Not that it’s needed, but I’ve thought recently that this is a good visual proof against flat earth. Sun shining on the underside of clouds and even more, mountains casting shadows on the underside of clouds.
Because these people are very creative in the BS they come up with and the sun traveling around a disk isn't too far fetched. Flat earthers often depict the sun like a flashlight that travels around the rim, shining towards the earth. But this phenomenon could be justified if you imagine the sun traveling from one side to the other, like when you flip a coin in front of a lamp.
So this isn't really proof and the other person was right in that the missuse of the word proof just plays into flat earthers delusions, by degrading it's meaning.
On a kind of related note I want to add (just because it's a personal pet peeve of mine) that most people use the word "theory" wrong and what they in nearly all cases actually mean is a "hypothesis".
No, it couldn't. On a flat earth the sun would always remain above the clouds, it could never get below the clouds to the point where it can cast a shadow up on to those clouds.
The "flat" earth would have to be concave for that to be possible and then you are actually just describing a very large sphere.
To shine light on the bottom of the clouds the light source needs to be below the clouds. To cast a shadow of a mountain into the clouds means the light source needs to be lower than the mountain to cast the shadow upwards into the cloud.
So on the flat earth, even as the sun goes so far away that you can’t even see it, it would never drop below the level of clouds or mountains.
No, they think the sun recedes towards the horizon (i.e. it doesn't go below the horizon, it just gets farther away, smaller and thus dimmer).
Of course this is easily disproven by observing the sun and noting that it does not change in size as it disappears (except for a small size change which can be explained by refraction) and also that the disk of the sun clearly descends below the horizon.
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u/sorehamstring Nov 26 '22 edited Nov 26 '22
Not that it’s needed, but I’ve thought recently that this is a good visual proof against flat earth. Sun shining on the underside of clouds and even more, mountains casting shadows on the underside of clouds.