globeheadscience

[globeheadscience]

A Rough Guide to spotting bad science.

[globeheadscience]

As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I’d prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

[globeheadscience]

I’m a bit confused, why don’t you think Einstein used the scientific method? He started with an observation, developed a model to explain it, and later had that model tested. In fact, he was the one that said “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”. And indeed, thousands of experiments from all around the world haven’t been able to prove him wrong yet.

I’ll certainly concede that certain topics in modern theoretical physics are struggling on the the ‘testable implication’ front, such as string theory, but testing theoretical models of high energy particle physics has never been stronger.

The next time a Flat-Earther decides to pull some crap to prove the Earth is flat, remind them that’s not how the scientific method works.

In science you start with a theory and then try to prove it wrong. Just because something “proves a scientific theory right” doesn’t make the theory the be all end all.

I could theororize water makes humans immortal, but that theory is wrong because plenty of people drink water and die.

[globeheadscience]

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

Galileo Galilei

[globeheadscience]

That’s not a legitimate argument against any of my points, you’re changing the subject and hedging your entire argument on historical ignorance. If you really wanted to prove flat Earth, you would find logical inconsistencies in my points, or better yet, you would actually perform the experiments I suggested.

Science is not some grand conspiracy set on world domination, there’s simply no point to it. Power is nothing if it isn’t supported on a foundation of truth. As a member of the scientific community myself, I can safely say most of us dream about solving the mysteries of nature and taking in the beauty of the cosmos, not some sort of mustache-twirling villainy. 

You asked for repeatable, testable experiments you could perform, and yet you refuse to test them. Put your money where your mouth is, if you think they are bad experiments, do them and show me they give no clear answer! This is how science works! You don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything. I think Randall Munroe put it best:

“The wonderful thing about science is that it doesn’t ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes.”

@bcuzloki Ah, I missed your criticism of Eratosthenes experiment. To start out, crepuscular rays are actually parallel, the light doesn’t refract much in the atmosphere. They appear to be angled because of perspective, parallel lines will appear to converge the farther away you look.

And yes, if light was perfectly parallel, an eclipse wouldn’t have a penumbra. The approximation that light travels in parallel lines only works over small distances, but when talking about much larger distances like from the Earth to the Moon, this approximation becomes invalid.

Also, with astronomers, sometimes they do have to take into effect the movement of Earth. In fact, this is one way we can approximate the distances to stars. This is done by observing how much a star appears to ‘wobble’ throughout the year, called the stellar parallax. And yes, even our Solar system is speeding through the galaxy, but even this speed is nothing compared to the distances between stars. It takes approximately 250 million years for our solar system to travel around the galaxy once, so if your observations are taken over the course of several decades, it’ll look like you hardly moved an inch. If you’d like a bit more detail, I suggest looking over this. Point is, this is something astronomers have though a lot about.

[globeheadscience]

@bcuzloki Ah, I missed your criticism of Eratosthenes experiment. To start out, crepuscular rays are actually parallel, the light doesn’t refract much in the atmosphere. They appear to be angled because of perspective, parallel lines will appear to converge the farther away you look.

And yes, if light was perfectly parallel, an eclipse wouldn’t have a penumbra. The approximation that light travels in parallel lines only works over small distances, but when talking about much larger distances like from the Earth to the Moon, this approximation becomes invalid.

Also, with astronomers, sometimes they do have to take into effect the movement of Earth. In fact, this is one way we can approximate the distances to stars. This is done by observing how much a star appears to ‘wobble’ throughout the year, called the stellar parallax. And yes, even our Solar system is speeding through the galaxy, but even this speed is nothing compared to the distances between stars. It takes approximately 250 million years for our solar system to travel around the galaxy once, so if your observations are taken over the course of several decades, it’ll look like you hardly moved an inch. If you’d like a bit more detail, I suggest looking over this. Point is, this is something astronomers have though a lot about.

[globeheadscience]

@bcuzloki I’ll top it off with the Coriolis effect. I would like to see the source for this laser target thing, because the details really do matter. If you show me the exact details of the altitude of the laser, the altitude of the target, and the distance between them, I will personally do the math and post it to see if it checks out.

And you’re absolutely right, the variables in the drain can completely overpower any possible Coriolis effect, in fact, I have two sinks, and each one spins in a different direction. Not to mention, the direction you fill the water in can have an effect on the direction. That’s why I said this is a tricky experiment to set up, you need to account for all of these.

If you plan to try this out, I recommend you do what Veritasium did. Get a kiddie pool, poke a hole in the center and attach that to a hose. Fill up the pool in the opposite direction it’s expected to turn, so it can’t possibly contribute to the Coriolis force. Leave it overnight to let the water settle, and then open a valve in the hose to slowly let the water out. You can put drops of food dye in the water to see the direction of rotation. Then, repeat this several times to make sure the direction is not randomly chosen.

[globeheadscience]

@bcuzloki Next up, Folcault pendulums. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by the swing ‘breaking down’ over time. Sure, energy will be lost through friction, but it won’t affect the direction in which the pendulum swings, only the amplitude. If we were to assume the pendulum was in a completely inertial reference frame, like a flat Earth, there simply wouldn’t be any outside variables that could give the pendulum extra momentum in a perpendicular direction.

And as I said, if you don’t trust museums, give it a try yourself. If the swing randomly ‘breaks down’ as you predict, then in theory you should see the swing tend to turn in both directions after several trials, with no clear preference. But if I’m right, it will always tend to turn in one direction at the predicted rate.

As for helicopters, it would affect their direction over several hours, but this effect is very small compared to all the other variables that come into play when flying a helicopter. Hovering one in place is a difficult balancing act that requires constant input and adjustment. Even the mechanism a helicopter uses to cancel out its own rotational momentum from its spinning blades isn’t prefect, so it’s by no means a controlled experiment. Still, if you had an extremely precise automated helicopter with ideal weather, after several hours, you would see this effect, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to try that yet.

[globeheadscience]

@bcuzloki Let’s take each claim one step at a time. I’ll make a separate post for each so we can organize our thoughts and not meld everything together. I’ll start with the Apollo retroreflectors.

So you claim that the reflections from the surface of the Moon don’t prove anything, since the surface of the Moon is reflective on its own. And, to an extent, you are correct. The Moon is very reflective, however, on its own it is unable to reflect a laser with that degree of precision. While the Moon does reflect the light, it gets scattered so much that by the time the light reaches Earth, it’s undetectable. Even a regular mirror on the surface wouldn’t suffice, since it would be reflected away at a different angle. To see a return signal, you simply need a special mirror that will reflect the light directly back at the source, aka, a retroreflector. Indeed, when these observatories aim the laser at other parts of the Moon, they don’t detect a return signal.

Even if you were to assume that the Moon could do this on its own, it would still be proof enough. We know the speed at which light travels, so if you found the time it took to see a reflected pulse, you could calculate the relative distance to the Moon with incredible precision. In fact, this is how we know that the Moon is drifting away from us at approximately 3.8 cm per year.

[globeheadscience]

@bcuzloki It would be my absolute pleasure to provide some third party sources that the Earth is a globe, as well as a few experiments you can perform yourself.

Let’s start with the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment that the Apollo missions left on the Moon. These were basically large arrays of specially designed mirrors that reflect light back at the source, so if you have a powerful enough laser and point it at one, you can detect a reflection! Don’t just take NASA’s word for it though, many different private research observatories around the world have independently confirmed the locations of these retroreflectors. Some of these observatories were MIT, the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, the Pic du Midi Observatory in France, the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, and the Wettzell fundamental station in Germany, just to name a few. If you want to see the data yourself, it’s available from the Paris Observatory Lunar Analysis Center here.

The next is a relatively easy experiment you can preform yourself, the Foucault pendulum. If you release a large pendulum from rest in an isolated environment, it will slowly start turning as the Earth rotates underneath it. This effect is greater the farther you are from the equator, though. Some say this is actually caused by some bias in the initial swing or the joint used, but from the physics side of things, it would be incredibly difficult to affect the behavior of a pendulum 9 hours in advance with a precision within a quarter of an inch. Still, if you don’t trust any universities/museums with their pendulums, I urge you to try it yourself. It doesn’t require any special equipment, but you’ll probably want a pretty tall room to perform this in, I recommend a stairwell.

Another fun experiment you can do is to demonstrate the Coriolis force with draining water. The rotation of the Earth creates a ‘pseudo force’ that influences the direction which storms spin. Specifically, large storms mostly spin clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere. This is a bit of a tricky experiment to set up though, since you need an extremely controlled environment to remove all other variables. Veritasium and SmarterEveryDay made an amazing video performing this experiment here.

So, don’t just take NASA/the government’s word for it, there is plenty of other evidence to support the fact that the Earth is a globe, and if you’d like me to provide more evidence or want to me elaborate on any of these, I would be happy to, but this is enough typing for now, haha. Also, personally speaking, if the government is holding up some grand conspiracy, they are doing a more competent job at doing that than literally anything else.

[globeheadscience]

Heat is radiated away from spacecraft in the form of infrared light because of blackbody radiation. Blackbody radiation basically means that if something has a non-zero temperature, it’s going to give off energy as light. This is the same reason why hot metal glows red. So yes, even in a complete vacuum heat can dissipate.

This was actually the cause of the “Pioneer Anomaly”, which caused the Pioneer 10/11 probes to mysteriously slow down. It turns out, the probes were dissipating heat more on one side than another, creating a slight pressure in one direction. The thermal radiation was actually carrying momentum away in the form of light!

If you have any other questions like this, I’d be happy to explain or elaborate.

ah!!!! thank you for this photo of our beautiful earth!!!

[globeheadscience]

Maybe I am the CIA, and I’m just trying to convince people the Earth is a globe to complete our master plan of... er... pushing people off the edge? Sure, why not.

Or maybe the Earth is neither a sphere nor a plane. They make the general population think it’s a globe, but seed the conspiracy theory that it’s flat to throw people off the actual truth. The Earth is actually a big doughnut.

#confirmed

ah!!!! thank you for this photo of our beautiful earth!!!

[globeheadscience]

I’m always amused when people start talking about astronomy related conspiracy theories because my buddy. My pal. Astronomers are fucking TERRIBLE at keeping secrets. 

Like in the two months between the discovery of the colliding neutron stars and the official announcement it was the worst kept secret in the world because there was a gamma-ray burst and then suddenly every telescope in the world was pointing at the same target and what were they looking at??? Not to mention the two separate people who accidentally TWEETED about it! Whoops? 

Like there were so many conversations among astronomers basically going *wink wink nudge nudge* “you know the thing?” “yeah the thing!” “amazing right?” By the time the announcement was made it was basically like “ok everyone look surprised now”

And yet conspiracy theorists think that somehow these guys could keep the earth being flat a secret for thousands of years. HOW.

[globeheadscience]

The truth has been told

[globeheadscience]

So, what does the flat Earth look like then? Please don’t dumb it down for me, you can’t expect people to jump on this idea if you keep giving them inaccurate models.

ah!!!! thank you for this photo of our beautiful earth!!!

[globeheadscience]

OK let’s take this one step at a time.

So storms blow wherever the wind takes them? Then why does the wind blow like that? There’s a clear pattern with the direction storms spin given their latitude. If the Earth really is flat, there must be some mechanism behind this.

And if you think the Foucalt pendulum is ‘fraudulent’, try it yourself! I have, and it seems to work fine for me. I released it without giving it any extra velocity in any direction so it would fall in a straight line with no initial angular momentum. Still, it rotated in the expected direction at the expected rate. It’s pretty easy to set up, if you really think it’s fake, do it yourself and don���t take my word for it.

And what you said about a helicopter is, sort of, true, but you wouldn’t really be able to measure it on that scale, especially over effects like wind. But when it comes to rockets, the rotation of the Earth becomes dramatically noticeable. I can do the math later if you really want me to. Launching rockets into orbit is much easier going East than going West, and a rocket in a polar orbit will appear to curve according to the Coriolis force.

And ho boy, the video. It seems his main complaint is that the warm band across the equator doesn’t exactly line up with the tilt of the Earth. And, well, it doesn’t. Over the course of a year, this warm band shifts up and down due to the tilt of the Earth, which gives us seasons. It lags behind the tilt of the Earth a little bit because it takes time to heat up or cool off that much water.

Why do most storms in the north and south hemispheres spin in different directions? Why do Foucault pendulums work? Why do things seem to weigh slightly less at the equator?

Storms blow wherever the wind takes them! That should be a simple given answer. It has nothing to do with any sort of imaginative curvature. Faucault’s pendulum is a fraudulent creation. Its movement is not effected by the ‘rotation’ of the Earth, but by the way it is released. If it were correct, then a helicopter would be able to take off, hover, and land at a different location due to the ‘rotation’ of the Earth! There’s just far too many inconsistencies. The equator simply doesn’t exist! Here’s an educational video as to why: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nKt2uoQxCH0

[globeheadscience]

So, is Australia supposed to be stretched out all weird like that? Why is it bigger than all of China? Everything here looks like it’s shown through a fun-house mirror, I wonder why...

But seriously, you could at least have chosen a better projection, azimuthal equidistant distorts the continents way too much to be plausible. The Winkel-Tripel, Robinson, or even the Van der Grinten (if you wanted to keep it circular) would have all made the continents far less distorted than this. Just saying, you had options.

ah!!!! thank you for this photo of our beautiful earth!!!