Why People Think the World is Flat

if you were able to look through the perspective of a person who thinks the world is flat you would see this the North Pole is right here in the center the continents splayed out over this plane and here on the edges you'd run into a hundred and fifty foot wall of ice guarded by NASA employees with guns and how far that ice goes outward and when people try to go down there they get turned away at gunpoint and put in prison the heavens are a dome that arcs over the flat earth the Sun the Moon the Stars they're all just little balls of light in the sky that move around just above the Earth's surface there are loads of people who actually believe this YouTube channels and Facebook pages you see hundreds of thousands of followers Google searches for the term Flat Earth proof over time look like this it's become incredibly popular and recently a poll showed that only 84% of Americans agree with the statement I have always believed the world is round 84% and if you're 18 to 24 that's more like 66% which is like dangerously close to half what is going on here now the North Pole is the center of a deep ocean whereas a South Pole is a center of a high plateau which averages seven or eight thousand feet in altitude this is frustrating and what's even more frustrating is every time I try to look into this and understand it all I see is coverage of like flat earther conventions and like interviews with these people we absolutely know for a fact this ain't it these interviews are interesting but I want to understand like how someone with a thinking brain can actually get behind this what is this actual belief where does it come from and how do potentially millions of people believe that the earth is flat the water is completely flat so as far as we can see in as far as we've measured and the horizon is completely flat I'm in Mexico now I've been sitting on the beach reading everything there is to read about the history of people who believe the earth is flat there's one thing that I just had to try for myself this is a simple experiment anybody can conduct to determine definitely that earth is flat where have a spirit level you take it on the plane in filius if they found this hardware store bought myself a level Gadhafi's amigo and i'm bringing it with me on the airplane I'm gonna do some of this empirical science myself if you are to fly on a non rotating earth please explain what kind of experience will a pilot the logic goes that if the earth is round and I'm flying thousands of miles which I'm about to do then the airplane will have to be tipped a little bit the whole time in order to make it around the curvature of the earth the plane should be constantly dipping its nose forward in order to compensate for the curvature I would be able to see the tilt of the airplane if I put my newly purchased level on the tray table in front of me I'm going to take my spirit level onto the plane if my tool shows me that the plane is totally leveled that's proof that the earth is flat let's go see what happens somebody explain to me duty-free buy perfume why is it so much perfume it in duty-free [Music] four hours on an airplane and I'm back my little level experiment worked wonderfully the bubble stayed nice and Center turns out the plane was not dipping its nose in order to make it around the earth this is explained by the basics of gravity and physics this video is not a debunk of Flat Earth theory this that doesn't need to happen that it shouldn't need to happen what this is is my fascination with the fact that there is lots of people but for this way a nonzero number of humans who think the world is flat and they work really hard to prove it I want to understand what sorts of tools are being used to prove the world is flat so here we go wonder if I can get some really dramatic like conspiracy theory lighting going on here seeing all the evidence what if the earth actually is flat the plane wasn't tipping the level was flat okay I'm kidding let's get into this I've been in the winds learning about the Flat Earth experience what people believe and why and where it all came from and here's what I've learned number one flat earthers have become a thing just in the past couple hundred years so by like 205 BC you've got these really smart Greek people making experiments that are like observing a globe shaped earth over the next several centuries eventually this would just become the widespread thing among anyone who was doing experimentation on the world and eventually nobody believed the earth was flat even in like the medieval times like it was a consensus that the earth was a globe so in short flat earthers weren't a thing during this time even though literally in elementary school I was taught that Christopher Columbus and like his voyage was somehow to prove that the earth was round or maybe it was flat and that there was like some debater on that that's actually a total legend and I have no idea why I was taught that in elementary school how did that happen I actually genuinely curious like how did that happen the fact is Christopher Columbus the Catholic Church the Spanish patrons no one thought the earth was flat but then they became a thing any sort of flat earther movement didn't actually come around ironically until science was really starting to heat up during the mid 1800s a huge amount of scientific breakthrough was happening the scientific method was taking off and huge breakthroughs in biology physics anatomy and mathematics we're taking place but at the time there were also people who were becoming uncomfortable with how advanced scientific methods were getting these guys would like hold on a second you have all these fancy new tools to inquire into the world and to understand reality but these tools are getting like too sophisticated and too abstract and theoretical they're becoming too disconnected from like what I can see and understand and touch and feel they wanted to bring science back to what it had been for a really long time which is that like a person goes out uses simple tools like a telescope to look at the world and to make conclusions about how the world works so it's the 1800s science is like having its time and you have these guys usually from like the US and the UK who want to throw out this growing body of like amazing advancements in science and they start to do experiments here's what those experiments look like so it's the summer of 1838 England up in the county of Cambridgeshire which literally sounds like a place in the Lord of the Rings so it's the summer of 1838 and the atom had just been discovered and the Doppler effect is like being fleshed out and then you've got this guy his name is Samuel Rowbotham but he goes by the pseudonym parallax which is actually a pretty dope name like if I were a DJ I would totally go with like parallax anyway parallax decides even though all this science is happening he thinks it's time to reopen up the debate about whether or not the earth is a globe which was like literally settled thousands of years earlier but he's like no let's do and he finds this canal system that is incredibly straight this canal goes on further almost ten kilometres like six miles of just a straight line this guy says if the earth is a globe and people say it's twenty five thousand miles in circumference then if I look at it's straight line after the first mile the curvature of the earth would mean that the canal would now be eight inches lower after two miles it would be 32 inches lower after three miles 72 inches lower meaning like six feet almost two meters and so on so he thinks eventually the dip from the curvature of the earth would be so great that you could easily observe it so he gets in the water he puts a telescope right above the surface of the water and then puts a boat on the canal with a 1 meter tall post on it so what he wants to see is if the earth is curved if it's a globe this post will start to disappear over the horizon so he does it the boat goes away it goes the entire six miles of the canal and it stays in sight the entire time it doesn't dip over the horizon and he's stoked he's like man I just proved that the earth is flat and I did it with a telescope and a boat like screw you science like I'm making breakthroughs right here in Cambridgeshire and then he writes this book where he flushes out this experiment and several others that he does but wait this experiments like kind of legit right it adds up like his numbers were all correct about the circumference and the tip of the curvature why didn't it dip like why was the boat still inside there's nothing wrong with this experiment I relaxed top that great name maybe he was onto something no no this is stupid this is like a third grade science experiment in your backyard this experiment doesn't take into account how the natural world actually works and how light behaves and refracts based on the different air densities this is like stuff that people already figured out and like parallax is sitting there getting wet in a canal like trying to observe this on it as know it this does not prove anything but parallax didn't want to hear any of this didn't want to talk about atmospheric refraction and air density and how light behaves in different media too complicated to abstract you can't touch and feel that stuff instead parallax sees science and observing reality as a much simpler task in his book he says nature speaks to us in a peculiar language in the language of phenomena she answers at all times the questions which are put to her just like go out and like put a question to mother nature and she'll answer it as scientific methods become more sophisticated they become harder for you and me to understand parallax and his canal experiments are reaction to all of this they are a call for a simplification of scientific methods and a return of the senses as the primary force for understanding reality he called his method of reduction as pseudoscience the zetetic method he says that honesty of thought is to look at truth in the face not the side face but the full front like just like look at it go out and observe it for yourself he was among several scientists and mathematicians at the time who were on this train of let's use really simplified reductionist math and science to prove that the earth is actually flat this argument of the Flat Earth flickered for a little bit in the 1800's gained a little bit of traction but then eventually it died out until just a few years ago refused to be another vegetable pseudoscience garbage will to me be unacceptable anyone would ask to see you don't have to be susceptible dispose of the globe in the nearest waste receptacle there's no curvature to this earth there is no motion to this earth you just accept the globe model with no understanding of the flat and no clear evidence for the ball earth do you see the problem there flat earthers are back and their methods are very similar to what parallax was doing in the 1800s and this is data this is repeat full observable measurable if you take the time to learn you will change your mind there's there's no doubt the only reason people think they live on a spinning ball is willful ignorance they're still zooming into horizons but now they have hordes of visual stuff to play around with they now have airplanes they now have satellite imagery to play around with they now have the moon landing to dissect and now they're taking levels onto airplanes like I did your plane can't go upside down here's the thing globehugger like the flat earthers in the 1800's the flat earthers today want to use their own intuition and senses to understand reality and in the process they reject and ignore the huge body of science that we all live with today so people that have physics degrees astronomy degrees he got their degree by regurgitating what their teacher of the books told them instead of trigonometry and telescopes and canals the flat earthers today use videos and photos circulated on the internet the has a muscle equidistant projection map that the usgs actually uses is the Flat Earth map wait did he just say as a thermal equidistant projection that's like my favorite projection is that the Flat Earth map don't with me and projections I take them very seriously in true internet fashion this new current movement of flat earthers has become just a bunch of bumper sticker type assertions and images that are really easy to share just like parallax's experiments these methodologies completely ignore the way the natural world is observed to work by like thousands of years of scientific consensus but if you go to the faq page of the Flat Earth Society you'll see what they're after here they believe that evidence is quote relying on your own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us that's the best evidence and in that vein that's how these people are doing I mean so in the physics world today do they not understand that convex lenses or fisheye lenses or GoPro add a distorted view so what have I learned from all of this from my understanding the flat earther movement whether from the 1800s or today on the Internet is actually not totally about the shape of the earth this movement has a much broader message built into it there's a reason why 1984 is like in the Canon of the flat earther movement 1984 has nothing to do with the shape of the earth what it does have to do with is being skeptical of big institutions that are probably watching you that are probably controlling your life that are probably feeding you bad information to retain power we're not crazy we're just secret lies here's the thing most of the knowledge we have about the natural world and the universe we've never seen we've never seen exoplanets or the deep space telescopes that tell us so much about our universe instead we read about this stuff we benefit from its findings we pay our taxes to fund more of it science is like a tall tower and each individual researcher and institution adds a little brick to that Tower each brick resting on the one below it no one person sees or understands all of the bricks instead we have a system of debate review scrutiny that only allows the most accurate information to be added to the tower and honestly I don't think humans are well suited to adapt to this very impersonal way of understanding the world we have evolved over millions of years with our senses as our main driver of survival and now we live in a society that is run by big systems and impersonal institutions that we will never touch and feel much less understand and that's why we have people who believe the world is flat despite conclusive evidence to the contrary this belief is a proxy for a much larger paradigm that mistrusts anything that you can't touch and feel and so yeah I'm really sad that only 84 percent of people can say with certainty that they've always believed that the world as a globe and that's 64 percent or younger people only 64% of people like that that just blows my mind and it's incredibly sad but despite this belief this movement these conventions this total lunacy science will continue to do its thing it will continue to go out observe the world with these amazing tools that we have come back debate it and add to this tower of knowledge that helps us see the world as it really is I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video Skillshare is this amazing giant repository of online tutorials where you can learn everything you can imagine from photography to design to illustration to character animation to filmmaking to entrepreneurship all the things and you get unlimited access to the entire library if you subscribe you get two months free to Skillshare if you click the link in my description you should check out this course on the fundamentals of photo editing photo editing is truly a craft and with a little bit of training you can dramatically change how your photos look and feel both from just simple mobile photography all the way to advanced professional photography having these fundamentals in your toolkit will help you make better images so click the link in the description to sign up for two months for free like you literally don't pay any money for two months you can test it out and see if you like it after that it think it's like less than ten bucks a month if you subscribe to the yearly which ten bucks like ten bucks to have access to this giant repository of tutorials is like a no-brainer to me so I love Skillshare I love internet learning go check it out thank you for watching this video and I'll be back soon with some more stuff see ya you [Music]

Channel: Johnny Harris

Views: 3,030,404

Rating: 4.7381186 out of 5

Keywords: Johnny Harris, Johnny Harris Vox, Vox Borders, Johnny Harris Vox Borders, Vox, Flat Earth, Flat Earth Debunk, globe, maps, sky, space, nasa, parallax, theory, flat earth theory, mark sargeant, behind the curve, science, scientific revolution, conspiracy, conspiracies, gravity, bedford canal, globe earth, airplanes, mexico, glitch, truth, ice wall, Antarctica, iz harris, exoplanets, exoplanet, deep space, dome, truman show, government, big government lies

Id: IwJzsE8CvzQ

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/fock]

I have zero time to waste on anything flat earth related. Except this post.

[u/BuuGz]

oh for fucks sake, just bite the bullet, and get one of these fuckers and shoot him to space.

[u/FloppieTheBanjoClown]

I think this misses one of the fundamental aspects of Flat Earth that is the same thing that is behind a lot of other conspiracy theories: some people seem to have this need to be apart from the crowd, knowing something that others don't. They buy into anti-vax or flat earth or 9/11 conspiracy theories not because the evidence is compelling, but because they need to live in a world where they're aware of some great secret. It makes them the hero of the story, fighting against vast shadowy organizations to educate the populace.

[u/rocke_t_girl]

Trash.

I'm not a flat earther, but he hits the point where he's talking about Parallax and he asserts he's wrong by saying, basically, "air density and light and.... stuff."

He doesn't understand why Parallax was wrong. He just takes it on faith. just like flat-earthers.

There's your explanation. QED. Save yourself the 20 minutes.

[u/Boner_McBigly]

I have a small amount of respect for flat earthers in that they are eager to experiment and hypothesize, it's always funny when they end up proving the earth is round.

[u/wellmaybe_]

80% of people that think surveys are worth to be answered

[u/qwerty_rocks]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJ9FnQXmJI

[u/qwerty_rocks]

https://twitter.com/iflscience/status/1166698290576072706?lang=en