A neighbor of mine is convinced that Earth is flat. He couldn’t quite explain why. I asked him how he explained the hull of ships disappearing over the horizon as they sail out to sea.
“That’s peripheral vision, you see!”
No, peripheral vision is what is seen out of the side of the eyes.
How did he explain the round shadow of Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse? He didn’t.
I asked him, “How about the measurements made by Eratosthenes of the differences between the shadows cast by the sun in Athens and Alexandria?”
The response from my neighbor left much to be desired. “You just have to consider alternative explanations.” Such as?
Also left unexplained was why every other stellar or celestial object we observe in the universe is round, so why would Earth be the flat exception?
One point he made, as I understood it anyway, was that if the Earth were round, then that would mean that people in the southern hemisphere would be antipodes who walked on their heads. Huh?
He asserted that Nicolaus Copernicus stated that Earth was round, and thereafter, everyone simply agreed with him. How about Ursus, Brahe, Kepler, et al.? How about NASA images that clearly show a round Earth? Columbus? Magellan? Einstein?
Nor is gravity real, he claimed!
If gravity were a real force, why hasn’t the universe collapsed into a singularity? Perhaps, I think, gravity isn’t that strong a force, and because there are three or four other fundamental forces of nature, e.g., the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism.
He also suggested something that, again, I did not quite understand, but sounded like he thought that gravitational forces pull matter to the South rather than to the center of an object’s mass.
And Earth does not orbit the sun, by the way. Really? Explain retrograde motion of planets to me, then.
Neighbor, here’s a razor, courtesy of William of Occam. Use it and you will accept that the simplest explanation is that Earth is round.
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