Shutting down flat Earthers, Neil deGrasse Tyson style | Big Think

Shutting down flat Earthers, Neil deGrasse Tyson style
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What is the point of debate when one side the argument is objectively true? There is none.

That is, unless the incorrect arguer has the ability to influence the masses. When a relatively famous musician began spewing flat Earth views on social media, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson knew he had to jump in the ring and defend science with science.

General belief systems aren't a threat, but it's important to combat incorrect and dangerous views when they have a chance of pervading greater society.
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NEIL DEGRASSE:

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium. His professional research interests are broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. Tyson obtains his data from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as from telescopes in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and in the Andes Mountains of Chile.Tyson is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid "13123 Tyson".

Tyson's new book is Letters From an Astrophysicist (2019).
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TRANSCRIPT:

I don’t like debating people because in a debate what is the construct. It’s typically two people and there’s an audience and you debate some opposite sides of some issue. And then there’s a winner of the debate. And then everyone walks away reflecting on the winner. So who wins the debate? It’s often the person who’s charismatic, who’s maybe charming – that’s related to charisma of course. Who has a good way with words, good vocabulary. And you can have someone who doesn’t have any of that who is speaking objective truths who could lose a debate. So then what is the point of the debate of one of these points of view is objectively true. So I will not enter a debate where I have the objectively true side of an argument and the other person does not. That is something that should not be debated, does not belong in front of an audience getting debated. You want to debate something? Debate political policy of what to do in the face of climate change.

Do you have carbon tax? Do you have solar panels? Do you subsidize them? Debate that. Don’t debate something that is or is not objectively true in this world. The B.o.B, the rapper, I have a video letter to him the transcript of which is in Letters from an Astrophysicist. That rose to that level of attention because he started saying I am using laws of math and physics to show Earth is flat. Those are fighting words. If you’re going to say using math and physics, that is an alarm to the geekiverse that we must rise up and counteract these forces from the dark side that are out there. So, the bat signal went up. I responded. What is the bat signal? Oh, sorry. In my Twitter stream there are people saying Neil, you’ve got to do something about B.o.B. Save him from himself. He’s saying Earth is flat. Then I first said who’s B.o.B? So I quickly looked him up. Oh, he’s a rap star. Okay.

These are people who follow me and B.o.B in the Twitterverse. So what does that Venn diagram look like. How much overlap is there in the two Venn diagrams. In this slice, however narrow, they were pleading to me to do something and so I responded with a video letter. Just kind of putting him in his place.

I think it’s important to combat people who are claiming that they are using math, science, evidence and physics behind their cause when, in fact, they either aren’t or they’re using it badly. That needs to be called out. Otherwise if you just have a belief system I don’t really care. We live in a country that protects free speech which usually also means free thought. If you want to think Earth is flat, go right ahead. But if you start influencing other people who have power over other people and you have no foundation and objective reality it can be dangerous. If you influence people or you yourself become someone who has influence over legislation, laws, rules by which we all abide in society. That’s an unhealthy situation for civilization to be in. If your personal belief system...

[bigthink]

Have questions for Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Let us know! We'll keep them in mind for our next video.

[jamesmartin]

Scientists shouldn't debate flat earthers for the same reason a professional boxer shouldn't fight an 8 year old.

[boterlettersukkel]

Flat earth fails on every point.


The geocentric flat earth has ...

• No working model, or map.
• No way to determine proper distances, or directions between two point on the earth not sharing the same longitude.
• No explanation for how the sun and the moon circle the earth, or how the sun migrates from the tropic of Capricorn to the tropic of Cancer and back over the year.
• No idea why the ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Eratosthenes and Aristarchus believed the earth was a sphere.
• No idea what P and S shockwaves detected by seismology equipment tells us about the internal structure of the earth, and the shape and dimensions of the surface of the earth.
• No idea what powers the sun and the stars.
• No idea of the distance to the stars.
• Clueless as to why almost all stars don't appear to change position in the sky from opposite sides of earth's orbit around the sun when the phenomena of parallax says they should, and why we can only use the parallax method for measuring the distance of stars that are closest to the earth. Luckily, Polaris is one that we can determine the distance to using parallax, because it is also a Cepheid variable star, which allows the distance to be measured to much more distant stars where the parallax method not longer works.
• No idea of the distance from the earth to the planets, or even much about them at all.
• No idea why binary stars obey Newton's law of gravitation.
• No explanation as to why we can only see 59% of the total surface area of the moon when, from a flat earth perspective we should be able to see most of it, including the dark side of the moon.
• No idea why the moon appears upside down in the southern hemisphere compared to how it looks in the northern hemisphere, and why the phases of the moon are on opposite sides of the Moon, and why it looks circular from all vantage points on the earth.
• No idea why sunspots rotate in the opposite direction in the southern and northern hemispheres, or even what sun spots are.
• No believable explanation for how GPS is implemented across the world.
• No explanation as to why aircraft carry ring laser gyros onboard capable of detecting the rotation of the earth.
• No idea how it is possible to develop gravitational maps of the earth's surface, or why anyone would want one, or how they could be used.
• No explanation for how eclipses work, especially lunar eclipses, or how to predict them correctly.
• No idea why the Humber bridge, the Verrazzano Narrows bridge are built to account for the earth's curvature.
• No idea why CERN, LIGO and the Stanford linear accelerator vacuum rings and arms are constructed to take account of the earth's curvature.
• No idea why physicists working on LIGO, the gravity wave detector, were awarded Nobel prizes in physics.
• No idea why geodetic surveyors keep claiming the earth is an oblate spheroid.
• No idea why Google Earth does not publish its underlying flat earth model that allows it to project the earth as a globe.
• No explanation as to why the sun rises due east for everyone on the earth on the equinox.
• No idea why an observer on the equator during an equinox does not see the sun set at an angle 19° above the horizon.
• No idea why there should be a discernible horizon that looks like the edge of the ocean viewed from a beach. The horizon should really be a blur as the farther we look out across the flat earth, the more light is scattered and the more particles in the atmosphere obscuring the view.
• No idea how it is possible to see the sun set twice simply by changing your height above the earth (quickly by just a few tens of metres).
• No reasonable explanation as to how Polaris can be used in conjunction with a sextant in the northern hemisphere to determine latitude.
• No explanation as to why the Artic and Antarctic experience months of days and nights at differ times of the year.
• No explanation why bright little objects called satellites by some are regularly visible in the night sky following a predicted path across the sky
• No explanation for how tides work.
• No explanation how (most times) boats disappear over the horizon when they should be visible on a flat earth.
• No explanation as to why the horizon does not rise to eye level.
• No credible explanation why helium balloons fitted with non-fish eye cameras often detect the curvature of the earth.
• No credible explanation for the existence of the "Downward" force called gravity.
• No explanation that does not implicitly make use of the theory of gravity for the atmospheric pressure gradient from high to low pressure with altitude, especially if we live in a dome.
• No idea why (almost without exception) hurricanes and typhoons rotate in opposite directions in northern and southern hemispheres respectively.
• No explanation for the Coriolis effect observable in controlled experiments such as those conducted by Ascher H. Shapiro in the 1960s.
• No explanation as to why the northern celestial pole rotates counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and the southern celestial pole rotates clockwise in the southern hemisphere.
• No idea what Antarctica even looks like, and where the South Pole is physically located.
• No idea why Venus has phases. Bye bye Geocentric system.
• No idea why planets, e.g. Mars, exhibit retrograde motion. Hello Heliocentric system.
• No idea why the planets and their moons in the solar system appear to be obeying Newton's laws of planetary motion.
• No explanation whatsoever why Stellar Aberration occurs.
• No idea why clouds are illuminated from the bottom at sun set.
• Can't explain how a commercial aircraft can fly from Perth to Sydney in only 4 hours 10 mins across the flat earth, as to achieve this, it would need to fly faster than an F18 on afterburner all the way.
• No idea why the CO2 atmosphere of Mars appears to "Cling" to the exterior of its spherical spinning surface without the need for physical containment. This phenomenon is observable on others planets too.
• No idea why the sun and the moon don't change in angular size from rising to setting by a factor of 2 to 3 since they are local to the earth, and no idea why the sun according to the inverse law of radiation is not 4 to 9 times brighter at midday than at sunset and sunrise when viewed from Australia.
• No credible reason why millions of people (mostly scientists, engineers and technicians ) over decades would lie to keep the globe earth alive, and why nations and commercial enterprises, accountable to the voters and shareholders respectively, would spend (waste) $2 trillion a year, each and every year to maintain the globe lie.
• No idea how it is possible to measure the value of G, the universal gravitational constant and in so doing, verify the theory of gravity.
• No scientific papers publish in the last 100 years supporting the flat earth.
• No idea why there is snow on hight moutains with a local sun as it has to get warmer and snow should melt if you get closer to the sun.

Now the globe earth and the heliocentric model have answers that are consistent with each other to all of the above that the flat earth can't explain, but the globe earth is wrong and the flat earth is correct, even although the flat earth model is almost useless at explaining anything?

Have I understood the situation correctly?

The flat earth is gaslighting to the power infinity

[TobyConger]

"It's hard to win an argument against a smart person, And impossible to win one against an idiot."

[pervysageyt]

He's absolutely right no need to debate with some one that isn't even trying to understand where you coming from

[rustyshackleford]

If anyone tells you 2+2=5, you don’t sit down and debate. You leave the conversation.

[udith]

I know what kind of math they use
2+2=22

[mcparts]

I finally found one in the wild yesterday, never though it would happen😅 i didnt discuss with him, because i know that no matter what scientific argument i could come up with, he would have some kind of fairytale as to why that could not be true, or simply ignore it.

[nlzcush]

Everyone asks questions and asks for proof of the flat earth, but once provided they ignore them because the programming goes against it.

[tankinator]

Well, you know what they say “don’t argue with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”

[Thomvn]

"You can beat 40 geniuses with 1 fact but you can't beat an idiot with 40 facts"
-Unknown

[anotherwolff]

When "Debate" a Flatearher:
It is not an real Debate.
It is making fun over an really stupid person.
Because every Flatearther is an more on.

[honeykim]

this comment section is filled with flat earthers.

[rochat]

"I don't argue with stupid people anymore."

4 minutes summed up in 7 words....

[cleander]

Arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon: no matter how good you are, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and then strut around acting like it won.

[terah]

Arguing with someone who has abandoned the use of reason... is like administering medicine to a dead person.

[pkmuhammedhisan]

I hate the Mount Everest shadow that shows up in front of my house everyday ! 😠

[dirmanbw]

"What is the point of the debate if one of these points of view is objectively true"

[runkus]

You cant change the mind of a person who refuses any data that doesn't support their perceived reality.

[DanielMartinez-nwpn]

What's a flat earther biggest fear?

Winning a cruise trip because the cruise might fall off the edge.