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What's funny is that they didn't even think the world was flat in the middle ages. The medieval scholars knew the world was a sphere, and they had the experiments to prove it, based on nautical navigation and the uneven length of days.

The whole flat earth thing was something invented in the 19th century by Washing Irving to make Columbus look smarter compared to everyone else.

 Peregrine wrote:
I don't see why people are so shocked by the idea that legitimate flat-earth believers could exist. After all, a significant percentage (up to ~40%, depending on the poll question!) of people in the US believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and evolution is a lie, a belief that is at least as absurd and obviously false as flat-earth theory.

Not really. Evolution and ancient earth are very recent ideas. Just a few hundred years ago no one believed in evolution. Spherical earth on the other hand, is an idea that has already been around and proven for thousands of years (hell, I don't know if people ever believed in a flat earth at all, given that the roundness of the earth is so easy to proof). So while both a belief in a young earth and a belief in a flat earth are outdated ideas, one is much much more outdated than the other. Also, that the earth is spherical is much easier to proof than that the earth is millions of years old. The roundness of the earth is something you can easily see for yourself, the age of the earth is impossible to see without specialist knowledge and equipment.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 sebster wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I dunno, "rocket formulist" sounds kind of cool I think they were all called "rocket engineers", "chemical engineers", "mechanical engineers", "fluid dynamicists", etc. to begin with anyway, lol.

I've actually seen some young earth anti-science screeds that say all the achievements of the modern world, like mobile phones, aircraft, medicine etc, were all actually 'engineering', as distinct from 'science', which is all theoretical and bad. So this guy would probably say they are rocket engineers or something like that. And I agree 'rocket formulist' does sound like a pretty sweet job.

Was "rocket science" ever actually a term outside of pop culture? I feel like NASA engineers would have always called themselves, well, engineers.

I don't really have a problem with people making a distinction between engineering and science as long as it's within reason. Science is the building of knowledge to understand and predict the universe, engineering is the building and application of knowledge to create machines, structures, systems, etc.

All the Universities I've worked at have separate research facilities for science and engineering. If you go to a few engineering PhD defence/confirmation/review the examiners will often ask about practical application and will hound grad students for picking a parameter set that doesn't apply to an actual engineering problem.

I work as a researcher in an engineering department and have always described myself as either an engineer, a researcher or a research engineer rather than a "scientist" (not that I'm opposed to the label, but everything I do is very much focused on application of knowledge rather than just the knowledge itself).

I don't think anyone is arguing that they are can not sometimes be separate disciplines and types of specialisation.

But, the point here is an attempt to make a distinction between the two as separate entities/bodies of logic, rather than acknowledge that they are two faces of the interconnected physical foundations upon which modern civilisation has been made possible. Really, it's just another way (and attempt to explain) something that flies in the face of evidence and peer review, if it just so happens that you don't agree with what that experimentation has shown. Usually it's when there is a very powerful obstructing or influencing factor (perhaps either the state or a religion) which prevents someone being even remotely objective about the evidence that they are presented with, and so they can't come to a rational conclusion.

Although the more I read about this, the more I think that it was someone that wanted funding for their own rocket project, and has been prepared to do a silly dance to get it.

 Peregrine wrote:
I don't see why people are so shocked by the idea that legitimate flat-earth believers could exist. After all, a significant percentage (up to ~40%, depending on the poll question!) of people in the US believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and evolution is a lie, a belief that is at least as absurd and obviously false as flat-earth theory.

The funny thing is that most of the Christians I know don't take the whole 6000 years thing literally. But most of them are either Old Earth creationists or evolutionary creationists.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
What's funny is that they didn't even think the world was flat in the middle ages. The medieval scholars knew the world was a sphere, and they had the experiments to prove it, based on nautical navigation and the uneven length of days.

Even the Ancient Egyptians figured out that the surface of the Earth was a curve and suspected it was round.

So did the Greeks, and I think the Babylonians. Not to mention the Chinese.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
What's funny is that they didn't even think the world was flat in the middle ages. The medieval scholars knew the world was a sphere, and they had the experiments to prove it, based on nautical navigation and the uneven length of days.

The whole flat earth thing was something invented in the 19th century by Washing Irving to make Columbus look smarter compared to everyone else.

it's an idea that's been around for a long time, the bible is all about how flat the earth is, as well as the koran. The book of enoch is all about how flat the earth is, which the Christians dumped when they realized that it's all sorts of wrong. Plus Enoch just walked off with god to heaven and skipped that whole dying part. so that's at least a good two thousand years or more where the initial thought was the earth was flat. It was probably the middle ages that people started to realize it was a sphere, but before that, it was considered flat like a square pancake and everyone kept going on about it's four corners.




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Also, the dude chickened out and didn't launch

Also don't forget education was very hit and miss in the past. There are many ancient societies where there was a huge education gap between the upper and lower ranks/classes and another between urban and more rural communities.

So depending on the period in time and the society there might well have been varying opinions on this subject. Also for the average lower groups, unless you were sent to war, chances are you'd not migrate vast distances on your own by choice. So if the earth was flat, round, square, oblong etc... it didn't really have any effect on your life.

 Overread wrote:
Also for the average lower groups, unless you were sent to war, chances are you'd not migrate vast distances on your own by choice. So if the earth was flat, round, square, oblong etc... it didn't really have any effect on your life.

To be fair, it doesn't really have an effect on the overwhelming vast majority of peoples' life these days either

Bran Dawri wrote:
So did the Greeks, and I think the Babylonians. Not to mention the Chinese.

Yep. Circumstantial evidence suggests that even before they could prove it mathematically, many ancient cultures suspected or assumed the Earth was a sphere.

 d-usa wrote:
I realized that the fact that we have cats is proof that the earth couldn't be flat. Because all the cats would be hanging out near the edge, constantly pushing things off the planet into the darkness of space.

The ancient Norse considered this the doom of all things that survived Ragnorok. Freya's cats push the survives off into the Ginnungagap, before pushing each other off. The last cat standing is a child of Loki (of course) and just smugly looks like it did nothing wrong. This is the lesser known saga 'Catnorok', lesser known because every time it is written, a cat pees on it. No matter how high the shelf it is put on.

The launch has been delayed :(
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/26/566583007/flat-earther-postpones-launch-in-his-homemade-rocket-saying-it-s-not-easy

The launch, which he has billed as a crucial first step toward ultimately photographing our disc-world from space, had been scheduled for Saturday — before the Bureau of Land Management got wind of the plan and barred him from using public land in Amboy, Calif.

Also, the rocket launcher he had built out of a used motor home "broke down in the driveway" on Wednesday, according to Hughes. He said in a YouTube announcement that they'd eventually gotten the launcher fixed — but the small matter of federal permission proved a more serious stumbling block (for now).

Hughes asserted that the BLM last year had tacitly left the matter of permissions to the Federal Aviation Administration, and "of course, they can't honestly approve it," he added. The FAA "just said, 'Well, we know that you're going to do it there.' "

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 sebster wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I dunno, "rocket formulist" sounds kind of cool I think they were all called "rocket engineers", "chemical engineers", "mechanical engineers", "fluid dynamicists", etc. to begin with anyway, lol.

I've actually seen some young earth anti-science screeds that say all the achievements of the modern world, like mobile phones, aircraft, medicine etc, were all actually 'engineering', as distinct from 'science', which is all theoretical and bad. So this guy would probably say they are rocket engineers or something like that. And I agree 'rocket formulist' does sound like a pretty sweet job.

I always thought of engineering as a form of science, just practical and applied, as opposed to theoretical and empirical. I may be wrong.

Engineering is applied physics and physics is applied mathematics.

fresus wrote:
The launch has been delayed :(
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/26/566583007/flat-earther-postpones-launch-in-his-homemade-rocket-saying-it-s-not-easy

Delayed... He planning again. Just needs flat land and launcher not breaking down... Because a converted RV...

Might not be booking a flight.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Was "rocket science" ever actually a term outside of pop culture? I feel like NASA engineers would have always called themselves, well, engineers.

I think there's probably been both scientists and engineers in NASA developing various parts of the rockets.

I don't really have a problem with people making a distinction between engineering and science as long as it's within reason. Science is the building of knowledge to understand and predict the universe, engineering is the building and application of knowledge to create machines, structures, systems, etc.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with separating science and engineering, they're different disciplines, albeit with some links.

The problem comes with some anti-science people applying their own definitions to science and engineering, to dump all the stuff they want to deny in to 'science', and all the stuff they want to accept in to 'engineering'. So for instance, they'll say evolution is just made up 'science' and entirely theoretical. So you might point out that its weird to be rejecting science by posting on the internet because that's an amazing bit of science, and then you'll see them say modern telecommunications, all of it, is engineering.

Basically, they're picking and choosing which bits are science and which bits are engineering, in order to invent a way to dismiss the bits of science they want to ignore.


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 Gordon Shumway wrote:
I'm not sure anybody really believes it, its more of a 4chan meme, I think. That said, I am not sure some of the people there get irony, or satire, or if they really believe the stuff they are saying. It's sort of like, "you won't really elect that person, will you?". And then it happens, and people have to pick up the pieces.

Part of it is maybe people missing the joke, but I what's more common is people who use irony and satire as a shield. This works in two ways, one is when they say something to another person, and if that person reacts against them they'll say they only said it ironically, but and if they're not challenged then they know they're talking to one and then they speak freely. The other way this works is using it to shut down discussion when they're losing, if you reach a point they can't defend they'll claim they were only being ironic.

Andrew Anglin, who ran the Nazi site Daily Stormer used to brag to friends that the public front of his site was 'nazism disguised as ironic nazism'. After Charlottesville, when there was a large reaction against Anglin and others like him, including his site being rejected by a lot of providers, Anglin seems to have seen the wind blowing, and now describes his efforts as 'ironic nazism disguised as real nazism disguised as ironic nazism'.

I think the flat earth nonsense is the same. There's a clear appeal to rejecting institutions and experts, saying you know better. But when challenged in any serious way and the flat earth nonsense falls down, they retreat in to irony. And yeah, there's some genuine irony in some flat earth people, but plenty that isn't.


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 oldravenman3025 wrote:
The funny thing is that most of the Christians I know don't take the whole 6000 years thing literally. But most of them are either Old Earth creationists or evolutionary creationists.

My auntie once gave my dad a book making the case for a young earth. My dad hadn't worked in geology in a long time, but it was his first career, so he quickly picked up most of the nonsense in the book.

Funny thing is, though, while my auntie is deeply religious she is also very smart. While she has no science background past highschool, she was the dux of her school, and a trained economist, though she hadn't used her qualification in decades. But it's even weirder because her husband, my uncle, is an oil and gas geologist*, a job where the science is dependent on there being a very old earth. Whether he also believes the young earth stuff I don't know.



*I've gone blank on the name but its something like that, the guys who locate and estimate the size of reserves.

Man, i was hoping to watch a youtube video of it going horribly wrong today.

Guess i will have to find other entertainment.

Just type "ouch" into the search on YouTube. Go nuts!

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
What's funny is that they didn't even think the world was flat in the middle ages. The medieval scholars knew the world was a sphere, and they had the experiments to prove it, based on nautical navigation and the uneven length of days.

The whole flat earth thing was something invented in the 19th century by Washing Irving to make Columbus look smarter compared to everyone else.

Columbus was a nutbar. His logs are an entertaining (but often disturbing) read. Dealing with the currents from the amazon river (though he didn't know that), he concludes the Earth is pear shaped and they're travelling up hill. (Which is where the 'banana shaped' joke in Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes from).

Anyway, the accurate story is not that he believed the world was round and his contemporaries didn't, but that Columbus' math was wrong, and he thought the world was significantly smaller than it actually is. Thus, the Atlantic crossing to Asia was entirely manageable. Everyone else thought that the extra couple thousand miles (of their more accurate estimations) just wasn't viable, but frankly they'd be well rid of him. Obviously they turned out to be correct, but Columbus lucked into the fact that there were other continents in the way.

Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

 BigWaaagh wrote:
Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

That would be the Ark which lacks the water displacement required to float, right?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:
Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

That would be the Ark which lacks the water displacement required to float, right?

See, that's just "Science" which everyone knows is false. The indisputable truth of "Engineering" tells us the Ark just needs the required ballast of two of every animal on Earth and we're good to go.

 BigWaaagh wrote:
Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

What is that?

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:
Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

What is that?

This horrible monstrosity that receives taxpayer money in order to lie to people.

"The Earth is flat" - to what purpose? The world being a sphere has a scientific reason, but why would it be flat?

If it was flat then are we sitting on a bed of lava? How deep is that bed? Why hasn't anyone ever tried burying all the way down through that bed and out the other side?

...Ah, I suppose at this point someone's going to say, "well, I think you're point out the flaws in these folk's viewpoint". Yup... Meanwhile people still go Church at weekends.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 BigWaaagh wrote:
Since the whole space launch thing is seeming to be a non-starter, maybe lunkhead can see if he can borrow the full-size Ark from the 'Ark Encounter' attraction in Kentucky and take it out in the ocean to see the world's edge up close and first hand.

What is that?

This horrible monstrosity that receives taxpayer money in order to lie to people.

Despite not being a young earth creationist, I would go to it.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
I don't see why people are so shocked by the idea that legitimate flat-earth believers could exist. After all, a significant percentage (up to ~40%, depending on the poll question!) of people in the US believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and evolution is a lie, a belief that is at least as absurd and obviously false as flat-earth theory.

Not really. Evolution and ancient earth are very recent ideas. Just a few hundred years ago no one believed in evolution. Spherical earth on the other hand, is an idea that has already been around and proven for thousands of years (hell, I don't know if people ever believed in a flat earth at all, given that the roundness of the earth is so easy to proof). So while both a belief in a young earth and a belief in a flat earth are outdated ideas, one is much much more outdated than the other. Also, that the earth is spherical is much easier to proof than that the earth is millions of years old. The roundness of the earth is something you can easily see for yourself, the age of the earth is impossible to see without specialist knowledge and equipment.

What I suspect is that the scholars of the past have long known and accepted that the world is round. At least since the time of the Greek Golden Age. Homer is known to have written in favor of the Earth being flat, but the fact he felt the need to debate someone on it means that even in his own time there were people who thought it wasn't flat. By the time you get to the Middle Ages most of the educated classes of the world seemed to assume, or know that the Earth was round.

Common folks I think probably weren't in on any of that stuff though. You're standard Thracian farmer or French peasant probably didn't think or care about any of that stuff. To them the world was flat because when they looked around it looked flat. It's not like there was a public education system back then or anything, and for most of history people were illiterate and probably not capable of anything but the most basic math.

 Wyrmalla wrote:
"The Earth is flat" - to what purpose? The world being a sphere has a scientific reason, but why would it be flat?

If it was flat then are we sitting on a bed of lava? How deep is that bed? Why hasn't anyone ever tried burying all the way down through that bed and out the other side?

...Ah, I suppose at this point someone's going to say, "well, I think you're point out the flaws in these folk's viewpoint". Yup... Meanwhile people still go Church at weekends.

Not lava - elephants. Four of them (though there used to be five) all standing on the back of the great turtle A'Tuin.

An alternate, though similar, theory is described as 'Turtles All the Way Down'.

The Auld Grump

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 sebster wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I dunno, "rocket formulist" sounds kind of cool I think they were all called "rocket engineers", "chemical engineers", "mechanical engineers", "fluid dynamicists", etc. to begin with anyway, lol.

I've actually seen some young earth anti-science screeds that say all the achievements of the modern world, like mobile phones, aircraft, medicine etc, were all actually 'engineering', as distinct from 'science', which is all theoretical and bad. So this guy would probably say they are rocket engineers or something like that. And I agree 'rocket formulist' does sound like a pretty sweet job.

I always thought of engineering as a form of science, just practical and applied, as opposed to theoretical and empirical. I may be wrong.

Engineering is applied physics and physics is applied mathematics.

Bah. Physics is coming up with explanations for engineering after something works.