Tech & Sci
14:45, 02-May-2018
‘Gravity doesn’t exist’ and other claims at UK’s first Flat Earth Conference
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Nearly 500 years after Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe, over 200 people gathered in a hotel in Birmingham for the UK’s first Flat Earth Conference.
Calling themselves “free-thinkers,” attendees met over a period of three days to discuss what they believe is the Earth’s flat shape.
Resting their arguments on the belief that NASA has falsified evidence and a distrust of widely-accepted scientific fact, the flat-Earthers presented their own “evidence” for why the Earth is not, in fact, a sphere.
One of the most common questions used by flat-Earthers to prop up their claims is: If the Earth is truly round, why is there no curvature to the horizon? Put another way, why is the horizon always at eye-level?
The answer: the Earth’s curvature only becomes visible to the human eye above 11,000 meters, and only when one has a 60-degree field of view, according to a 2008 paper.
Taking their senses as the ultimate indicator of truth, believers in the flat Earth theory appear to argue that they need to “see it to believe it.”
The conference was also an opportunity for speakers to put forth other claims that refute science, including the idea that “gravity does not exist.”
Speaker David Marsh claimed that his ideas “destroys Big Bang cosmology” and “supports the idea that gravity doesn’t exist and the only true force in nature is electromagnetism,” reports the Telegraph.
Addressing the challenge of the Earth’s finite edges under the flat-Earth system, speaker Darren Nesbit introduced what he called the “Pac-Man theory” – the idea that celestial bodies can teleport from one side of the planet to the other, just like what happens when the character goes off one side of the game in Pac-Man and arrives on the other.
The recent surge in the popularity of flat-Earth theory has been partially propelled by well-known musicians and athletes who have publicly questioned the Earth’s shape.
At the beginning of 2017, NBA star Kyrie Irving triggered a media frenzy when he claimed that most people’s ideas about the Earth being a sphere has been spoon-fed to us, but that no one truly knows.
In September 2017, rapper B.o.B started a GoFundMe campaign so that he could send satellites into space to find the Earth’s curvature for himself. He had earlier engaged in a Twitter debate with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the same subject.