Critical Trust: Is the Earth Flat?

I don't know about you, but the earth looks flat from where I'm standing. Each day, I see the sun, moon, and stars rise up from one side of the earth and go down on the other. The most obvious explanation of these facts is that I'm standing on a flat surface inside a larger spinning sky globe.

If this flat earth theory is true, I will come to an edge if I travel far enough.

I drove for a couple days once and came to an ocean. It continued as far as I could see from the highest point I could climb. I also flew for half a day in a plane a few times, crossing over the ocean and a lot more land. I never saw an edge.

When should I give up trying to figure this out myself? For all I know, the edge was just on the other side of a mountain range that blocked me from seeing it. If everyone gives up so easily and just believes what other people say, how can knowledge and truth prevail?

That is the question I asked myself as a young idealist. Eventually, I realized there is a difference between giving up and leveling up. On our own, we humans are basically pathetic. The one man army and the lone genius are Hollywood tropes. In real life, it's more like the one man loser.

Einstein was not a lone genius. He did some important thinking on his own, but that was after he attended university all the way to the level of PhD to learn how to do physics from other experts. His revolutionary theories built heavily on the work of Newton and many others. Newton was a prideful man, but he said that his ideas were only possible because he stood on the shoulders of giants.

Well, I am no Einstein or Newton. But there is a tool that can allow me to stand on the shoulders of giants. It is called critical thinking.

What is the goal of critical thought? It's to think for myself, right? Instead of just believing some authority, I should examine the facts critically and draw my own conclusions. But this noble idea often gets misunderstood. The goal of critical thinking is not to be a lone thinker. The goal is to stand on the shoulders of genius. The goal is not distrust but trust.

The rest of humanity has explored further than I could in a lifetime. They have thought more thoughts, formed more theories, done more experiments than I will ever have time, resources, or skill to do. By trusting them, I can elevate my thinking to a much higher and interesting level.

But some people say one thing and some say the opposite. How do I know who to trust?

One way to decide is to search for the answers I want to hear and trust the people who say them. That's what most social media encourages. Unfortunately, that easy path is echo chamber thinking, not critical thinking. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, I am more likely to be trampled under the boots of trolls.

Critical thinking is a skill that takes effort and practice, like any other. The basic idea, though, is pretty simple: base trust on results, not claims.

Most scientists think the earth is round, spinning, and a bit tilted, not flat and stationary.

So they claim. What are the results? What testable predictions have been made by round spinning earth theory? Here are just a few:

• Traveling a long way in any one direction brings you back to where you started.
• Seasons are opposite south of the equator vs. north.
• The length of the day depends predictably on time of year and north/south position, not east/west.
• During lunar eclipses, the shadow of the earth on the moon is round.
• The time delay in detecting tremors from an earthquake is predictable from the distance through the earth.
• A faint predicted Coriolis force exists.
• Foucault pendulums rotate in a predicted way.
• Astronauts can see directly that the earth is round.

Here are some predictions made by flat earth theory:

• Traveling a long way in any one direction brings you to the edge.
• During lunar eclipses, the shadow of the earth on the moon has a flat side.
• Tremors from an earthquake take longer to reach more distant places as measured along the surface.
• Attempts to measure the Coriolis force fail, because it is zero.
• Foucault pendulums do not rotate.

These predictions of flat earth theory are routinely found to be false. Excuses can be made. The theory can be tweaked to try to match reality, but a true theory should then be able to make new predictions that turn out to be true. Flat earth theory has made none. Not. One. Single. New. Prediction.

But round spinning earth theory makes some wrong predictions too, doesn't it?

• We should feel dizzy.
• People on the bottom of the globe should fall off.
• Oceans should get flung into the sky as the earth spins.
• Airplanes should turn upside down when they cross the equator going south.
• There should be a constant wind as the earth spins through the air.

But no. Scientists say those are not predictions of round spinning earth theory. They say that to make predictions with this theory, I have to also apply the theory of gravity and Newton's laws of motion. When I do, they say none of those crazy-sounding predictions result. For example, the earth's gravity pulls things towards the center of the earth, not towards some external down direction. Should I trust the scientists? This all sounds like an extra modification of the theory to make it fit the facts.

That is the correct critical thought to have. The more claims made, the more results owed. I should demand even more predictions before I trust this more complicated theory. As it happens, many precise and correct predictions have been made from Newton's theory of gravity and motion. Here are just a few:

• There is a measurable weak attraction between objects, proportional to the product of their masses.
• The paths of projectiles are predicted.
• Tides are predicted.
• The future positions of planets are predicted.
• The orbits of artificial satellites are predicted.

And here's the kicker: the round shape of planets is predicted! Large amounts of matter will tend to clump into round shapes due to gravity. This makes the theory even stronger. It doesn't need to claim the earth is round. It predicts the earth is round.

Although Newton's theories are quite powerful, they eventually fell on their face. They made some slightly wrong predictions. This led to Einstein's even more powerful theories of relativity. In the scientific community, there is a huge incentive to find mistakes and fix them. It makes you famous. You can bet that people have scoured Einstein's theories for incorrect predictions, because it would be the discovery of a lifetime to find one.

The flat earth community, on the other hand, does not celebrate the finding and fixing of mistakes in their theories. In the flat earth community, any evidence that conflicts with the theory is false evidence. Since there is so much false evidence, they are forced to believe in a vast conspiracy of people spreading the lie. The conspiracy apparently spans all countries across many centuries. Many of those countries have fought bitter wars with each other and competed fiercely for scientific and technical supremacy, but somehow they still managed to all remain firmly part of the round earth conspiracy. Not a single country's scientific community broke away and acknowledged the truth of flat earth theory. Or if they did, it was in secret. They continued to mislead in public with false teachings in schools and universities. Why?

Results versus claims: Round spinning earth theory is used every day by people who forecast the weather, fly airplanes, ship goods around the world, use GPS navigation, launch satellites into space, and manage telecommunications networks. Flat earth theory, on the other hand, is used by zero industries other than the conspiracy theory industry.

Why am I even talking about it?

Because the conspiracy theory industry is eating us alive.

A growing number of adults believe the earth is flat. It's now about 10% in the USA. Another 10% aren't sure. Some of these folks are Internet trolls, but many are good people, trying to think for themselves. I was one of them. There is no shame in that. There's no shame in reaching different conclusions either. What is a shame? The product of the conspiracy theory industry: people immunized against evidence, against discourse, against expertise.

A nation steeped in distrust of thinking together will be trapped in thinking apart. A nation led by conspiracy theorists will fail when real problems strike. Folks, we need all the sanity we can get these days. We need critical thought to yield empowering critical trust.

Peace
Pop Winch