I find the “flat earth” movement (if you can call it that) disturbing. That and other ideas, such as rejecting modern proofs about the speed of light. One could dismiss these as quirky, relatively harmless things. Or maybe it is an honest misunderstanding, so one can educate oneself in the finer points of flat earth theory to refute it.
But I think there is something worse going on. It takes a lot of effort not only to be mistaken about a few facts but to have an elaborate alternative view of reality, full of conspiracy theories. This has to be willful, for whatever reason. What happens when a society reaches a tipping point and enough people are guided by odd conspiracy theories? All of this is to step away from civilization. We like to think our progress is so obvious and inevitable. But progress is far from inevitable. You would be amazed at how quickly everything could be lost. That there are movements like flatearthism should be an early warning. Yes, better general education about science may help but I think there is more to it than that.
I agree, I find it deeply disturbing. Not that I would want to idolise science and scientists, but I don’t understand the modern anti-intellectual conspiracy-theory movements about moon landings, UFOs, Flat Earth, young earth and so on. Is it post-modernism? I understand checking and not taking things for granted, but what I see goes beyond open-minded scepticism to outright prejudiced hostility, that anything not from ones own senses should be automatically presumed to be untrue. I don’t see how a society can function like that.
Indeed. And for that reason I have my doubts that elected officials in the USA will be doing all that much about the climate change crisis. Many of them feel beholden to that kind of mentality among various constituency within the electorate.
[I don’t recall if we have conversed before, Darren. Even if you’ve been on Peaceful Science for a while, I will welcome you anyway.]
Post-modernism is definitely a part of it. There is also the human psychology of group identity and persecution. When you are part of a group that is attacked by some perceived elite class it can cause people to dig in and cling more tightly to that group. Personally, I find the psychology of the Flat Earth community to be much more fascinating than their actual arguments.
CS Lewis described something similar in his speech The Inner Ring, the desire to be part of of an inner group who know “the truth” and be able to look down on those who don’t. http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
I also find this to be the most interesting thing about the FE community. If I am not an astrophysicist, I would like to get a PhD on crackpots and crackpot societies from the social science perspective.
One thing I notice is that a lot of these people (important: not all) have some sort of superiority complex, in which they have a strong wish to be smarter/more “awake” than others. A big draw of FE is the idea that everyone else except for them are blind.
Here is a cute anecdote:
There was a small kerfuffle earlier this year, where the most popular FE model is found to be inconsistent. A number of people in the FE community then suggest that there is a “conspiracy within the conspiracy”, and they were quite proud of being the elite subset of people who can see through this double conspiracy. It was quite amusing.
This photograph cannot be taken in a globe Earth. That is, if you remove atmospheric refraction, which of course the Flat Earther will either neglect or incorporate wrongly.
According to their calculations, the Sun is 3,000 miles above the Earth. This would mean the Sun would go through dramatic size changes as it moves from horizon to horizon. How do they explain the Sun staying the same size through the entire day?
Some of them claim that the air causes the Sun to be unresolved, and similar to the unresolved stars, it doesn’t matter what the actual angular size of the star is as they all look the same size
Some of them claim that the Sun is not a ball of plasma in the sky, or perhaps not even an object in the sky at all, but rather some unknown thing that is currently beyond human knowledge and understanding (this one is the most ridiculous but the most logically consistent)
That book looks like a great recommendation, Dan. And when I saw that Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1964, I immediately thought of Douglas Hofstadter winning the very same Pulitzer in 1980 (for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.)
So I wondered if Richard Hofstadter might be Doug Hofstadter’s uncle, the brother of Robert Hofstadter. However, my preliminary research online rules that out because of the different parents listed in the Wikipedia entries for Richard and Robert Hofstadter. Yet, both Richard and Robert Hofstadter were born into Jewish families in New York. (OK. I admit that that doesn’t narrow it down all that much!) Nevertheless, I wonder if there is some sort of second or third cousin relationship between these two Hofstadter Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction winners.
Speaking of Robert Hofstadter, I remember several of us shooting the breeze with Doug Hofstadter back around 1980 (??) when we all had tiny offices crammed into the same ancient building and Doug told some stories of what it was like going to Oslo in 1961 so that his father could be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Doug was just 16 years old, and I think he said the entire family went (perhaps with the exception of one of Doug’s sisters, who is severally developmentally disabled from birth.) They got protocol and etiquette instructions for dealing with the King of Norway. Douglas certainly had lots of interesting “adventures” growing up, being the son of such an eminent scientist and that Oslo trip was just one of many fun stories he shared with us.
Anyway, both Richard and Robert Hofstadter seemed to operate in the upper intellectual stratosphere and Douglas Hofstadter was/is the most incredible polymath I ever had the privilege of getting to know. (A lot of people assume that the Hofstadter character on The Big Bang Theory TV series was named after Doug Hofstadter. Yet, I think I heard series creator Chuck Lorre say that that character was named after Robert Hofstadter, Doug’s father.)
I really miss the university environment I enjoyed in days gone by.
Hmmm, I guess I’ve really gone off topic from “Soundly Proving the Curvature of the Earth.” My apologies. (Nah. I really don’t feel that bad about it.)
I don’t think they have much problem with magma. At least I have not encountered it as an argument against Flat Earth. I think they would just claim that there is pressure deep within the Earth (the flat Earth can be very thick) similar to how there is a lot of pressure deep in the ocean.
I agree. They mock “gravity” as a magic word, but replace it with their own magic word “density”. They seem blissfully unaware that sorting by density would only occur in a gravitational field anyway.
Thanks Dan. argh, so many good books, so little time. Its not in my local library but I’ll suggest they get a copy. Sadly Anti-intellectualism is not confined to America but is also alive and well in New Zealand, where it often goes by the phrase “its cool to be a fool”