New Mexicans for Science and Reason
presents
December 12th, 2018 NMSR Meeting: Bruce Lacey, on "A Flat Earther's Journey and Perspective"
by Dave Thomas
Bruce Lacey’s Response to January NMSR Reports
Bruce Lacey, the Humanist Codex, and Nick Soutter's Flat Earth Challenge
Watch the Entire presentation and Followup on NMSR's YouTube Channel!
NMSR's December 2018 speaker, Bruce Lacey, had pledged to give an account of the evidence that had brought him around to the view that Earth is a flat planet. The consensus of most audience members, however, was that Lacey failed to deliver convincing evidence.
Bruce Lacey began by saying the Yin/Yang symbol was like a record of the sun's shadow over the year. (Perhaps someone mashed the two sides of an Analemma together?) He then showed some video blogs by rapper O.D.D., a flat earther, who received some rude, vicious, nasty comments. "Do you see the genius of these people?", the rapper asked.
Lacey then quoted Arthur Schopenhour: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally it is accepted as self-evident." Brian Mullen, a Flat Earth "Engineer", was pressured to stop for the sake of his family and job. George Orwell was quoted as saying "In an age of universal deceit, telling the Truth is a revolutionary act."
Lacey said that Flat Earth (FE) beliefs are becoming a full-blown "truth movement". He said that NASA gets $57 million per day, which is a good incentive to lie. He declared that FE is not a religious movement, and that "Scientism" is the new 21st-century religion. Lacey affirmed that "The FE Movement is based on truth and scientific reasoning, not religion or any other dogma."
Our speaker said that students are taught, not empirical-based scientific evidence, but only "theories." He said the average flat earther is NOT ignorant, and is much more knowledgeable about earth than the typical layman. "Ask any person about heliocentric details, they can’t answer basic questions," he said.
Regarding when he actually made the leap to being a Flat Earther, Lacey said there was no specific time or place, that it "just grows on you." He allowed that he was into aliens and space, Roswell, Dulce, and so forth.
Lacey opined that the Moon landings were the biggest game changer for him, and that there is so much evidence that NASA lies. He said "There's no way you can study moon landings and not think they were faked. Same for the International Space Station (ISS)." He pointed to an image of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), with panels having four rivets only. A skateboard has more, he said. He also noted there was no dust, or burn crater, thus proving the fakery.
Lacey played a lengthy segment from a film titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon." The narrator said the footage showed the Apollo astronauts in low earth orbit, faking being half-way to the moon by putting a cut-out of Earth in the spacecraft window. Lacey then claimed that there are cameras all over the US, but zero cameras in space, looking at earth 24/7. He said photographs on the moon don’t show stars in daytime like they are supposed to.
Lacey described how Buzz Aldrin punched Apollo denier Bart Sibrel when asked to swear he'd gone to the moon on a Bible. He said moon rocks are just petrified wood (one alleged moon rock was found to be such). He showed a video clip from a speaker at an Albuquerque City Council meeting who said "Bubbles in space" proved Apollo was a hoax (and also that Climate Change is a hoax). Lacey said NASA lost telemetry, and destroyed technology, and forgot that the Van Allen belts would have been lethal. He quoted Admiral Byrd saying there was land as big as America "beyond" the south pole. He insisted that it is impossible to book trips across Antarctica (presumably, because the government doesn't want anyone to discover the edge of the Flat Earth).
Lacey moved on to the Michelson-Morley experiment. Professor of Physics Richard Wolfson said that "It could have detected speeds as low as two miles a second instead of the known 20mps that the earth as in its orbital motion around the sun. It didn't detect it. What’s the conclusion from the Michelson-Morley experiment? The implication is that the earth is not moving…" He mentioned a similar statement by Stephen Hawking on Einstein. Lacey said Einstein knew that the Earth was motionless. Lacey noted that these were "Quotes from highly regarded professionals..."
Lacey said he moved from Florida two years ago, and what he saw was "Flat Water, Flat Earth." He described some early photographs of his that he later realized were "Bedford Level Tests", regarding how far one can see over water (like a river or lake). He said not one repeat of the Bedford Level experiment has been done in 150 years. He said Mick West at Metabunk makes the Earth effectively 1/6 bigger to account for "refraction." Link He said that things at a distance don’t go behind the Earth's curve, they just get smaller (perspective). He said seeing shorelines of Chicago are not mirages, but rather, evidence of a flat earth. Lacey recommended studying Dr. John D's Bedford Level experiments. He said that because several U.S. states are relatively flat, so is Earth. He cited a $19 million science project in Louisiana to model the Mississippi with a simulated river plain some hundreds of yards long. Because the model is flat, so is Earth, he said.
There is no evidence water sticks to a magical ball, Lacey said. The main reason for heliocentrism/globism, he said, is to deny the ether. This stops us from understanding that everything is electric, and is manipulated by frequencies. He then played a long video showing a musician/engineer making patterns with Chladni plates, Tesla coils, and so forth.
That was the bulk of Bruce's presentation. Dave Thomas asked several specific questions following. The whole lecture and followup has been uploaded on YouTube, and can be seen in seven 16-minute segments, starting here.
The consensus was that Lacey failed to make a strong case for a Flat Earth. People screaming at flat-earthers on the internet might be rude, but that doesn’t validate FE. On the "Funny Thing Happened..." video, voice-overs claimed a hoax was being performed, but this wasn't at all confirmed by the video. At one point, the narrator says the "same misleading shots" of Earth were used on different days, but inspection of those shots shows they are very different (as would have been expected a day later). But the real kicker for this video is that the original footage is not "secret" at all, it was seen by millions on 17 July 1969, 1 day 9 hours and 59 minutes after Apollo 11 launched (33:59 GET or mission time, 11:31pm GMT). The Apollo crew sent this broadcast from 130,000 miles away - about halfway to the moon. You can compare the "hoax" video on Youtube, here), to the original video, here. When this is done, the "hoax" claims fall to pieces.
There are numerous other errors in the "Funny Thing" video, for example claims that shadows from the sun don’t appear parallel as they should. This is an absurd objection; photographs of train tracks show the tracks converging, not parallel. It's due to Perspective.
These train tracks are parallel! But in this photograph, perspective makes them appear to converge.
The shadows of the flag poles are parallel! But in this photograph, perspective makes them appear to converge.
Just like on the Moon.
Another photograph of parallel shadows. Again, perspective makes them appear to converge.
Or, perhaps, there were nine suns out that day?!?
How about satellites looking at the whole Earth 24/7? The United States has five geosynchronous full-scan 24/7 satellites in operation; GOES-12, GOES-13, GOES-15, GOES-16 and GOES-17. Japan operates Himawari 8 and 9. And then there is DSCOVR, which is outside geosynchronous orbits, and shows the Earth turning daily from a million miles out. (The image at left was taken just before the December Meeting!) While humans on the moon can see stars, cameras, with their very limited exposure range, are not able to capture very bright lights like the sun, or sun-lit surfaces, along with fainter stars. Re the bubbles, there would have been a LOT of bubbles had this really been "underwater." Where were turbulence, cavitation and nucleation? Why weren’t the "bubbles" digitally removed to avoid suspicion?
Regarding the Van Allen belts, the Apollo trajectories were designed to pass through the thinnest known parts, and the astronauts received minimal radiation. Admiral Byrd was describing the side of Antarctica facing India, on the other side of the South Pole from the more commonly visited side. This area is a land mass about the size of the CONUS. Two explorers, Colin O'Brady and Louis Rudd, used the services of Union Glacier Camp (the company that outfits private tours of Antarctica, which Lacey said aren’t permitted at all) to walk alone, from the Atlantic side of Antarctica, to the South Pole, to the Pacific side. Interestingly, this trek of 930 miles would, on the “Flat Earth” map in which the South Pole is an Ice Wall running the entire circumference of the flat earth, amount to over 17,000 miles.
The actual trek, 926 miles. Flat Earthers are dismissing that as being "just across a peninsula, not crossing the continent."
The Flat Earth version. The total trip is over 17,000 miles, and would be tens of times longer than feasible, even if it's
just a "peninsula". If Colin O'Brady did a full pirouette in one second while standing at the South Pole, on the Flat Earth map,
he would be traveling at 40% of Lightspeed!
Einstein didn't think the earth was "motionless." His hypothesis that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames led him to realize that these laws, which predict electromagnetic waves in a vacuum, require the Speed of Light to be constant in all reference frames. There is no optical (lightwave) experiment that can show motion through an "ether", and that is how Einstein explained the null result of Michelson-Morley. One of the "highly regarded professionals" quoted, Professor Richard Wolfson, has written that "...the 19th century closed with no satisfactory answer to this question [of earth's motion] that is consistent with observations like aberration of starlight and experiments like Michelson-Morley. But Einstein's 1905 answer is consistent and simple: the laws of physics are the same in all uniformly moving reference frames. Period. … If you still don’t like what relativity has to say, then you answer the question, Speed C relative to what? In a way that's consistent with experiments like Michelson-Morley and that doesn't put Earth, alone among all the cosmos, in a favored position." (Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified By Richard Wolfson, November 2003, ISBN 978-0-393-32507-2) In other words, Prof. Wolfson says that Einstein was first to explain that no "motion" can be measured in optical experiments like Michelson-Morley, and also that the Earth IS in motion, as is proved by phenomena like aberration of starlight. The Earth does not have the favored position of being "stationary."
From a speech by Einstein in Tokyo.
About the only actual Flat Earth argument presented by Lacey was the Bedford Level experiment. In 1838, Samuel Rowbotham claimed to see a boat while 6 miles downriver, thus “proving” the earth is flat. Critics said the result could also be explained by atmospheric refraction. In 1870, a supporter named John Hampden offered a wager to use the method to show Earth is flat. None other than Alfred Russell Wallace accepted the wager. Wallace know about both surveying and physics, and wisely made the sight line 13 feet (about 4 m) above water, thus greatly reducing the effects of atmospheric refraction. Wallace also added a pole in the middle, so as to see the “bump” of curvature between the two end points. Wallace was awarded the bet, but had to return it later when a court ruled that Hampden had retracted the bet before the actual test. Along the way, Hampden was jailed for threatening to kill Wallace. In 1901, Henry Yule Oldham at Cambridge added a theodolite to the mix, and came up with a definitive experiment that was taught in schools until photographs from space became available.
I posed a few questions to Bruce Lacey after his main presentation. I mentioned that private citizens can book tours to the heart of Antarctica through Union Glacier Camp. Lacey replied “How far can you go without telling somebody? Am I controlled?” I guess he wants a secret trip for some reason.
I showed Lacey this FE explanation of day/night/seasons. The sun is 3000 miles above the plane, and in Summer, the sun circles above the Tropic of Cancer; in Winter, the Tropic of Capricorn; and in spring and fall, over the Equator. Bruce Lacey agreed that "That's the basic theory, yes." I then showed why the sun rises due East on the equinox, and displayed a picture of the Sun rising in the East in Socorro on Sept. 22nd, 2018. I then showed that, according to the model Lacey had just agreed with, the FE sun would not rise in the East, but some 30 degrees to the North instead. "Why keep a model that has been Falsified?" I asked. Lacey answered "Do you know what the sun is? You don’t even know what it is. Fusion? Can’t be proven." Bruce also mentioned that "I actually never heard any flat earthers positively say they know what the sun is, for one. And what it's doing, for number 2."
I showed how anyone can measure their local latitude with the use of the height of a pole, and the length of its shadow at noon of the equinox. On the solstice, the earth’s axial tilt can be measured with the same pole and shadow. Lacey countered that I was assuming an axial tilt; I pointed out that I was measuring the axial tilt.
I went on to show how those same measurements could be interpreted with the Flat Earth model, which provides the height of the sun above the plane of the earth. But, different latitudes give wildly different heights, anywhere from 0 to 4000 miles.
I tried to discuss stellar parallax and aberration, but Lacey kept yelling that this was only apparent motion, and thus an assumption. Mark Fraser said that yes, we actually measure this phenomenon. The stars appear to move because it's Earth that is actually moving, Fraser said. Then, Lacey said "So, you disagree with Einstein, who said that there is no experiment that could prove Earth is moving?” Gerry Alldredge noted the many ellipses in Lacey's quotes of scientists, and that parts were missing (such as what Einstein actually thought about the motion of the Earth). Lacey vehemently countered "Don’t say I cherry picked. I gave you page numbers. Go look it up and point it out to me and then tell me!" (But, when you do look it up, like I did with Prof. Wolfson, you’ll find that the scientists quoted do agree with Einstein; the earth moves!)
On Stellar Aberration, I said "We have to correct the angle of the telescope to see the starlight, and that’s a measurement." Lacey yelled that "I can’t argue with you if you're going to deny that this is an assumption..." I showed an article from website www.thetruthaboutguns.com where long-range shooters discuss the Coriolis effect, which can produce deviations of up to 3 inches at 1000 yards, and 9 inches at 1500 yards. Lacey declared that I was lying, and cited a marine sniper manual that didn't even mention Coriolis. Gerry Alldredge mentioned that it wasn't important for snipers, but consideration of Coriolis effects is not negligible for artillery. Lacey then asked why the Earth didn't spin underneath a helicopter in the air. I said if that happened, then Hurricane Harvey should have circumnavigated the Earth every day for a week.
I showed an amazing star trails panorama, with stars circling counter-clockwise around Polaris, and clockwise toward the south (the southern axis was below the horizon, of course). I noted that this could never happen upon a flat earth. Lacey said I was making assumptions, and that we don’t know about the electrical ball of energy in the sky.
This animation shows the 300 brightest stars as seen from 45 deg. North latitude. Globe Earth version. Blue = sky, brown = ground (opaque).
I asked "Gravity – do you think it's real?" Lacey answered "No, it's made up." I showed a picture of someone struggling to climb uphill, and asked "Why is it harder to go uphill than downhill?" Lacey replied "Force of motion? Buoyancy and Density? Is a Helium balloon anti-gravity? Does anyone here think gravity exists? That it's real?"
I followed by showing this FE meme, which claims that if the mass divided by the volume of something is greater than that of the surrounding fluid, it sinks.
When I showed this counter-meme, however, things got interesting. Both buckets of water have the same density, and are suspended in lighter-density air. Why does the 2-liter bucket tip the scale, if only relative densities matter (as the FE meme declared)? Lacey answered "Because it’s twice as much water. More of one than the other. You don't need gravity to explain why things drop. You only need gravity to explain why you can be upside down on a spinning ball of water."
I asked "What covers the sun during an eclipse?" Lacey answered "Rahu and Ketu" (Vedic mythologies). "Can you prove it's the moon?” To do just that, I showed a long-exposure eclipse picture by the ministry of creationist David Rives, with the moon clearly visible inside the over-exposed corona. Lacey dismissed it as CGI. (Even though these creationists are not at NASA!)
I asked why I can't see the Southern Cross, and Lacey said it was simply too far away. But, I replied, you can see the top star of the cross from Albuquerque at times. What's blocking the other three, if not the limb of the earth? Perspective? I showed how anyone, anywhere in the northern hemisphere, can measure their local latitude by marking the elevation of Polaris, and Lacey responded "Can you prove the earth is curving?"
I showed how, viewed from a mountain top, the horizon dips below true level. Lacey dismissed it as mere perspective, the same excuse he employed to deny obvious evidence of the curving earth at Lake Ponchartrain, where a series of same-sized towers cross the lake. I showed pictures (taken by a friend) of ships at sea, and how the ship clearly goes behind the water, and does not simply get small from perspective. Lacey said the photograph showing the curve (on right) was "totally faked."
I showed how, at sunset, high clouds far to the West can be bathed in bright sun, while it’s already nightfall on the ground. I asked Lacey to explain what, in FE theory, was blocking the sunlight from the photographer and the local terrain, when the distant, high clouds are lit up so well. In globe terms, the earth itself blocks the light from the sun, which still reaches the high clouds easily. Lacey was not able to answer this simple question. He pointed out parallel sun rays in my diagram, and then demanded to know how the shadow of the moon in an eclipse can be so small. For that, I said, you need more detail – you need to consider the different sizes of sun and moon, and all rays of light (not all of which are parallel). Lacey ranted about how scientists use parallel rays here, non-parallel rays there, they just use whatever they can to sell their lies.
What's blocking the sun from the parking structure? The Earth.
It never got any better. Experiments are just assumptions, NASA tells only lies, no one knows what the sun is, or what covers the moon in an eclipse. Lacey gave lip service to "observable and repeatable science," but dismissed numerous experiments that ARE "observable and repeatable" as mere "assumptions." Bruce Lacey provided an alarming example of the True Believer, who is shouting rebuttals so fiercely that they cannot begin to comprehend the simplest of arguments. It was interesting, like watching a train wreck, but it's obvious Mr. Lacey will never allow himself to be reasoned out of his delusions.
Bruce Lacey’s Response to January NMSR Reports
Bruce Lacey was invited to respond to the article about his December talk which appeared in the January issue of NMSR Reports. Here follows his response
By Bruce Lacey
The most important message I try to convey is - demand evidence. When something is claimed to be based on science, you have to understand this doesn’t always mean - proven by factual data. This past century real science has been highjacked by the theoretical. Nikola Tesla sounded the alarm to this happening more the 80 years ago, when he stated:"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." — Mechanics and Inventions, July, 1934
And that, my friends…. is exactly the situation we find ourselves into today. Our reality is not a reflection of our beliefs, because our beliefs are based on pseudoscience. The basic concepts of the Heliocentric model directly contradicts the known "laws" that are firmly grounded in empirical based experiments. These are not debatable.
Let's start with motion. There seemed to be some alluding that I thought Einstein believed the earth to be motionless. I can’t time travel into Einsteins mind, so I can honestly say - I don’t know what he thought. I can assume, since he developed his Special theory to offset the data of the Michelson Morley - that he must have believed in Heliocentrism.
This is nothing but a red-herring — soaring around the interpretation of the data. It doesn't matter if Einstein, Wolfson, Hobble, or any other person I quoted - believed the earth to be stationary. It doesn't matter the excuses or math-a-magic (transform equations) that have been applied to the experiment, so it would conform to the heliocentric model. The only thing that matters - is - What did the data conclude? It concluded the Earth was motionless - as did - every interferometer test conducted afterwards.
Many will state that the M/M only disproved the aether - and not the motion of earth, I have showed, “renowned” heliocentric’s, admit this. The experiment was more than detecting the aether - they were trying to detect earths’ motion - and failed.
Even today, people such as John D. Norton Professor at Pittsburg University make it perfectly clear as to what the M/M experiment was seeking to do.: "The result was negative. Michelson and Morley found shifts in the interference fringes, but they were very much smaller than the size of the effect expected from the known orbital motion of the earth."
Mind reflect, "expected known orbital motion of the earth?"
I feel there is no room for a different interpretation. They were measuring for the velocity of earth around the sun - and failed to do so. Doesn’t matter the "reasoning" or the excuse given.. What matters is - What the data proved.
Professor John D. Norton: "The assumption of uniformity has much to be said in its favour…Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, analogous, in a sense, to the ancient conception of a central earth. The hypothesis cannot be disproved but it is unwelcome and would be accepted only as a last resort in order to save the phenomena. Therefore, we disregard this possibility and consider the alternative."
So - in other words - he states that the empirically collected data is proving the earth to be motionless - but, he as others, will disregard what the empirical science is reflecting - and instead - believe in a theoretical or philosophical idea"
Einstein does the same exact thing when he stated: "…if we admit Michelson's null result as a fact. This was the first path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment, though the Earth is revolving around the Sun."
Mind reflect: “Though the Earth is revolving around the sun”
Being a true scientist, how could he have arrived at that assumption? How could he deny the entire premise of science and experimentation so directly? His philosophy should never be considered the answer to his scientific endeavors, especially when they completely contradict the observable and repeatable evidence. Is this not, the reasoning behind the scientific method? It stifles out our prejudices - and holds the empirical data as the bringer of truth.
This goes back to me stating that our current state of the sciences, could actually be considered a religion. I define it as, when Philosophy took precedence over empirically driven data.
Einstein decided to go with his world view….his philosophy… instead of accepting what the empirical backed science was telling him. Einstein created the Special Theory, which was "the answer" to the "null" result from the M/M.He specifically states, "No Terrestrial experiment can prove Earths motion".
He had to know about Foucault's pendulum, Eratosthenes and other pseudoscientific proofs that the earth is in motion. I have a hard time contemplating the concept he was only referring to optics, when using the word Terrestrial.
It's a catch-22.. If you could prove the Earth's motion, then the entire theory of relativity gets debunked. Yet, time and time again.. People will state aberration, parallax, pendulum, and many other observations.. prove earth is in motion. Completely contradicting what Einstein based his theories on. Even the most scientific of people fail to see this logic.
Many also don't understand how the M/M experiment got helio-centri-fied. They concluded that the apparatus was contracting in length. Another unproven, unseen, unrepeatable phenomenon where time, space, and light are being warped by the apparatus’s contraction. The mathe-magic bandage, is what's referred to as, the Lorentz Contraction.
Many heliocentric's like to throw out the Occam's Razor argument. This is exactly the opposite. Instead of taking the data at face value, they invent this transform equation that is based on the “warp of time and space” to mathemagically conform these experiments to agree with the heliocentric philosophy. To me, the excuses amount to little more than deception and lies.
George Ellis, a famous cosmologist, in Scientific American, "Thinking Globally, Acting Universally", October 1995 Stated: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations," Ellis argues. "For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations." Ellis has published a paper on this. "You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."
Another not so classic - example - of someone trying to explain the philosophical hold that has captured our academics. He, like the others, clearly state there is no evidence for the motion of Earth - therefor the heliocentric model is not one based on Scientific understanding but one of beliefs that are philosophical in nature. Ellis seems to have failed in his attempt to bring this knowledge to the public.
The M/M Experiment shows the methods and tactics that are used. It's the old adage "If the facts don't reflect the theory, then change the facts"
This trend doesn't stop with the M/M - is goes into all things Flat Earth. The physics of water state it will find and maintain level — That data is ignored and replaced with mathemagical gravity. The laws of Entropy are violated because a vacuum can’t exist next to a non-vacuum/pressure without a barrier. Around every corner you will find elaborate hood-winks - that have manipulated the fundamental nature of humanity.xt
Nikola Tesla sums it all up brilliantly, when in 1935, he was talking to the New York Times about the Theory of Relativity: "a beggar wrapped in purple whom ignorant people take for a king" and "a mass of error and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense… the theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors…. its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved."
Closure, by Dave Thomas
It's evident that Bruce Lacey thinks he has found a fatal flaw in heliocentrism; however, he is mistaken. He argues that the Michelson-Morley (M-M) null result means that the Earth really is motionless in space, and that Einstein’s Relativity was simply a desperate attempt to explain away the null result of the M-M experiment.
While related to the findings of M-M, Einstein’s main pathway to relativity was trying to reconcile James Clerk Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism with transmission of light waves. Two of Maxwell's equations can be combined to predict electromagnetic waves, traveling at a constant speed of 1/√(εoμo), where εo and μo are physical constants relating to electricity and magnetism. The speed of the electromagnetic waves didn’t depend at all upon the motion of the source or the observer, which led some to think that these waves were carried by a special medium, the aether, in which the speed of waves would remain constant.
Given electrons moving back and forth at a given frequency, electromagnetic waves of speed c ~ 300,000,000 m/sec are the result. The electrons could be moving up and down, forward and backward, or left and right; Maxwell's laws of physics say their radiated waves all move at speed c. Imagine if the antenna holding the electrons is on a fast train, and an observer outside the train measures its waves. Maxwell's laws state clearly that the electrons wiggling back and forth, even with an extra left-to-right motion caused by movement of the train, still create waves going at speed c. Einstein's brilliant formulation of relativity was based on the insight that the laws of physics must be the same in all (inertial) reference frames; as a result, the speed of light, calculated with Maxwell's Laws, must be the same for all moving sources and/or observers. Einstein realized that for this to work, the concept of absolute time had to be abandoned – events that were simultaneous in one reference frame might occur at separate times in a different reference frame.
This approach happened to explain the null result of the M-M experiment. Here's an analogy I hope will be of use to Bruce Lacey. Let’s imagine that a clever car manufacturer has invented a windshield that measures the speed of droplets of rain as they impact the windshield. If the car is stationary, the speed of the drops is "normal." As the car speeds up, it will run into the oncoming droplets, making them impact the windshield at a higher speed. One could measure the increased speed of the droplets, and infer the speed of the car itself. This is an analogy of what the M-M experiment was looking for, with the “aether wind” replacing the droplets. Now, imagine that, for some very odd reason, the speed of the raindrops on the windshield was not affected at all by the motion of the car. Even at high speed, with the drops coming in almost horizontally, they still hit the windshield with the same speed as if the car wasn’t moving at all. Could you measure the speed of the car from the impact speeds of the droplets? No! There would be a "null result" for the speed of the car.
While the speed of raindrops would, of course, depend on the speed of the car, the speed of light does not do so. And so, the null result of M-M does not mean the earth is motionless. Earth's motion is confirmed by numerous other experiments, including stellar parallax and stellar aberration, which Einstein himself explained correctly, for the first time. There is no paradox; the earth moves, the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames, and lightspeed doesn't depend on the motions of source or observer.
Since the December meeting, Bruce Lacey has made numerous comments in conversations on Facebook. Here is one of the most revealing: "Nothing in the damn sky will actually prove what shape the Earth is. The only reason you people even talk about it, is because you can't 'talk about' the Flatness of EARTH.. so you look into the sky. … That is what Globies do.. Okay.. Stop talking about the f***ing stars, planets, sun, moon and everything else that is in the sky… Get on the GROUND..." This reveals an incredibly unscientific outlook. Of course the motions of the sun, moon and stars will differ if the world is round versus flat. The sun must stay above the flat earth, or else it will be night all over the planet. And that means the sun can’t sink behind the horizon of the flat earth. The flat earth model can be tested, and it fails, abysmally.
This sunset is impossible on Flat Earth
Bruce Lacey, the Humanist Codex, and Nick Soutter's Flat Earth Challenge
Nick Soutter is a Massachusetts-based writer who has created a "Flat Earth Challenge" at his blog, the Humanist Codex.
Soutter states "We here at the codex believe very strongly in proving that the earth is flat. It's a passion for us, and one in which we hope our theistic brothers and sisters will participate. We here at the codex think it's time that Flat Earth is proven! ..."
" To that end we propose experiments to prove that the earth is flat. We will offer a bounty of $10,000, to anyone who can provide proof that the earth is flat. We'll accept any number of proofs, and provide below two experiments where you and the Codex will participate in an effort to prove that the earth is flat. We will take up the position that it is not, and invite the challenger to prove it is. If the challenger fails, they will need to pay all expenses. If the challenger wins, they get their expenses plus the $10,000 bounty."
Nick Soutter tried really hard to get our December speaker, flat-earth believer Bruce Lacey, to accept the Challenge. How did that work out? How did Lacey respond to Nick Soutters' Flat Earth Challenge?
Soutter made every effort to accommodate Lacey's concerns, letting him choose the experiment, the location, and his share of the judges, but Lacey responded negatively, saying "Sorry, but you have the wrong person.. I can go out and prove the Flat Earth all day..Just as you can.. You don't need to offer 10,000.. How about you keep your 10g's and do a test that proves water can stick and conform to spinning objects.. Go out and prove water is curving.. Find that bendy water.. You can be the guy who shut the Flat Earth Movement down...I will be waiting a long time for that.. There is a reason the movement continues to grow daily.. That is because there is ZERO science backing up the magical spinning ball theory."
Nick's reply: "The $10,000 is my personal money, and while it's something I can
afford, it's not a small chunk of change. Rest assured I'm not going to go through the trouble of setting this up, vetting it,
getting the contracts, lawyers and scientists, not to mention flying across the country, without taking every available precaution
to make sure that this test is reliable and completely accurate. I'm sure neither side wants results that could be undermined....
But since (that I can tell) we’ve been reasonable, and handled every objection, offered him $10,000 at absolutely no risk to him,
and since he appears to be almost running away from this challenge…. Well unfortunately this makes it look a lot like he isn't
sure the experiment will work in his favor (and maybe never was)... Every flat earther tells me it's easy, that I can do it
myself (I've tried, many, many times, never been able to do it), and while dozens – like you – have told me that they could
easily do it, prove it with me, not a single one has every done it, they all back out, even when offered $10,000 to do it.
Any idea why?"
Last Update: Feb. 11th, 2019
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