How We Know Space is Flat | Brian Cox and Joe Rogan

Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1233 w/Brian Cox:

[superbloodwolfmoon]

Joe sacrificing himself as the guy who looks dumb asking simple minded questions but getting these geniuses to utter common tongue explanations is oh so appreciated

[many]

The guy's too smart to understand what Joe is asking.

[woodlandwrench]

Brian gets a call at 4am:
Joe: "but what's the thickness?".

[MixMasterMarx]

Big props to Joe for having conversations like this. More please.

[exiletsj]

Poor Brian. He’s on a very noble quest to educate the masses, this still does not change the fact, I have no idea what he’s talking about.

[GrimJerr]

I've seen that same look that was on Joe's face on my dog's face when I tried to explain to him that the ball rolled under the couch

[xpndblhero]

Brian Cox is one of my favorite physicists.... His way of describing stuff is intuitive and easy to translate to others that don't understand physics.

[squalldrk]

The problem with Coxs explanation is that he does not explain that we are not referring to flat as a 2 dinensional feature, but as a 3 dimensional feature. Joe is thinking that the whole universe is a infinitely large board, but thats obviously not the case. The other example he could have done with curvature was taking a sphere (a soccer ball for example) and compare it with a desk surface and trace on both object 3 lines of the same lenght, each one connected by the next one by a 90° degrees angle. On the desk surface it will end up as an open shape (like a square missing one side) while on the sphere it will end up as a triangle (closed shape). Same dimostration is usually presented to debunk flat earther.

[AslanW]

Man, flat earthers had it all wrong, it's SPACE that's flat!

[mubasshirkhan]

Rogen is asking perfectly reasonable question. I am a PhD student, and it took me some time to wrap my head around what cox is saying when I first took a GR course.

[terrydaniels]

allways like listening to Brian an others make think an open new things in my mind

[robertjameson]

Watching this in my crappy rented accomodation, observing that there's no space in my flat.

[ezerasurfr]

This is Brian's answer for the layman: "The universe could be infinite and have depth, but the small piece of it we see is flat. We know this because Albert Einstein was a lot smarter than all of us."

[shantanoob]

Man that explanation was sooo good! Bit strange to see so many folks in comments not understand and enjoy that. I thought it was great.

[sentientmeat]

Flat earthers everywhere.
“Well we knew something was flat.”

[OneManTrail]

Whenever I see Brian Cox, he looks like he’s 14 and 40 at the same time.

[saturdaysequalsyouth]

I think one of the things people struggle with here is, how can a 3 dimensional object like a sphere be “flat”? Maybe another way to say it is, how can empty space have a shape?

[MagisterMilitumBelisarius]

We're basically specks of dust so profoundly small that we can never hope to see even the shape of the universe in its entirety. We're capable of only seeing perhaps its smallest peripheries. Watching this high is such a vibe

[WAKEUPARTIST]

Joe: "Yeah, but how can that be possible?"

Brian: "The trick is to imagine a color you've never seen before, but do it without thinking."

[denforcer]

I no longer understand what “flat” is or means.