Anyone else continually find it hard to believe that flat earthers aren't just fucking with us?

@CopperCicada I'm afraid that saying "I'm trained as a physicist" immediately translates to "I'm trained as a scam artist" when most flat-earthers hear it. 😓

@RoboChloe Probably. I'll entertain any idea though. I'm open to weird shit. Like I said-- give and take.

@CopperCicada Thank you for that information.I like the idea of the occasional wiggle.
That would fit a hypothesis that we live on a spinning ball.
Would you, could you explain gravity to us all, as I can't understand why there are clouds in the artic don't fall to earth.

Gravity is an mystery to me, please explain.

As Newton couldn't really prove much, cept an apple inavitably falls from a tree cos air can't support its S/G?

@Graciebaby Clouds are what is called an "aerosol". Droplets of a liquid suspended in air. The droplets are on the order of microns. That is why clouds are white-ish.

So one of these tiny droplets experiences the force of gravity. It's mass times a constant, the acceleration of gravity, pulling it to earth. That force is pulling them no doubt.

But the tiny droplets are also subject to other forces that are significant to them precisely because they are so small.

But the drops are suspended in air, and the motion of the drops is limited by the viscosity of air. The drops experience "drag". That drag acts in the opposite direction of the gravitation force, and very small particles on the order of microns or less can be slowed down as they fall so much that they are, for all intents and purposes just "hanging" in the air.

It is like clay in water. Shake it up and the tiny particles of clay just hang in the water and may take days to settle out. Yet the larger particles fall out very quickly. This is exactly the same thing that happens in clouds. When the particles get too large, the gravitational forces pull them down exceed drag and they fall from the sky.

There are yet other forces that are exerted on these droplets. Air currents that move upwards from the earth being the most important. They can be significant. That's how we can get golf-ball sized hail.

The trick to clouds is that they're not just a "single thing". If put all the water in a cloud in one place in the sky in ball it would fall down immediately. A cloud is a huge number of tiny water droplets. The reason it looks like a single thing is because of how those droplets scatter light. Mixtures of things that contain micron sized droplets tend to look white. Doesn't matter if it's an aerosol (water in air), an emulsion (milk-- fat in water), or a solid (milky quartz).

@CopperCicada Why wouldn't the flat planet wiggle n wobble.
Dare I say you are studying 3D global wobble wiggle stuff, could u be barking up the wrong trees for too many years.
I'm Coperernious I say it round.
Then let's have some scientific proof.
You can't, cos there's no evidence, but there is for the total lack of any (a new word perhaps) coriolis effect.
Bedford mile
Suiz Canal
Panama Canal
Just a few ideas.

Tell me they incorporated it's effect please.

@Graciebaby As for gravity more generally, two bodies feel a force of attraction based on their masses. The apple falling from the tree, a cannon ball out of a cannon, or the earth around the sun are all governed by that same principle.

That much we know and is very well proven and tested.

The part of it that is not understood is how that gets integrated with other aspects of physics. That seems to be a mystery at this point.

@Graciebaby I'm not following.

You certainly could come up with a model of a flat earth and explain the motions of everything that is observed in the skies. But you'd end up with a few problems.

One is that it would be more complicated than the formulation of round bodies orbiting each other. It would also be hard to interpret that model into fundamental principles.

Another is that it would lose some predictive capability. It would be harder to explain such things as the trajectories of missiles and satellites.

And if one started to look at other orbital motions using telescopes, like binary stars, exoplanets, one would then have a hard time explaining the dynamics of one's flat earth to them. One's model is not generalized.

... and then there are other more direct problems that I'm actually setting aside.

I have no interest in convincing you that the earth isn't flat. I don't teach that way.