How a Celebrity’s Silly Belief in Flat Earth Can Be Useful By Lawrence Krauss

[jakeXT]

1. Time zones: My favorite of the moment. There are 24 time zones on Earth, and the only way I can see that sunset would move smoothly by an hour as each time zone is passed—and more importantly that the sun would set on either side of the international date line exactly 24 hours apart—is if the planet is a sphere.

2. Seasons: Many people think it is colder in the winter than the summer is because the earth is farther from the sun. But of course such a notion is Northern Hemisphere–centric, because winter in the North is summer in the South. The tilt of the Earth is responsible for the seasons, and again, if the Earth were flat, I cannot see any possible explanation of how the summer turns smoothly into fall, nor why summer in the North is winter in the South.

3. GPS: Perhaps B.o.B thinks that the GPS device in his car is a vast conspiracy designed to tell him, and only him, exactly where he is. But for the rest of us, GPS systems only work because of the network of satellites orbiting the Earth in appropriate stable orbits. Unless you think the laws of gravity don’t work in space as they do on Earth then such stable orbits wouldn’t be possible around a flat Earth.

So those are a few somewhat out of the ordinary reasons for knowing the Earth is not flat, even if you don’t believe what the photos we have from space tell us.

Is it a waste of time to come up with these? No. I don’t think so. It is sometimes worth sitting down and asking why we believe even the most fundamental things that science has told us about nature. Because we should all be skeptical, and we should remember that in science there is no such thing as authority. Every “fact” we assert has to have some sound, and testable, empirical reasoning behind it. Nothing should be accepted on faith. But skepticism has its limits. As Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the former publisher of the New York Times, once said, “I believe in an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/01/29/why_rapper_b_o_b_s_belief_in_a_flat_earth_can_be_useful.html

It reminded me of the documentary with Jim Al-Khalili, where he measured the earth's radius using the method of Al-Biruni
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Biruni

(It's at 1 hour and 17 minutes in the video)

[VMA131Marine]

1. Then there's the story of Eratosthenes

who made what maybe the first recorded measurement of the circumference of the Earth around 200 BC.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

[jakeXT]

2. I remember the Cosmos episode, it's a great argument against a flat earth

[MisterP]

3. OTOH isn't Krauss's outfit the one that banned quantum mechanics?

y'know, damning ball lightning as woo and ending careers, until it was quietly admitted?

[jakeXT]

4. By outfit you mean Arizone State University ? I don't know anything about it. /nt

[DetlefK]

5. The best Twitter-post from B.o.B.'s Flat-Earth rant (paraphrased):

"I was in a plane really up high! And the horizon wasn't curved even though the video shows it as curved! It looks curved on camera because the lenses are curved!"