The Earth is Flat
Posted By crates on April 7, 2008
I just started this book: The World is Flat which was published in 2005 with at least two updates since. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, argues for the idea that due to globalization the Earth’s economic playing field has been leveled to the point where all the players have an equal opportunity for success. This process is having a revolutionary affect upon the economics of the world.
I’ve only gotten past the first three chapters or so, but is an interesting and thought-provoking book.
Apparently he isn’t the only person to think that the Earth is flat. The Flat Earth Society is an organization of like-minded people who…well, here’s an excerpt of some of their arguments against a spherical earth:
1. “But how could the Earth continue to move at the same speed for as long a time as the “round Earthers” say that it has existed for; namely, several billion years. If outer space were a vacuum, then there would be no problem. But space is not a vacuum, it is instead filled with ether. The earth would have to have been pushing its way through the ether for all those billions of years. Shouldn’t it have slowed somewhere along the line?”
2. “[The Earth] according to “round Earth” theory, orbit[s] the sun at a radius of around five-hundred million kilometers. Were this the case, the Earth would be an accelerated object in circular motion around its sun. And thereby are the problems introduced. The Earth accelerating in circular motion would behave no differently than would a car taking a corner: loose objects (humans and animals would act like loose change or a cup of coffee on the dashboard) would slide around, or be thrown off completely.”
3. “Once again, picture in your mind a round world. Now imagine that there are two people on this world, one at each pole. For the person at the top of the world, (the North Pole), gravity is pulling him down, towards the South Pole. But for the person at the South Pole, shouldn’t gravity pull him down as well? What keeps our person at the South Pole from falling completely off the face of the “globe”?”
4. “What would happen if the person on one side [of the Earth] decided to visit the other? Since the man at the North Pole has a different idea of what is down and up (and in fact experiences an opposite pull from the Earth’s gravity) than the person at the South Pole does, when the denizen of the frozen Arctic visits his Antarctic counterpart, they will experience gravitational pulls exactly opposite of each other! The human from the North Pole will “fall up”, never returning to the ground, and will continue falling forever into the deep void of outer space!”
5. “While flat-Earthers know that the ocean is really just a large bowl, (with great sheets of ice around the edges to hold the ocean back), and the atmosphere is contained by a large dome, the backwards “round-Earth” way of thinking would have you believe that all those trillions of gallons of water and air just “stick” to the planet’s surface. Water or air that (according to “round-Earth” theory) starts on one side of the planet could end up completely on the other side in a matter of only a few days [due to currents and turbulence]. With all this turbulence and motion, if the world were round, the oceans should all fall “down” into the sky, leaving the planet dry and barren, and the atmosphere would simply float away. Why, just look at the moon. It is round, like a ball, and yet it has no atmosphere at all.”
6. “Taking into account the “gravitational charge” analogy once more, and assuming that for some reason the atmosphere was able to align itself with the new direction of the theoretical “gravitational field”, we are faced with a new problem involving another branch of physics known as thermodynamics.”
These cogent arguments conclude with the statement:
“Obviously, the world is static, the fixed center of the Universe. The sun, planets and stars all revolve around it (although not necessarily in circular paths), in a plane level with the flat Earth.”
I have quoted extensively from this site because I was astounded by its arguments…
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