After watching a few terrence howard debunk videos on youtube, I have been finding myself locked into the debunkisphere on youtube by the algoritms, and I must say that it is an interesting experience. On one side of the spectrum in the debunkosphere we find inteligent people like Sabine Hossenfelder who really do their research, try to explain why the people that are wrong are actually wrong, and actually looking at the possible merrits of some of their arguments, and on the other side of the spectrum we see people like Dave Farina (Professor Dave) who are more loud than right, hardly do any research because they assume they already know, and mostly seem motivated by the idea that winning a debate against bigger idiots somehow makes them look smarter than they actually are. And nothis is not about the obvious differences in inteligence and education level between these two debunkers, I just name these two because they are relatively well known youtubers in the debunkosphere.
One subject debunkers love to do their debunking on, and a subject that both Sabine and Dave did videos on (look them up on YouTube for some contrast) are flat earth theorists, and here is where things grow fun on the Dave side of the debunkosphere.
Oh so many flat earth debunkers will either refer to or actually use weather baloon footage to try and debunk the flat earthers, and in principle therwouldn't be anything wrong with that, because weather balloons are high enough for us to see the actual curvature of the earth. The point is, flat earthers like our pompous friend Dave points out, claim that the footage from weather baloons is CGI, and guess what, up to a point it actually is.
And no, Im not a flat earther myself, at least not in the way most people think about flat earth theories. I believe, like many scientists, that there are likely more than three dimensions of space, and that our universe (and hence the earth) is pretty darn flat in at least most of these extra dimensions.
As anyone who has ever done anything with digital wide angle photography will know, wide angle footage is distorted. You need software to undestort the image, and if you don't use that software right, round things can become flat and flat things become round. With the growing popularity of fisheye lenses, this fact should bconsidered widely known, but its not just fisheye lenses, its everyhing wide a angled in photography. You can not make undestorted wide angle footage without using some type of computer generated distortion that compensates for the lens or mirror distortions.
Un-edited footage from weather baloons often shows very curved earth, even from as low as 10 km or 15 km. Many of the Dave level debunkers though will gladly use that footage to show the earth is round without doing the basicly highschool level math needed to see the world would need to be a tenth of its actual size for it to show such curvature at only 15 km high.
But lets dive into it a little bit. Assume we have a weather baloon shooting close to undistorted footage at the peak of wherwcan expect baloons to go. Lets do little thought experiment with a 100 degree lineair lens at a whoping 40 km and see what distortion free curvatyre we might actually expect.
There is an easy part and a somewhat less easy part to this. Lets start with the easy part.
The easy part starts by normalizing our planet. Tne radius of the earth is 6,371 km. At a height of 40 km abouve the surface, this means our baloon is 6.411 km from the center of the planet. Lets divide both by the radius of the planet.
Now we can draw a litle right angled triangle. The longest side is 1.0063 long, one side is 1.0 long, and using pytagoras we can see that the short side is 0.11 long. Now if we take the arctan of the short side, we find the angle φ between the long legs of the triangle that is 0.11 radians or 6.4 degrees.
This was the easy part, we calculated the distance in degrees betwee our baloon and any point at its horizon. Now we need to move on to figuring out the distance between two points at the horizon, namely the two extremes visible within the 100 degree horizontal area covered by our lineair lens.
We will skip the math but walk through the basic steps. If we place our baloon dead ce ter above the north pole, or at a 90 degree latitude, the coordinates of the left side of the horizon could be taken at :
- 83.6, 0.0
- 83.6, 100.0
Now given these two points we need to calculate the minor arc of the great circle.
The result in our case is 0.17 radians or 9.8 degrees. Now we divide this angle by two and take one minus the cos of half the angle to get how much lower the horizon at the edges should compare to the center, in our case this is 0.0037, and we take twice the sin of half the angle to find out how to scale the distance between the two points, in our case 0.17.
So how wide should we display our image?
Lets make it 17 cm wide, like your phone on its side. That means the curvature would be thus that the horizon shows less than 4 mm higher in the center of the phone scree than at the sides.
This is absolutely enough to show curvature at 40 km, but 15 km is a whole different story. It's however nowhere near the curvature many of the debunkosphere crowd are refering to even showing.
You can see more curvature but to do so you need to use wide angle lenses or mirror systems, but these lenses and mirror systems distort the curvature and need to be compensated for, something that is indeed computer generated and very delicate. Too delicate I would propose to use as any kind of debunking prove unless the combination of lens and correction as been calibrated.
Yes, flath earthers are still wrong, but when debunkers like Dave Farina frifioulously use uncorrected or non-calibrarecorrected wide angle and even fisheye footage, they are actually giving more credability to the flat earthers.
The earth isn't flat, alas not in the three dimensions sense othe world, but the curvature of the earth in some of these debunk videos and blogs would suggest the earth to be smaller to sigificantly smaller than the moon.
So can we please leave the debunking to the Sabines of this world, so the Dave's of this world can go back to doing things that don't make flat earthers and other misguided souls look more credible?