Flat-Earth advocates say things like “we should be able to feel the Earth turning so fast”. But it isn’t turning fast; it’s turning at 0.00067 rotations per minute, which is barely perceptible. Watch the hour hand on a clock and realize the Earth is turning half that fast. The “speed” relates to the fact that the hour hand is nearly four thousand miles long and we’re sitting on the end of it. And all the physical objects in our frame of reference are in the same spot, riding along with us.
Suppose you’re a passenger in a car moving sixty miles an hour. You hold one hand 12 inches above the other and drop a coin. It falls for 250 milliseconds “straight” down into your other hand. But if you mapped the coin’s fall in reference to the _ground_, it would make a right triangle one foot high and 22 feet long. Instead of the 90-degree fall we perceived inside the car, the outside observer (who has x-ray vision and can see through the car door) perceives the coin falling at a long slope of just 2.6 degrees. This is seamless to us because it is the nature of reality.
The great advance of science has been to add analysis to multiple frames of reference – the microscopic, the relational, the cosmic, subatomic, deep time, bullet time and so on. Our senses evolved to keep us alive and for little else. We can get more out of reality by measuring it and thinking about it, performing experiments when possible to gauge the result. And then looking for falsification in other fields that impinge on the same phenomena.
Notes:
- Discuss this post on Facebook and Twitter
- To put this another way, a vinyl record spins forty-nine thousand times faster than the Earth rotates.
- See also: Phases of the egg, um, I mean “moon”
- Source: Second Nexus, Flat Earth Society is not a joke, and it’s growing
- Minute Physicist: Top Ten Reasons why we know the Earth is round
- We’re supposed to “dial back the snark” as if we could convince a flat-Earther. But we can’t, and I’m not speaking to them anyway. I’m speaking to people on the sidelines, and if something’s ridiculous, I’m gonna laugh at it.
georgewiman 