Flat Earth Frolic

I bowl a googly at the beliefs and doctrine of what amounts to a religious cult hell bent on drawing blood from the innocent

We live in an age where Flat Earth is a thing. When I told Mrs Dee that this would be my topic this week she looked at me “gone out”, as they say:

“Do you mean to tell me that there are people who still believe the Earth is flat?”

“Oh, yes. They’re quite serious about it.”

“But, but, but…” [silence and pained expression with hand gestures]

Aided by the internet, and especially social media, a core of rather curious people are building a Flat Earth following and, against all odds, they’re doing surprisingly well. It’s easy to see why – grab a 2 metre length of 4 x 2 seasoned wood, hold it up to the horizon and voilà; the Earth is flat as flat can be. Grab a 3 metre length and the Earth is still as flat as flat can, so it must be true and I shall name these folk flarthians for they are followers of Flarth!

As for those photos from NASA, ESA and the rest, well they’re all fake of course. Same for all that footage from the International Space Station. Better forget any camera footage from high fliers like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird also. Fake, fake, and fake, apparently. From what I can gather the Earth is flat for flarthians primarily because the Bible says so, yet flarthians are happy to concede that the moon and planets are spherical. We must be thankful for small mercies, I guess.

I’m not a Bible scholar, so decided to Google the matter and came across this incisive comment from Fr. Charles Grondin. These heavy duty Catholic dudes in those splendid robes know their caramelised onions but what I was most delighted to learn from the friar was that the Flat Earth spiel originated with nineteenth century fundamentalists. Well, now, that explains a LOT!

I gather that Isaiah 40:22 is a sure-fire crackerjack for flarthians, the King James translation (KJV) offering this:

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

The circle of the Earth, eh? Not the disc of the Earth, then, or the dish of the Earth or the bowl of the Earth, but the circle. Sounds very geometrical to me, and rightly so for the same Hebrew word used to provide ‘circle’ in Isaiah 40:22 – ח֝֗וּג – is found in Proverbs 8:27, in which the mighty KJV has this to offer:

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:

A compass now, is it? What we need is a learned Hebrew scholar and top-notch Bible translator who is not afraid to upset the apple cart of Eden! But this is just word play, so let us see how far we get with something physical like a 2 metre length of well-seasoned 4 x 2 hardwood that has been planed to god-like perfection.

Pink Plank Plonker

We might ask what we can deduce with that 2 metre length of well-seasoned 4 x 2, so let’s do some sums. Consider a pink person on a sandy beach somewhere lovely. This person, whom we shall call Rodney, wants to determine the Earth is as flat as claimed so he takes with him his carefully prepared plank:

He holds it up nice and square with the aim of measuring the distance delta (δ) with a Vernier gauge borrowed from his uncle. The idea in his mind is that if the Earth is a disc then delta will be zero but if the Earth is spherical then delta will not be zero; and he’ll be able to spot that, of course. Job done, innit?

After an ice cream  and some deep thought Rodney realises that the geometry of the situation is such that he can carefully lower the plank so that the two ends line up with the watery horizon, thus leaving a little bit sticking up in the middle that will also offer an estimate of delta (and will be a trifle easier to physically measure). Without realising it Rodney has settled on the solution to calculating the height of a segment of a chord within a circle (sagitta), and is delighted to find a Wiki entry on this very matter. But better than that Rodney has found an online calculator that will provide every possible answer! Let us begin…

Rodney enters 6387.1km for the radius of the Earth (whether flat or spherical), followed by 2.00m for his carefully prepared plank then hits the calculate button with precision set to 5 decimal places. This is what he sees:

The first row provides his answer, with delta fetching-up at 0.00008mm. Rodney slumps as he realises his uncle’s Vernier gauge is only accurate to within ±0.1mm for he’s going to need a device that is 1,250 times more precise! After a second ice cream he has a brilliant idea; he’ll set the height of Arc to 0.1mm and see what plank size he’s going to need to measure to this level of accuracy. This is what he now sees on his phone:

Rodney feels crushed. He’s going to need a perfectly planed plank that is 71.5 metres long if he is to stand a chance of detecting a delta as big as 0.1mm. Ouch. Not wishing to remain a pink plank plonker he decides to use it to start a beach BBQ.

In case anyone finds this a terribly tall tale let me tell you now that I’ve sat giggling at YouTube footage of folk taking their planks to the beach in order to prove the Earth is flat. None of them find a measurable delta (surprise, surprise) and so they all conclude their cherished Flat Earth theory must be correct. What these Rodneys fail to realise is that they’ve established an experimental situation in which their hypothesis cannot be falsified.

What Goes Up Doesn’t Come Down

These days those partying late into the night can look to the skies and see something rather funky that has nothing to do with intoxication… Elon’s Starlink. It’s quite something to see a chain of bright beads silently moving across the inky heavens, though I would argue the most thrilling sight is the International Space Station for you can wave to the people on board in full knowledge that they’re likely having a cuppa (though in a different sort of way). There are some wonderful apps you can download that enable you to track the ISS, Elon’s Starlink and more in real time, and right now (08:50BST) the app I use on my Android is showing me more visible satellites for my location than I can readily count. If I flip to N2YO.com on my desktop I see that this resource is tracking no less 28,849 objects in orbit, with a feature article entitled How many satellites can we safely fit in Earth orbit? Yikes!

Being a simplistic guy who fell for Newton’s Laws of motion at an early age I would normally assume that those 28,849 objects are kept up there by virtue of their angular momentum as they are constantly pulled toward the planet by gravity. Being a flarthian I would need to abandon the notion of an orbit and proffer the notion of a race track, with satellites held up by lengths of string. As an extreme flarthian I would even dare to declare satellites and their orbits to be fake, fake, fake even though I could watch several hundred on any one night with my bare eyeballs. Clearly what goes up doesn’t have to come down if it doesn’t want to in Flat Earth world and Newton probably dreamed the whole apple thing whilst high on scrumpy.

What Happens At The Edge?

There are some splendid cartoons in which giant cats are pushing things off the edge of the Earth but dedicated flarthians will tell you there’s a giant wall of ice around the perimeter of the Earth disc that we pretend is a continent called Antarctica. This is particularly strange for me for, as a young scientist studying for my PhD, I was given the opportunity to spend some time supporting one of the bases there (I now forget which). In the end I decided to remain warm, sane and close to pubs selling fine ales. What is stranger still is that you can book Antarctic flights and cruises to go see for yourself if you have more money than sense ($62,895 to be precise). Admittedly, there are very few flights right over the whole continent (and for jolly good reason) but if you manage to get to Australia you can book a whopper of a flight with Qantas. There’s video proof of this but hardened flarthians will no doubt claim this is faked. There we go with that unfalsifiable hypothesis again!

In rejecting all forms of evidence out of hand flarthians have rendered their entire argument to be unscientific (as if it was in the first instance!). I’ve yet to ask a flarthian what evidence they would accept that has the potential to refute their hypothesis but I doubt I’ll get any kind of sensible answer from folk whose fervour exceeds that of the suited Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on my door.

Ringing The Changes

If we munch on a sufficient number of biscuits (ideally Cornish Fairings that are dipped in hot, sweet tea) we come to realise that flarthians concern themselves with optical geometry. Things look flat and so they must be flat (the Bible says so), with many phenomena that we see explainable by a modified Flat Earth model (think of a big pasta dish with a hump in the middle). When it comes to optical stuff there is topological equivalence in this matter and so both flat and spherical Earth models will serve us well. But is there another way to distinguish matters? A way that avoids optical geometry altogether? Well yes there is, and the clue is in the section header.

HELMHOLTZ!

An answer in a sneeze. If anybody cares to browse this Wiki entry on Helmholtz resonance they’ll realise that spherical bodies possessing a cavity do something special: they hum and throb when the air inside is agitated by blowing across a small opening. We might at this stage like to grab a milk bottle, beer bottle or wine bottle and experience this for ourselves. Those with ocarinas (a.k.a. potato flutes) can also join in.

That there humming and throbbing isn’t any old humming and throbbing. There is a dominant pitch and there will be harmonics just as with any musical instrument. As it so happens the harmonics of a spherical resonator (e.g. Helmholtz jar) come in a different flavour to those of a linear resonator (e.g. flute, guitar) in that they offer a different mathematical progression. There’s a nice Wiki entry here and here for those who want to get into the meat of this.

The Earth isn’t hollow as far as we can make out so we can’t go blowing down a big hole somewhere. What we can do, however, is consider the atmosphere and the ionosphere in particular. Either the ionosphere is a spherical structure wrapped around a spherical Earth or it is a flat disc sitting above a Flat Earth. The former will give rise to spherical harmonics when the ionosphere is agitated and the latter will give rise to linear harmonics (like a cymbal being struck).

So how can we agitate the ionosphere? Well, this is being done 24/7/365 without any effort on our behalf and we call it the Schumann Resonance. I don’t want to go into detail on this phenomenon in this article and keen folk can check it out here. What this all boils down to is a simple question:

Q: Does the Schumann Resonance follow a spherical or linear harmonic progression?

If the former then the Earth must be spherical; if the latter then the Earth must be flat. Simples! A falsifiable hypothesis at last, and it doesn’t rely on faked images from NASA.

It is a simple matter to derive the harmonic series for both spherical and linear oscillators with a fundamental frequency of 7.83Hz and back in 2016 I cobbled a simple spreadsheet together to put under the nose of the bewildered. Here’s a screenshot of that spreadsheet that has been revised with the latest (2023) measurements:

Here we have the first six harmonics for something resonating at a fundamental frequency of 7.83Hz. The first column provides the harmonics that would be theoretically generated by a Flat Earth oscillator and the second column is what we theoretically get from a spherical oscillator. The final column shows what has been measured by Tang et al (2023).

NOTE: When considering observed values please to remember they are estimates that vary over time – they are not fixed in concrete. If your Russian is good you can head over to the global reference laboratory at Tomsk and see what’s cooking frequency-wise in near real-time - a quick link may be found here. On this page you get to see a time series plot of the first four harmonics over the last three days. Tasty!

OK, so what do you think of that slide? Is the Schumann Resonance indicative of a Flat Earth or a spherical Earth? My eyeballs suggest spherical by a long way. No matter how we butter this bread the Schumann Resonance, ringing like a bell, is telling us that the Earth’s ionosphere should be considered to be a Helmholtz-like resonator and therefore the Earth herself is nice and round and juicy. You may now burn your planks or glue your breasts to something as you see fit.

What’s Going On?

These days we’ve got a whole big bunch of people investing time and energy into some curious beliefs, some of which raise my eyebrows and some of which sure make me smile. I couldn’t quite envision the late Queen Elizabeth II as a reptilian hive mother but this sort of thing sure sells books… and fabulously expensive tickets to slick shows.

What I’d love is a coffee table book of every conspiracy that has gained traction in the last 60 years. It’s going to be a big book, and it’s going to be utterly fascinating. On my top shelf gathering dust are two tomes telling us all what terrible things were going to happen in 2012, and with plenty of juicy proof. I’d like to think the authors are well-embarrassed but maybe they pulled in sufficient moola to brave-it in public and not blush. But here’s the thing… that fat list of conspiratorially-flavoured claims in my hoped-for coffee table book of books cannot all be true. So who is knowingly selling us tripe? Who is unwittingly selling us tripe?

A more important question, perhaps, is why many folk are keen on buying that tripe. How is it that 2 minutes of dodgy social media feed can have somebody believing in something sufficient to prepare planks, move house, lie awake every night in fear or even commit suicide? Why should a blocked face, altered voice, silhouette interview or false name (for security reasons, of course) provide credibility? Then we have all those whistleblowers that seem to crawl out of the woodwork at the right moment, all with their lives in danger (apparently). Then we get celebs ramping the hype and stirring the pot until it’s hot. These are cheap and easy tricks to pull folks, and I rather admire Ben Davidson over at Suspicious0bservers for saying it like it is when it comes to HAARP.

It seems that certain folk actually crave this sort of stimulation. An addiction to fear, maybe? Another adrenaline fix? Something to fill the void of mundane lives, perhaps? TBH I find this all very eschatological and it smacks of people (and science) being utterly lost. Lost, perhaps, because they’ve been sold the idea that they’re a meat robot in a mechanistic universe that has no point and no meaning; unless you sign-up to the latest conspiracy, that is.

Whilst we are talking of signing-up it occurs to me that Flat Earth, Chemtrails, Hive Queens and all the rest are a jolly good way of soaking up and distracting all those inquisitive folk who otherwise could be trouble for the establishment and its standard model of life, the universe and everything. This is why you’ll hear me muttering “conspiracies are a conspiracy” into my leather tankard of porter every now and then. If you haven’t seen that banned TED talk by Rupert Sheldrake now is a good time.

Kettle On!