Like you keep your foot on the gas in a car to keep it moving, or the speed would drop off. If there was gravity downward force, it would show downward acceleration in freefall and when resting on earth, but accelerometer doesnt show that.
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↩ replying to 𝕞ptf
you can imagine the accelerometer to be a small weight in a box that is suspended by springs in all directions. when the weight gets pulled and a spring is lengthened, it reads acceleration in that direction. at rest on the earth surface, the "upward" spring is lengthened and it shows an upward vector. when you release the accelerometer and allow it to fall, the weight returns to neutral, no springs are lengthened and it shows no vector. >> The earth is moving at a constant velocity but requires constant accelerstion to keep the veloxity. Like you keep your foot on the gas in a car to keep it moving, or the speed would drop off. this doesn't make any sense. a mass either has "a constant velocity" or "constant acceleration", you can't have both lol. The car is either accelerating or holding a constant speed. and in order for us to experience a constant 9.8 meters per second squared of downward force, we would have to be *constantly accelerating* in the opposite direction. NOT maintaining a constant velocity. so according to your hypothesis, the sun and moon and earth and everything that we see is somehow holding itself together while hurtling through space at thousands of times speed of light. and accelerating every second. but without us having any observable data to confirm this fantastic speed of course. and this is more believable to you than " mass effects a pulling effect on other mass " something that actually has demonstratable evidence behind it.
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↩ replying to Comte de Sats Germain
homeboy wants us to believe in a DIFFERENT magical force. One that requires us to be constantly accelerating in an upward direction and traveling at many thousand times the speed of light. which... okay maybe... I haven't personally verified that the speed of light is an insurpassable constant... but this new model can't explain why the stars look different at different points on the plane. or why the downward force is lesser at higher altitudes on the plane. or why we have no observational evidence of this fantastic upwards speed. and what keeps the sun, moon, atmosphere and everything together while we're tearing along. All things which are quite neatly explained by the globe hypothesis. so I'm sticking with that.
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↩ replying to Hanshan
That is called special pleading logical fallacy. There is no imagining anything about an accelerometer. It reads acceleration or do you deny that? To have constant velocity, you need constant acceleration. It is constant because each second (time), the same measure is applied to keep the same speed. Changes in acceleration (called jerk rate) would be different amounts of force applied over time instead of same amount. When you start your car, your acceleration is higher until you get to the cruising speed and then to maintain the cruising speed requires the same acceleration/force applied.
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↩ replying to 𝕞ptf
I described to you how the device worked. predicably, you want to ignore its actual functioning also, you're making it very obvious that you dont have the basic knowledge required to have this conversation. acceleration is the *rate of change in the velocity* of a mass. "to have constant velocity you need constant acceleration" is a nonsense statement. The acceleration of a mass at a constant velocity is zero. and maintaining a constant velocity as in a car (ie, against friction) requires force, not acceleration. we're done here 🙏
The most insane mental gymnastics I've ever witnesse, the flat earth crew. Ive tried multiple time to have a discussion wirh a rlaf earther and it usually just divulges to insulst when I ask for a model that explains day and night cycle as well as the season. They can show me two separate models but those don't even jive with each other. The mathematics that secure bitcoin, is the same mathematcs that show you our world is NOT flat.