[tempestn]

Depends what causes things to stick to the flat Earth. IIRC flat earthers have various explanations for gravity, including the disc continuously accelerating upward; in that case you'd experience the same force everywhere on it.

[munch117]

If this mysterious disc-accelerating force also accelerated the people and things on the surface, we'd all be weightless.

I guess it must be a pushing force from below.

So, who's doing the pushing? I'm thinking a big turtle.

[nkrisc]

They mean it is actually accelerating constantly.

My math might be wrong, but if we were accelerating at 9.8m/s/s for at least 4000 years (roughly as long as we have continuously recorded history and the minimum time “gravity” has been observed) then we ought to currently be traveling through space at over 1,000,000,000,000m/s.

Now I’m no physicist, but I reckon that might end up violating causality.

[empath75]

Some of them think that.

The problem with trying to "explain" this is that fundamentally, flat-earthers, to the extent that they could be said to have a coherent world view at all, are usually a kind of occasionalist[1]. They don't _believe_ in natural laws or cause and effect. For the most part, they believe that god is in complete control of all events, and things go down because god wants them to go down. There's no required explanation for _anything_. The sun moves across the sky because god wants it to, and he could stop it or make it go backwards if he wanted it to, etc.

Indeed, that a flat earth is incompatible with physics is part of the appeal of believing in it to begin with. They _want_ to overthrow Newton, because a clockwork universe is incompatible with their belief system.

It's also sort of immune to any kind of argumentation. The result of any experiment is simply that god wants it that way, that they're predictable and testable doesn't _prove_ anything, because you can do an experiment a million times, and god could still cause it to fail any time he wants to. God just doesn't want to argue with Netwon right now, for his own reasons, you see.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism

[mlyle]

https://www.xkcd.com/2440/

[jbeninger]

Nah, when you move that fast, further acceleration stops increasing speed and starts squishing time instead, so you asymptotically approach C.

So I guess what I'm saying is I see absolutely no problem with the flat earth arguments?

[plagiarist]

We should see this as all the celestial bodies traveling "down" at relativistic speeds by now. Unless maybe they are also experiencing 1 G in the same direction as us in addition to whatever other accelerations.

[nkrisc]

I imagine whatever magical force has been constantly accelerating the disc Earth for 4,000+ years also magically accelerates everything else uniformly in the exact same direction, at the exact same speed, and also magically solves every other hole in the theory.

[nkrisc]

Can’t argue with that, I guess.

[bryanrasmussen]

wait, is the flat earth theory going to make me immortal?

[lukan]

Only if you truly believe in it. Then you create a belive field, shaping your reality in any form you desire.

[lukan]

The theological argument I recently heard is, the creator just made up and down. And things move down. But it is not gravity.

[mlyle]

> And things move down.

It's not a bad way to look at it for a start. Things move down because it is their nature to move downwards. And this kind of empirical law is what we rely upon for most thought.

It takes a lot of work to get to a theory that makes more general predictions.

And even after having that, 98% of the time my thought is effectively just "things move down." Another 1.5% it's "things move down at 9.8 m/s/s". It's an extreme edge/special case when I'm thinking "massive things are attracted to each other, with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances".

And even with "massive things are attracted to each other, with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances" ... if you ask me why, it's because "uh, they just do that?"

[lukan]

"with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances" ... if you ask me why, it's because "uh, they just do that?""

To be fair, that is somewhat the current scientific consensus on gravity. It just is. We can meassure it and determine a general constant and calculate with it (and even though some people claim to have understood way more, it is highly debated terrain as far as I know)

And in general, I was actually arguing with flat earthers recently a lot, I even met a flat earther in real life. It is an interesting intellectual challenge debating them. Basically rebasing all the physical theory I have. (Main summary is, they have a high ego, but lack understanding of everything and make up for it with make believe.)

If I found a school one day, one of the lessons will be the teacher telling the students: "The earth is flat! Proof me otherwise." Or more advanced, model a flat earth on a computer. Flat earthers try that for real - it gets weird very quickly, so much that I could not believe anyone taking it serious and it all is just satire. But they are for real (but with a very different concept of reality).

[mlyle]

> To be fair, that is somewhat the current scientific consensus on gravity. It just is. We can meassure it and determine a general constant and calculate with it (and even though some people claim to have understood way more, it is highly debated terrain as far as I know)

Sure, and if we come up with some fancy unified theory, and ask "why" once more, the answer will still be "uh, because they do?."

> But they are for real (but with a very different concept of reality).

We think ourselves so advanced. I wonder what big counterfactual scientists believed in the 1900s and 2000s will be laughed at a few hundred years from now.

And, of course, some of that will be libel; e.g. that we thought the world was flat "just like Christopher Columbus's compatriots" [who didn't].

[UltraSane]

A huge thing about flat earthers is that they don't care if their explanations are self-consistent. They happily accept explanations for one thing that directly contradict their explanations for another thing.

[cratermoon]

"A wizard did it"

[f1shy]

We can give them points for creativity.