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Friday, December 2, 2016

Flat Earth Follies: Clouds Lit From Underneath Prove Flat Earth, say what?

Flat Earth Claim


Sunlight hitting the bottoms of clouds proves Flat Earth and yet (somehow) is impossible on a Globe (even though on a Globe it would be much further away and so the same argument would actually apply in both cases-except that argument is just Flat Out wrong and absurd as I will show).


The Facts


I wish these guys would just get to the point -- this is 42 minutes of mind-numbing rambling.

There are a whole slew of errors in this video, I'll hit on a FEW of them.  Feel free to post more in the comments.  I had to skip forward... like a lot...

At around 13:15 he shows a diagram with a greatly over tilted Earth.  He even notes this is tilted too far, but he still uses it to make the point that "all this area" would be in total darkness.  Well yes, it is in winter... but it's far LESS area than shown and this actually matches reality.

At 13:58 he goes on a numerology rant about it being tilted at 23.3333° "which leaves 66.66666° off of 90°" --- Um.... that math doesn't even work, it would be 66.6667, but it's even more wrong than that because the ACTUAL tilt of the Earth is ~23.439281° if you don't round it, which irrelevantly leaves 66.560719° which is... well nothing.  Not that it really matters if a 2/3 happens to show up somewhere.   Oddly enough when you have physical processes that vary over time they often have to cross 2/3 somewhere along the way in SOME unit of measure or another.  Have you ever driven at 70 km / hour?  Then YOU have gone 66.6 km /hour!  You must be Satan himself!  That is exactly how stupid most of these arguments are.

I asked him to correct this in his video notes.  Will he?


His statements around 15:59 are also false because he forgot about refraction which bends the light about half a degree around so slightly more than 50% of the face towards the Sun would get some light.   Since the angle is very steep at the edges that half degree bend actually covers a significant distance.

I asked him to correct this in his video notes.  Will he?


His drawing is extremely misleading and in error - the clouds aren't on the sunny side.

Here is a better one -- the clouds are NOT way out in front -- they are behind the Earth.  This isn't to scale or anything but I tried to put at least SOME sense of proportion into it.


Look at his absurd version and then he says "see, the sun rays would be going way UP like this" and draws lines from the sun to the cloud...



There is so much wrong with this I'll just leave it at that.

I asked him to correct this in his video notes.  Will he?


The Oblateness is actually only 0.3% which makes it almost impossible to see in images that are not very high resolution - if you get the Himawari 8 images you can count the pixels and see the oblateness matches since Himawari 8 takes a full frame image from a great distance.

I asked him to correct this in his video notes.  Will he?


I cover crepuscular rays in this post on my blog.

They absolutely do not "point" to the sun any more than railroads "point" to a point on the horizon where they converge.  You are viewing parallel lines at an angle and perspective makes them appear to converge.   I doubt you will understand or be convinced by this alone so I don't expect a retraction on this one as it requires some understanding and isn't a simple fact.

Where is the Sun here?  Not one single Flat Earther seems to have the answer for this (so far).



Here is a 3D model in SketchUp where the rays are absolutely parallel.  When viewed at an angle they also APPEAR to converge, just like the railroad tracks and exactly like the rays of the Sun.



After he rambles on some more about 'perspective' (and gets most of it wrong) he offers his Flat Earth model... Oh boy...


This just is not how Perspective actually works, as I explained in my post about it.

Perspective WOULD allow a distant object to APPEAR below the level of a near object but this appearance would NEVER allow the light from that object to illuminate the near object FROM BELOW.

It doesn't change the ACTUAL physical relationship of things FFS!

This is their failure, in a nutshell.  They literally think that because something is far away it is magically able to light something from underneath it even though it is actually higher than that object.  Just Wow.


Conclusion


So Busted.


1 comment:

  1. Flat earthers are the latest version of the Carrot Theory of Creationism which is "Carrots and Bananas don't have seeds, so how do they grow?" They do have seeds. "No they don't". Vegetables grow below ground, fruits grow above ground. Fruits grow from flowers. "I've never seen an orange flower!". Then where does Orange blossom honey come from? Buckwheat is a fruit. "No is not, is a grain!" Buckwheat botanically speaking, is a fruit, like Tomato. "Tomato's aren't fruits they are vegetables". They are fruits, they are from the Tobacco family. "You must be an idiot, tomatoes dont look anything like tobacco!". Tomato *are* fruits. Buckwheat is a fruit. Peanuts are beans. "If they are fruits then how come they aren't sweet!" Lemons aren't sweet. (Puzzled and Perplexed look): "Well, I still think they are fruits...."

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