by Douglas Falk
“Who?” asked John.
“His apprentice, Johannes Kepler. Brahe died suddenly and mysteriously in the autumn of 1601, and before his corpse had gone cold, Kepler threw out everything his old master had taught him out the window and started preaching the Copernican heliocentric model, the one we still live by. It has been accepted as absolute truth now for several hundreds of years, but it has never been proven. Scientists, now and then, always were accursed with a large dose of hubris. Did you know that the first globe Earth model was made in the year of 1492 by the German astronomer Martin Behaim? 1492! Five hundred years is nothing. When you realise this and take an unbiased look at the timeline, you will quickly realise that it is the globe that happens to be the new kid on the block—not the other way around. Even the great Alexander von Humboldt rejected the Copernical principle as late as the nineteenth century.”
The room grew silent as the three looked at one another, as if each person was expecting someone other than themselves to continue. It was John who broke the deadlock. He walked slowly from the window back to the desk and looked once again at the globe in Celeste’s lap.
“If there are no satellites up there, what kind of craft took all the thousands of pictures of planet Earth?”
William burst into laughter.
“Pictures! Pictures! If there existed actual pictures of the ball Earth, John, do you for a second believe that this movement would have the legs that it has? There are no pictures of the Earth. There are no pictures of other planets, or stars, asteroids, and the other lot for that matter. Every single one of them admitted composites, computer-generated images, or straight up drawings. Illustrations. There is only one picture they claim is real, and that is the Blue Marble shot from 1972, and they’ve milked that for nearly fifty years. Not that I think that picture is real either, but I will admit that it looks better than the CGI pictures they are putting out today.”
John scoffed. “What you just said is horse manure. I don’t believe a word of that. CGI? That wasn’t even invented back in the day of the Apollo missions! There was no Photoshop or computer trickery. Stop wasting my time and present some real arguments for your case.”
Celeste gave John a wry look.
“You want me to show you pictures of the Earth?”
“Yes. There has got to be tens of thousands of pictures at this stage taken by not only the astronauts in the International Space Station, but by space rockets, probes, and satellites. There has to be…there needs to be.”
“As you wish,” she said.
As Celeste started typing on the keyboard, John walked over to her side of the desk and leaned forward over her shoulder to the laptop. She searched for “pictures of Earth from space” on Google Images and pressed enter, and a myriad of colourful orbs showed up.
Jesus Christ.
“Scroll down a bit so I can see the real pictures of the Earth.”
Celeste did not scroll down, nor did she say a word.
“Wait…these…these are supposed to be real? They pass them off as real? That can’t be.”
“This is what you have, John. This is your beloved globe.”
This is not happening. These cannot be the only pictures. These…these are ridiculous! All the colours vary from globe to globe…and the continents are all skewed. Some of these are identical with just the contrast changed!
Celeste kept scrolling.
“Should I keep going? You won’t find anything more realistic deeper down this rabbit hole, believe me.”
“The globe is about as real as the Loch Ness monster, about as factual as Santa Claus,” said William.
“Not a bad analogy, William. The difference is that adults no longer believe in Santa Claus once they reach a certain age—they learn how to let go of fairy tales. But they will cling on to this fantasy, which is very near and dear to them. It will take many years or a whole lifetime for people to wake up, because they love their precious ball far too much. Like they say in the Truman Show…”
“People accept the reality of which they are presented,” quoted William.
Celeste nodded.
“Is this a farce? Are these truly what they say are real actual pictures of the world? Every single one of them look as phoney as a seven-dollar bill,” said John and pointed at an image in the upper left side corner. “Click on that one, and enlarge it please.”
Celeste obliged.
“Here is the iconic Big Blue Marble, from 2012,” said Celeste and clicked on the link, which directed her browser to the NASA web page.
“This picture is rather hysterical, actually. Not only is it obviously fraudulent and computer animated, but the animators at NASA really phoned it in when they created this piece of hot garbage. They phoned it in worse than Bruce Willis in a direct-to-DVD action flick. Take a look at the clouds in the bottom left corner. They are cloned and stamped together! And in the right-hand corner, east of North America, you can clearly see that the clouds form the word sex. Like their designer admits to the public—the pictures of Earth are photoshopped…because they have to be,” said William.
“Why would NASA admit that their pictures are fake? Who said that, some intern?”
“His name is Robert Simmon, also known as Mr. Blue Marble. He goes vividly into detail on how he created this artificial globe in Photoshop.”
“All right. Could you back up and compare this globe to another NASA picture?”
Celeste pressed backstage and zeroed in on a new picture from the NASA website.
John was in disbelief.
“North America covers half of the planet compared to the other picture! Which kind of kindergarten do they handpick their computer animators from?”
William laughed.
“I don’t know, John. But I am glad we can agree that these pictures are one hundred percent counterfeit. Now, NASA faking pictures does not at all automatically mean that the ball Earth is a hoax—that would be rushing to conclusions. But it’s another piece of the puzzle, another brick in the wall of the undeniable preponderance of evidence. If this picture is real, then the United States, Canada, and Mexico would cover one half of the globe, leaving no room for the other continents. I suppose the United States landmass, much like its population, gained a few pounds in between the years these two pictures were released.”
John chuckled.
“I have thought experiment for you now, young man,” said Celeste and placed a firm grip on the orb depicting the known world with her right hand.
“Look at this globe,” she said and spun it around. “As you knew well before this conversation, the Earth is covered by mostly water. Seventy percent, in fact. My question is, have you ever seen large quantities of water bend around the exterior of an object?”
Bendy water? What? Wait, like the oceans being wrapped around the globe? Uh…no. I never thought about that. Raindrops curve, though. Don’t they? But they are hardly comparable to the ocean. If I’d bring up raindrops they’d just call that an ad hoc.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Exactly, and you never will. Because the nature of water is to always find and maintain its own level, a law that goes out the window if the ball is true. It’s a physical necessity for the globe that the world’s oceans are all bent slightly, thanks to our magical friend called gravity. And have you ever heard of a repeatable experiment when you have a sphere spinning a thousand miles an hour with liquid stuck it to it? If you can find me an example in nature or in a science lab when a sphere is shown to possess these properties that makes liquid weighing billions of tonnes sticking perfectly to the ball.”
“I guess there aren’t many.”
“There are none. Because it cannot be demonstrated, and it never will be. Like all fictional fantasies are. Water will always, always, find its own level. Whether the liquid rests in a bathtub, lake or world ocean, you can bet that fancy coat you have there that the water lays completely flat and level.”
“So, what’s the official explan
ation for this anomaly in the heliocentric model?”
“That the force of gravity bends the water around the Earth with surgical precision, with such a miniscule slope that it cannot be detected from ground level. As you know, science tells you that gravity pulls everything towards the centre of the Earth, so no matter where you stand on the globe, you are on top of the ball and everything curves away from you downwards from there. As for how the water is bent around the ball, they describe this as curve level, which has got to be the mother of all oxymorons if I ever heard one. Something is either level, or it is curved. They want to have the cake and eat it too,” she exclaimed.
It is freakishly scary…how much sense this is starting to make. That the water simply rests at level everywhere on the Earth instead of being stuck to a spinning ball that also orbits the Sun in millions of miles a day. My foundations are beginning to crack…although the pillars the house rests on are yet to crumble completely. There are still so many questions left unanswered.
“Speaking of the big G—gravity. How would it work on a plane?”
William cringed. “Do you remember how I explained to you that Nikola Tesla was adamantly convinced that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was a farce?”
“Yes.”
“Naturally, the theory of gravity goes out the window if the Earth is truly flat. Gravity dictates that all mass is pulled to the centre of the Earth, but if the Earth is flat with the North Pole in being the centre…well, it would not work at all, and no flat-Earther believes that the force of gravity exists. Mathematically, the force of gravity when applied to the sphere works, that’s all fine and dandy on paper, but it has never been proven. We believe that the force which makes objects rise and fall in the air comes down to density and buoyancy. Do you understand the concept?”
“Uh…not quite. Give me an example. Why would density and buoyancy replace the force of gravity, which is unanimously agreed upon to exist? There’s no debate about this in the scientific community. Gravity is a law, not a theory—for many years this has been so.”
“Of course, I know that the force of gravity is not up to debate in the scientific community; most scientists are too far gone. Have you ever been bewildered by how selective gravity is? It is strong enough to keep millions of gallons of water stuck to the surface and it keeps massive buildings pinned down, but weak enough to let butterflies and birds fly freely. The force of gravity is pseudoscience, since it cannot be demonstrated in any way—it truly is the duct tape of science. If I am to believe that gravity can keep water sticking to the side of a ball that spins and travels in an elliptical path around the Sun at millions of miles an hour, I want to see some damned good proof of that. And while they are at it, they should be able to present proof of how the Earth’s velocity somehow manages to escape the centrifugal and the centripetal force. The Earth is not speeding around the Sun in a constant velocity, you know. It slows down and accelerates as it revolves around the Sun on the ecliptic plane in the heliocentric model.”
“Again, how does density and buoyancy work then?”
“It’s very simple. The reason why something dense, like a rock, will fall to the ground when dropped is because the item in question is denser than the air surrounding it. But if you fill a balloon with helium, it will rise upwards…thanks to buoyancy. The helium in the balloon is less dense than the air, therefore it rises up.”
“I have to say, I have wondered at times about gravity. It seems like it is the scapegoat for everything that scientists cannot explain.”
“Quite so,” said William. “Every single conundrum that science is faced with—dark matter, black holes, the bending of space time, and other metaphysical hodgepodge—they always pull the gravity card out of their ass to fix everything that does not work. The only experiment ever claimed to have proven the force of gravity is the Cavendish experiment from the late eighteenth century, when Henry Cavendish from the Royal Institution in London made a woeful attempt at proving the force of gravity by hanging a few lead balls in his backyard shed. He spun them around for a few minutes and then declared to the world that he had found proof that mass attracts mass. This experiment by today’s standards is of course easily dismissed. It cannot be reproduced, but the proponents of the doctrine of the sphere will still tout it as a pillar of their belief.”
“The doctrine of the sphere? Your name-calling of the average person’s belief is getting saltier by the minute…”
“I thought it was rather clever a name myself,” said William and smirked. “Anyway, multiple experiments debunk the force of gravity and the alleged motion of the Earth. The Michelson-Morley experiment, the Michelson-Gale experiment, the Sagnac experiment, and the test that went on to be called Airy’s Failure all failed to prove the assumed notion that the Earth was in motion. Every single one of these experiments proved this, even though they did not draw such conclusions at the time, and they were all performed for different reasons. The Michelson-Morley experiment was not performed to test if the motion of the Earth could be detected, but to find out if the luminiferous aether, which scientists of that day believed, existed. It did not, and so Einstein came onto the stage and simply eliminated the aether a couple of years later, but that is another fiver.”
“What’s the luminiferous aether?” asked John.
“It was something of a consensus in the scientific community in the late 1800s that the propagation of light was explained by a medium they referred to as the aether, like William just said,” Celeste explained. “Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed their experiment and found to their surprise that there was not a trace of evidence that the aether even existed. What they did not realise is that they also proved that the Earth is not in motion. While they did not latch on to this discovery at the time, we certainly have now. I wager you were never taught of these experiments in school…am I close to the mark? Am I in the vicinity nearby, or even closer? I wager it’s much more likely that you were taught of the Foucault’s pendulum and how that device somehow proved that the Earth is in constant motion. Even if it is true that Leon Foucault claimed to have picked up a fifteen-degree drift during his heyday, any such detected motion could be chalked up as something else. Like the aether. The Foucault pendulum also malfunctions during eclipses, which the scientific community currently are at a loss for an explanation for. It’s called the Allais effect. Am I close?”
John thought long and hard until he spoke.
“I…I think you might be. Now, high school was ten or fifteen years ago for me, but I don’t remember us being presented with any sort of evidence in favour of or against the sphere. As far as I remember, the curriculum was pretty much this: You’re on a giant ball, and Columbus proved it when he crossed the Atlantic and went ashore on the North American continent. And beneath us there are different layers of the Earth with a molten core at its centre. We were never taught to my knowledge that there was still debate going on as recent as just one hundred or two hundred years ago whether we live on a plane or a planet.”
William nodded. “Ah, the molten core allegedly consisting of iron and nickel. Funny how in the real world, those metals lose their magnetic properties when melted. But in the case of the Earth, these melted metals somehow produce Earth’s magnetic field. Once again, it’s a story. Theoretical, unfalsifiable pseudoscience. We read it in textbooks and accepted it is as gospel…along with the rest of the carefully engineered government narrative. And then we regurgitate it in school tests and pass it along to the next generation.”
My brain is starting to overheat. I don’t even know what to say right now.
“We have all literally spent years reading the same old textbooks, and whence repeated enough times it becomes unquestionable truth. Even now as I have woken up from my slumber, I still catch myself thinking in heliocentric terms. I remind myself to trust my own senses, first and foremost. Oh, and John, since we talked about the alleged motion of the Earth. The proofs we are presented with currently is ab
solute nonsense, like the Coriolis effect. Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that snipers and football players are forced to adjust for the motion of the Earth when they fire a bullet or kick the ball, which is patently absurd. Ask any sniper or athlete. Do you think they adjust for some imaginary force when they throw or kick a ball? Spoiler alert! They do not. Do you know which famed scholar once went on record saying…”
“Oh God, it’s one of your quotes again.”
“Uh…yeah. Guilty as charged. The quote is as follows.”
“Yes?”
“I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any experiment.”
“Hmm. Mike Tyson just after he got knocked out real hard, or after his ninth brandy at the same boxing after party?”
“Close, but no cigar. Albert Einstein said this at a conference in Kyoto, Japan. 1922 was the year, I believe. Mind you, I am not making this up—the poster boy of modern science, sculptor of the theory of relativity and chosen by Time Magazine as the man of the century, said this, point blank. No wonder Tesla rejected his theories—the guy just didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Nikola Tesla was the real deal, the true genius—and it’s only now after many decades when he is starting to get the posthumous credit he deserves. He was a man before his time in every sense of the word, discarded as a mad man by those too limited to recognise his vision for the future.”
John was baffled. “Is that real? He really said that? Are you sure this quote isn’t just something you read on the internet that an overexcited flat-Earther cherry-picked? More than once have I gotten outfoxed by savvy liars on the internet…just saying.”