THE EARTH IS FLAT DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT? T-Shirt

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And yet, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere; it bulges slightly at the equator. "Over a long time-scale, the Earth acts like a highly viscous fluid," says Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Earth has been spinning since it was formed, and "if you have a spinning fluid, it will bulge out due to centrifugal forces." You can see evidence for this at the equator, where the Earth's diameter is 7926 miles—27 miles larger than at the poles (7899 miles). The difference is tiny—just one-third of 1 percent. THE SHADOW KNOWS People who believe that Earth is flat aren't coming to that conclusion from the same types of observations. Instead, they believe that we are being misled and lied to, that scientists (including me) want you to believe that Earth is round, despite its flatness. In Zetetic astronomy, the perception that Earth is flat leads to the deduction that it must actually be flat; the antimoon, NASA conspiracy and all the rest are just rationalizations for how that might work in practice. Those details make the flat-earthers' theory so elaborately absurd it sounds like a joke, but many of its supporters genuinely consider it a more plausible model of astronomy than the one found in textbooks. In short, they aren't kidding. And Earth's curvature is clearly apparent from high altitudes, as Capt. Albert Stevensof the U.S. Army Air Corps showed in the 1930s. In December 1930, for example, Stevens snapped a photo looking westward while flying at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) above Villa Mercedes, Argentina.

If you use gravity to, say, trust your GPS to give you accurate positions and calculate trajectories, then that same force will form material the size of Earth into a ball. When you follow this train of logic, it becomes clear that the only feasible conclusion is that Earth is indeed flat. Flatter than anyone has ever expected.Earth's shadow blankets the moon during a lunar eclipse on May 16, 2022 in this image taken from the International Space Station. (Image credit: NASA) Eric Oliver is a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, local politics, racial attitudes and self knowledge. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which was Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has also authored numerous articles in journals. As objects recede from you, they begin to look smaller and slowly disappear in a very unique way: first their bottoms become hidden, and then their tops. If you've ever watched a ship on the horizon, you've seen this for yourself. Similarly, from a great distance, the tops of tall objects like mountains are visible well before their bases.

The photograph showed the troposphere-stratosphere boundary and the actual curvature of the Earth and demonstrated the potential for long-range reconnaissance from high-altitude balloons," NASA officials wrote. To put it bluntly, we know more about the curvature of Earth than almost any other topic in the realm of physical science. There are so many experiments, observations and demonstrations that have, time and time again, revealed the curve of the Earth. But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round — say, pictures taken from space — are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work.Our curved Earth also aligns perfectly with all of physics. Additionally, all of the other planets ever discovered also appear round, because that's how gravity likes things. During a lunar eclipse, Earth passes between the sun and the moon, allowing Earth to cast its shadow on the moon. That shadow is always, always, always a circle, no matter where you are on the planet, no matter the timing of the eclipse. Always.