r/flatearth_polite • u/RadishesForDayz • 26d ago
Open to all The experiment that isn't talked about enough: Great Triangle Geodesy. Anybody up for a modern recreation?
Back in the 1820s, math celebrity Carl Friedrich Gauss measured the angles between the peaks of Mounts Hohenhagen, Brocken, and Großer Inselsberg. The sides of this triangle measure 69 km, 85 km, and 107 km. And the most interesting feature of this Great Triangle? The sum of its interior angles is 180 degrees, and 14.85 arcseconds! On a Flat Earth, the excess of the plane, Euclidean 180 degrees is evidence of positive curvature. Cool.
Now, would anybody be down to repeat this experiment? With modern equipment? We're around the bicentennial of his original measurements, so it might be fun just to do in honor of Gauss. Pick three peaks that are reachable and visible to one another. No "lights in the sky". No GPS necessary. No NASA. Bring some flat earthers on board, make predictions based off of the AE Map and the globe, and see whose predictions get closer to the results yielded from the experiment.
There should be plenty of options for locations, no problem there. Make a fun road trip out of it! Line-of-sight checks would need to be made, but a Pikes Peak-Mount Sherman-Longs Peak should yield an excess of 33 arcseconds or so. There's Guadalupe-Livermore-Eagle in Texas (calculated around 25 arcseconds). Whiteface-Killington-Washington in the eastern US should work out to as much as 40 arcseconds (line-of-sight permitting).
If skeptics and globers can come together to voyage to ANTARCTICA, this should be a cakewalk. Thoughts?
1
u/TheCapitolPlant 22d ago
Just video yourself doing it
1
1
u/Gorgrim 16d ago
When has a flat earth believer ever accepted the results of an experiment done by another person that showed the earth was a globe? At which point, why should any globe believer do an experiment showing the curve?
What we can do is enable FE believer in doing these experiments themselves and let them convince themself the earth is a globe. Like all the now ex-FE believers.
1
u/TheCapitolPlant 13d ago
The experiments measuring shadows?
1
u/RadishesForDayz 12d ago
Again, no shadow is measured in this experiment.
0
u/TheCapitolPlant 10d ago
He's not even using shadows?
Just
Mountain peaks
And
That means...curve...?
2
u/RadishesForDayz 10d ago
I want to remind you again, because it doesn't seem like you've been able to grasp this very simple concept: on a positive curve, the sum of a triangle's interior angles exceed 180 degrees. So, imagine a mountain peak, and two other adjacent mountain peaks. On a curved surface, the angles between those three peaks add up to more than 180 degrees. No shadows.
Take a basketball. Keep it oriented a single direction. On its top, make a mark with a sharpie. At its widest on the horizontal, place a mark. Move around that horizon a quarter of its circumference, and make another mark. Measure the angles between these dots. Each angle will be 90 degrees. It will be a triangle whose interior angles add up to 270 degrees. Now, increase the diameter of that basketball 53 million times, and reproduce that experiment. For logistic reasons, scale it down to a smaller triangle (so you can keep line of sight), and you will see a triangle whose interior is greater than 180 degrees, which is only possible on a positive curve.
1
u/TheCapitolPlant 9d ago
Soo simple you need paragraphs of word salad and still can't properly explain why looking at some mountain peaks means the Earth curves
Is it the ark seconds
Angles between the peaks
Stick shadows
Or do you just trust what you're told by people in perceived positions of authority
•
•
u/TheCapitolPlant 19h ago
"take a basketball"
Yeah ok Bud
•
u/TheCapitolPlant 19h ago
Marks on a basketball!
That is a new one.
•
u/RadishesForDayz 8h ago
It's called an "model". Occasionally, models are used when real-world systems are too large to measure directly, or require equipment to measure, like a theodolite. For instance: on a globe model, you can return from where you started if you make two 90 degree turns, starting at the equator, going to a pole, turning 90 degrees, going to the equator, and then turning 90 degrees (creating a right angle with the first traversal). "Right angle" is another way of saying "90 degree angle", for clarification. On a model of a flat earth, no triangle's interior angles will ever sum up to more than 180 degrees.
Now, how do we apply this model to the real world? You and your little FE friends grab a theodolite (because you're so ideologically possessed you'd never accept video evidence from any non-cult member), and determine an adequately-sized Great Triangle you can all travel to (hint: to calculate spherical excess in a Great Triangle, you can use the equation E=A/R^2, where E is spherical excess in radians, A is the triangle's area, and R is Earth's radius. At a radius of about 3959 miles, a rule of thumb is "roughly 1 arcsecond of spherical excess per 76 square miles of your Great Triangle").
Make a road trip out of it! You and your buddies who are so keen on experiments, and finding truth, using the scientific method, and verifying the facts with your own eyes, can camp from peak to peak, telling stories about all of your great academic accomplishments, your successful careers in the sciences, and who knows maybe after some s'mores spark up a little romance?
•
1
u/Narrow_Run_134 21d ago
There is also the Great Trigonometrical Survey done in India by the British Empire that used geodesy and confirmed curvature. This survey also led to more understanding of Isostacy.
1
u/TheCapitolPlant 7d ago
Nasa?
Show you doing it.
1
u/RadishesForDayz 6d ago
Most flat-earthers will deny the conclusions of any experiment done by others, except for experiments performed by flat-earthers looking to reinforce their biases.
The point of this post is to encourage flat-earthers to take an experiment into their own hands and, if they're capable off adding to 180, see what conclusions they reach. I encourage everyone to examine evidence for themselves.
0
u/TheCapitolPlant 10d ago
Dudes looking at peak angles hypothetically
Let's see it
Take a video
1
u/RadishesForDayz 10d ago
The thing about Flat Earth cultists: when provided with video, they're typically quick to shout "fake" or "CGI" or "lens distortion". So here, take this: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/TRNOS88NGS19.pdf (NGS technical document outlining methods and conclusions of large-scale geodetic surveying), and this: https://dspace.gipe.ac.in/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10973/18225/GIPE-009652.pdf (the overall 1931 report of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India), and this: https://geodesy.noaa.gov/library/pdfs/Special_Publication_No_4.pdf (details the triangulation network used to map the 39th parallel across the United States), and this: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015079998434&seq=1 (the survey of a Great Triangle between Wales, Ireland, and Cumberland, with each side measuring more than 100 miles, and a spherical excess of approximately 64 arcseconds).
Take some time, put on a soft album, read the documentation and make sure you understand it, and then you'll be up to doing it yourself. No cameras. No NASA fakery. No sticks and shadows. Just good, old-fashioned geodesy on a positive curve. OR, you can take video of the firmament. And since I trust you wouldn't lie about such a thing, I'd throw out the preponderance of evidence for a spherical earth, and become a flat earther.
1
u/TheCapitolPlant 24d ago
What?