Questions for flat earth believers.

1. If the earth is flat, what is its shape? Most flat-earth believers assume it is a circular disk. But could it be square, with four corners as the Bible suggests? Or is it some other shape? What experiment might we do to find out?

2. How do you know that the center of the flat disk is the North Pole? Why not the South Pole? Why not some other point? What evidence supports that? How could we do an experiment to find out?

   Flat earth with South pole at its center. Could the location of the continents be the result of radial continental drift due to centrifugal effects?

3. Is the flat disk earth stationary, or spinning about its center like an old phonograph record? If it is spinning like that, which direction is it spinning? How can we find out?

4. Might the flat earth be moving like a coin spinning at a low angle on a table, with the entire starry heavens a "celestial sphere" around us? Sun moon and planets crawl around that sphere at different speeds? What flat surface would the earth be spinning 'on'? Perhaps a table on another, much larger flat earth, that is itself spinning on another and so on ad infinitum? How would we test that?

5. What is on the other side of the earth disk? Another civilization, maybe? How thick is that disk? Could we tunnel down to reach the other side? We know that as we dig deeper, the earth is hotter, as is experienced in deep diamond mines. Why is that? (I hear some saying "That's the way to Hell.")

6. Flat earthers say that light bends by large amounts and its speed varies by large amounts, to give us the illusion of a round earth. What causes that effect on light? Flat earth proponents have hinted that this happens, but have never worked out a mathematical model of it or proposed a cause of it. They've never even addressed what might be the physical reason for this. They shun the notion of gravity, but to explain their idea of light ray bending they would have to postulate some equally mystifying "force" or "influence" to do that bending.

7. What causes ocean tides? Why are they synchronized so reliably with the position of moon and sun in our sky?

8. What role does gravity play in this picture? Most flat earthers deny that gravity exists. "Things fall because they are heavy", they say, and no more explanation is needed. Is that a proper scientific attitude? Scientists want to know how things work, and are not content with "That's just the way it is".

9. Some say the moon is flat also, since we always see only one side of it. But actually the moon wobbles, so we see a bit more than 50% of it over time. This wouldn't happen with a flat disk moon. The edge of the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse is clearly the shape of a shadow of one round object cast on another round object, not flat ones. This can easily be demonstrated by anyone, using lamps and flat and round objects. So how could flat disks give this illusion?

10. All the evidence from our space programs, those of many countries, are consistent with the round, rotating earth and the conventional solar system cosmology, to very high precision. The very fact that we can use conventional physics to plot complex paths for space probes that do in fact reach their calculated intended targets with only minor course corrections is evidence of the correctness of our mathematics and physics. Amateur space enthusiasts have access to much of this data, and can independently follow the paths of our earth satellites using their own instruments. Is this all a vast hoax? Can you imagine Soviet, Chinese, European and USA scientists getting together in a vast conspiracy to agree on such an elaborate deception? Why do nations that can't agree about much else conspire to agree on this? What would that gain any of them?

11. Some hollow earthers, those who accept the Koreshan Cosmology that has the entire universe within the earth shell, argue that light paths bend in just such a way as to give the illusion of a vast cosmos surrounding the earth. Flat earthers must also assume such bending of light paths to account for appearances. But the two systems are quite different and incompatible. Both require that the speed of light is not constant, but varies dramatically with distance from earth. Or maybe distances or light speed depend how far light has traveled and from what direction it arrives here. Or maybe it is all an illusion. Perhaps we are only illusions and we only imagine that we exist. How can we find out?

12. How is it that a ship or airplane can travel all the way around the Antarctic continent in less time that it takes to travel from New York to England? The distance, on the north-centered flat earth map, is much greater near the Antarctic, where you are going around the circumference of the flat disk.

13. Even before GPS systems, the land masses of earth had been extensively surveyed using telescopic transits. They confirmed the fact that the earth is round. Later, laser transits were used. And now we have global positioning systems. All of these consistently confirm the curvature of the earth by simple Euclidean geometry. How could they all have been wrong? Oh, that pesky light path curvature again!

14. Flat earthers, Parallax (Samuel Birley Rowbotham) (1816-1884), John Hampden (1819-1891), John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), Wilbur Glenn Voliva (1870-1942), Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), and Charles Kenneth Johnson (1924–2001) have all said with certainty that the sun is only 3000 miles from us, and is 32 miles across. How were these values determined? What experimental data was used and what mathematical methods (and assumptions) were used? Are they just making up stuff out of thin air, and unthinkingly repeating it? Inquiring minds want to know.

15. In short, what experiments have flat earthers done in the past century to confirm and verify their hypothesis? The 19th century experiment on the Old Bedford Canal was wrongly interpreted. The similar Koreshan experiments on the Chicago drainage canal reached a different conclusion—that the earth's surface is concave, not flat. Their experiments were also misinterpreted. There's simply no hard evidence supporting the flat earth or hollow earth notions, and an abundance of consistent evidence of many kinds from many sources, obtained by independent scientists in many countries, all consistently supporting the spinning round earth model.

Such exotic models ignore the laws of physics that have been developed over several centuries into a unified and powerful tool for understanding the natural world. Any of these warped geometries would require rewriting every physics book and recasting every law of classical physics—laws that have worked just fine in science and engineering for centuries. No reasonable person would even try such a daunting task, and no flat earther is sufficiently knowledgeable about mathematics and physics to attempt it. It would require a "new physics" to duplicate exactly the results of the "old physics", and the newly transformed laws would be much more complicated to understand and use. So what is to be gained from such a vast exercise? Nothing new would be learned, and the result would surely be more clumsy to use in physics and engineering and all the other fields that depend upon it. Not one flat earth believer I've ever corresponded with even knows about such mathematical models, or has the ability to understand them. Ditto for their grasp of physics.

This document ©2017, 2002 by Donald E. Simanek. Input and suggestions are welcome. Please use the address to the right when responding, and please indicate the specific document of interest.

Latest revision, April, 2002.

Return to Myths and Mysteries of Science.
Check out an alternative theory, The Hollow Earth.
Find out the facts and evidence, Is the earth a round, spinning globe?
Return to Donald Simanek's front page.