129. Common sense tells us that the Earth cannot be moving around erratically as science maintains

"To quote William Carpenter, “Why, in the name of common sense, should observers have to fix their telescopes on solid stone bases so that they should not move a hair's breadth,  if the Earth on which they fix them moves at the rate of nineteen miles in a second?  Indeed, to believe that ‘six thousand million million million tons’ is rolling, surging, flying, darting on through space for ever with a velocity compared with which a shot from a cannon is a very slow coach,  with such unerring accuracy that a telescope fixed on granite pillars in an observatory will not enable a lynx-eyed astronomer to detect a variation in its onward motion of the thousandth part of a hair's breadth is to conceive a miracle compared with which all the miracles on record put together would sink into utter insignificance.  Since we can, (in middle north latitudes), see the North Star, on looking out of a window that faces it - and out of the very same corner of the very same pane of glass in the very same window - all the year round, it is proof enough for any man in his senses that we have made no motion at all and that the Earth is not a globe.”" 

The roller-coaster fallacy again

So someone called William Carpenter doesn’t understand something and this constitutes a proof in Mr Dubay’s world?

"[The Earth is] rolling, surging, flying, darting on through space ..."

Dubay and his flat Earth colleagues keep bringing this up because they don't understand that we do not feel velocity, only acceleration.  The Earth is not under and significant acceleration so there is nothing for us to feel.

See proof  97

Carpenter obviously knows this on some level which is why he describes the motion of the Earth with descriptive words that we associate with acceleration.  E.g. Rolling, Surging and Darting.  He is trying to suggest that a rotating Earth orbiting the Sun is like some sort of roller-coaster ride.   It isn't.

"Since we can ... see the North Star ... [in the same position] ... all the year round, it is proof ... that we have made no motion at all ..."

William Carpenter, like Dubay, has a hard time grasping how far away stars are from Earth. 

First let us consider the Earth orbiting the Sun.

Polaris is 2,550,000,000,000,000 miles away.  The diameter of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is 189,000,000 miles.   In proportion if the distance to Polaris was 1 mile, the side to side motion Earth as it moved around the Sun would be only about 0.005 inches.   That is a minuscule angular difference.  Obviously way way too small to make a noticeable difference to the position of Polaris in the sky.

Next let us consider the motion of the Sun relative to the stars.

A rough over approximation can be obtained by considering that the Sun, and with it the Earth, travels about  3,942,000,000 miles in a year.   If we assume that the motion is at a tangent to the direction of Polaris and Polaris is stationary, then in proportion, if the distance to Polaris was 1 mile, the distance the Sun would have travelled would be only about 0.9 inches. That is less than 1000th of  a degree of angular difference.  Again way too small to change its position in the sky.  In reality it is much less than this because Polaris is also in motion, rotating with the Galaxy.  

It would take many thousands of years for us to be able to notice a positional change of Polaris due to our Sun's motion. 

However, there is another movement that can be noticed over timescale of a centuries. This is the axial tilt of the Earth which changes very slowly.

From: http://www.astronomytrek.com/do-the-stars-change-position-each-year/

"While stars maintain their same relative positions and configuration from one year to the next, over a period of centuries they do not. This is due to precession, or the wobble motion of the Earth which causes the direction of its axis to change over longer periods of time. Greek astronomer Hipparchus is generally credited with discovering precession in 127 BC, having noticed that the equinoxes occurred in a different position among the stars than depicted on comparison charts of 150 years earlier. Likewise, star positions have changed since ancient Greek times at a rate of roughly 1 degree every 71.6 years, corresponding to a cycle period lasting around 25,772 years. The North Star around 3000 BC, for instance, was Thuban in the constellation of Draco, while today it is Polaris in Ursa Minor, and in 14,000 AD will become Vega in Lyra, before becoming Thuban again sometime around 23,000 AD."

Something for flat earthers to consider is how to explain the changing positions of the stars if the Earth is stationary.

< Prev    121-130   Next >