{"id":74,"date":"2025-08-08T14:02:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T14:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.sciencepicker.com\/?p=74"},"modified":"2025-08-08T14:02:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T14:02:36","slug":"what-if-the-earth-was-flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/what-if-the-earth-was-flat\/","title":{"rendered":"What if the earth was flat?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Earth is a sphere, this\nis a simple fact that humans have known for thousands of years. It was beyond\none’s control confirmed as soon as the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1\nsatellite in 1957 and it went around the globe. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, a small but\nvocal group of people who insist that the world is flat so-called Flat Earthers\nhave emerged online in recent years, and they seem to be inseminated doubt\nabout this most basic aspect of reality. Many flat Earthers put a great deal of\neffort into fabricating alternative explanations for why the world behaves as\nif it’s round when it’s actually flat even though a spherical Earth clearly fits the observations humans have made about\nthe planet over the last few paradises.<\/strong>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A planetary scientist at Caltech\nin Pasadena, California David Stevenson says, to shape a cosmic body into a\ndisk rather than a sphere, you’ve got to spin it very fast. This would,\nunfortunately, destroy the planet by tearing it into tiny particles. In the\n1850s, astronomer James Clerk Maxwell showed mathematically that a solid,\ndisk-like shape isn’t a stable configuration in the cosmos, in work he\nconducted regarding Saturn’s rings. Maxwell’s research predicted that Saturn’s\nrings would be made of lots of small, unconnected particles; he turned out to\nbe right. His math explained why there are no planet size disks floating around\nthe galaxy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Source: Shutterstock.com\/Amanda Carden<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To flatten Earth <\/strong>without spinning it is very\nexpeditiously, you’d need magic, or perhaps an astronomical panini press. At\nany rate, a stamped flat Earth<\/strong> wouldn’t last for long. Within a few hours, the\nforce of gravity would press the planet back into an elliptical. Gravity pulls\nequally from all sides, which explains why planets are spheres (or nearly so\ndepending on the speed of a planet’s rotation, those forces may work against\ngravity to create a bit of a bulge at the equator). Maxwell\u2019s math showed a\nstable, solid disk-like Earth<\/strong>\njust isn\u2019t possible under\nthe actual conditions of gravity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The atmosphere? Gone,\nbecause it’s held to the planet by gravity. Tides? Gone. They’re caused by the\nplanetary motion pull of the moon, which traction on the oceans and causes them\nto subtly bulge out as it swings by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gravity is also responsible for Earth’s<\/strong> luminous structure, with the impenetrable materials sinking to the core, lighter materials making up the pallium and the lightest materials forming the crust. Without this layered structure, the planet would behave a lot differently. Earth’s<\/strong> liquid outer core, acts as a giant, dynamic magnet, which creates the planet’s magnetic field. The magnetic field helps protect the planet’s atmosphere from the stripping effect of the solar wind, which scraped away Mars’ atmosphere after the planet’s magnetic field fluctuated 4 billion years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Davis, a geophysicist\nat Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth<\/strong> Observatory in New York City says if the Earth<\/strong> was flat<\/strong>, plate tectonics the movement of rigid\nplates that make up the planet’s crust wouldn’t work either. When you just do\nthe simple calculations like, if this plate is moving this much and that plate\nis moving that much,’ you have to do it on a sphere,” he told Live\nScience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flat Earthers<\/strong> spin different explanations for how all these\nobservations could be possible on a flat<\/strong>\nplanet. The problem, Davis\nsays, is that these explanations don’t have any basis in mathematics or\nphysical reality. When Maxwell predicted in the 1850s that Saturn’s rings were\nmade of lots of small particles, he did so by applying general knowledge of how\ngravity and rotational forces work. David says his essay on the subject, in\nfact, was mostly mathematical equations. Flat Earth<\/strong> theories\ndon’t work that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Earth is a sphere, this is a simple fact that humans have known for thousands of years. It was beyond one’s control confirmed as soon as the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and it went around the globe. Nevertheless, a small but vocal group of people who insist that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-and-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.science-pickers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}