After watching a few terrence howard debunk videos on youtube, I have been finding myself locked into the debunkisphere on youtube by the algoritms, and I must say that it is an interesting experience. On one side of the spectrum in the debunkosphere we find inteligent people like Sabine Hossenfelder who really do their research, try to explain why the people that are wrong are actually wrong, and actually looking at the possible merrits of some of their arguments, and on the other side of the spectrum we see people like Dave Farina (Professor Dave) who are more loud than right, hardly do any research because they assume they already know, and mostly seem motivated by the idea that winning a debate against bigger idiots somehow makes them look smarter than they actually are. And nothis is not about the obvious differences in inteligence and education level between these two debunkers, I just name these two because they are relatively well known youtubers in the debunkosphere.
One subject debunkers love to do their debunking on, and a subject that both Sabine and Dave did videos on (look them up on YouTube for some contrast) are flat earth theorists, and here is where things grow fun on the Dave side of the debunkosphere.
Oh so many flat earth debunkers will either refer to or actually use weather baloon footage to try and debunk the flat earthers, and in principle therwouldn't be anything wrong with that, because weather balloons are high enough for us to see the actual curvature of the earth. The point is, flat earthers like our pompous friend Dave points out, claim that the footage from weather baloons is CGI, and guess what, up to a point it actually is.
And no, Im not a flat earther myself, at least not in the way most people think about flat earth theories. I believe, like many scientists, that there are likely more than three dimensions of space, and that our universe (and hence the earth) is pretty darn flat in at least most of these extra dimensions.
As anyone who has ever done anything with digital wide angle photography will know, wide angle footage is distorted. You need software to undestort the image, and if you don't use that software right, round things can become flat and flat things become round. With the growing popularity of fisheye lenses, this fact should bconsidered widely known, but its not just fisheye lenses, its everyhing wide a angled in photography. You can not make undestorted wide angle footage without using some type of computer generated distortion that compensates for the lens or mirror distortions.
Un-edited footage from weather baloons often shows very curved earth, even from as low as 10 km or 15 km. Many of the Dave level debunkers though will gladly use that footage to show the earth is round without doing the basicly highschool level math needed to see the world would need to be a tenth of its actual size for it to show such curvature at only 15 km high.
But lets dive into it a little bit. Assume we have a weather baloon shooting close to undistorted footage at the peak of wherwcan expect baloons to go. Lets do little thought experiment with a 100 degree lineair lens at a whoping 40 km and see what distortion free curvatyre we might actually expect.
There is an easy part and a somewhat less easy part to this. Lets start with the easy part.
The easy part starts by normalizing our planet. Tne radius of the earth is 6,371 km. At a height of 40 km abouve the surface, this means our baloon is 6.411 km from the center of the planet. Lets divide both by the radius of the planet.
Now we can draw a litle right angled triangle. The longest side is 1.0063 long, one side is 1.0 long, and using pytagoras we can see that the short side is 0.11 long. Now if we take the arctan of the short side, we find the angle φ between the long legs of the triangle that is 0.11 radians or 6.4 degrees.
This was the easy part, we calculated the distance in degrees betwee our baloon and any point at its horizon. Now we need to move on to figuring out the distance between two points at the horizon, namely the two extremes visible within the 100 degree horizontal area covered by our lineair lens.
We will skip the math but walk through the basic steps. If we place our baloon dead ce ter above the north pole, or at a 90 degree latitude, the coordinates of the left side of the horizon could be taken at :
- 83.6, 0.0
- 83.6, 100.0
Now given these two points we need to calculate the minor arc of the great circle.
The result in our case is 0.17 radians or 9.8 degrees. Now we divide this angle by two and take one minus the cos of half the angle to get how much lower the horizon at the edges should compare to the center, in our case this is 0.0037, and we take twice the sin of half the angle to find out how to scale the distance between the two points, in our case 0.17.
So how wide should we display our image?
Lets make it 17 cm wide, like your phone on its side. That means the curvature would be thus that the horizon shows less than 4 mm higher in the center of the phone scree than at the sides.
This is absolutely enough to show curvature at 40 km, but 15 km is a whole different story. It's however nowhere near the curvature many of the debunkosphere crowd are refering to even showing.
You can see more curvature but to do so you need to use wide angle lenses or mirror systems, but these lenses and mirror systems distort the curvature and need to be compensated for, something that is indeed computer generated and very delicate. Too delicate I would propose to use as any kind of debunking prove unless the combination of lens and correction as been calibrated.
Yes, flath earthers are still wrong, but when debunkers like Dave Farina frifioulously use uncorrected or non-calibrarecorrected wide angle and even fisheye footage, they are actually giving more credability to the flat earthers.
The earth isn't flat, alas not in the three dimensions sense othe world, but the curvature of the earth in some of these debunk videos and blogs would suggest the earth to be smaller to sigificantly smaller than the moon.
So can we please leave the debunking to the Sabines of this world, so the Dave's of this world can go back to doing things that don't make flat earthers and other misguided souls look more credible?
I understand that Farina is not flawless, sometimes resorts to logical fallacies, and can be quite sarcastic, but a priori I don't believe his work is of poor quality or under-researched. A case could be made, but that's not what you're presenting here. You offer a critique of a specific alleged error regarding distortions in photographs. I say "alleged" because, unless I've missed something, I didn't find a reference to this error in your writing. For your readers to verify what you're saying, it's important to provide sources and make them easily accessible.
Moreover, you cannot generalize the quality of work based on a single error. The correct approach would be to analyze it from a broader perspective, considering more aspects of his work.
Regarding the flat Earth debunking work, I know Dave produced at least two versions, one more technical and another "intuitive," which didn't require mathematical knowledge to follow. In the realm of scientific dissemination to the masses, this is valuable. I've witnesses that he's done his research, considering that in other works, like his defense of origin-of-life research, he has interviewed several relevant leading researchers (check this one, for example). As you can see, it's necessary to weigh many aspects and avoid making generalizations if that's not done.
Maybe I named him a bit too much, because he is just one of a much larger group that I tried to refer to through him as the one with by far the largest audience. My main poimt here is that groups of flat earthers refer to all round earth high altitude baloon footage as computer generated because they don,t understand wide angle photography and image processing, and there are groups of flat earth debunkers, including very notably Farina, that try to debunk that broken argument not by researching wide angle photography and showing that in general the computer generated part actually makes things much closer to reality and is a nececity, but instead ignoring the whole thing, ignoring that proper correction for wide angle lens or mirror correction can be delicate, and declaring the computer edeted or computer generated argument to beridiculous while showing baloon footage in videos and blogs that given the highly expessed curvature can't possibly be undistorted baloon altitude footage.
In this post I tried to address this by showing the absolute maximum visible curvature of a linear lens maximum baloon altitude photo is still quite small, so the footage used as proof of a round earth at best is calibrated computer corrected wide angle footage (making the computer edited/generated arguments of flat earthers something that needs adressing), it isn't actual baloon footage but LEO footage instead, or worst case, and I belief this is common, it is manually corrected footage that doesnt take lens or mirror properties into account, or even worse, it is raw wide angle footage lacking the needed distortion correction all together.
Maybe I should have made this post using jupyter notebook, but I thought keeping pretty much to high school level math would keep my post more accesible, and the great circle math while not that hard, would possibly make it less accesible. I could try an in depth post though.
But have a look at how Sabine adresses subjects like these. You won't find any such sloppy arguments or footage in her debunking. Again, Im using these two high profile debunkers as stand in for much larger groups of debunkers, and its not meant as a personal attack on Dave or directed praise for Sabine. And I'm pretty sure Davis great debunker in chemistry, as that seems to be his field of expertise. But for Sabine its partical physics, and she seems to put in extra effort the more the subject or argument is removed from her particular field.
If you are going to high-profile debunk flat earth photography and computer editing arguments, it shouldn't be too much to ask to look into photography and computerized lens correction steps. But most of all, if you do this and position yourself as scie ce communicator, the math for this should be simple for Dave with his background, he should long have noticed that the flat earthers do have a (misguided) point regarding much of the wide angle footage where the curvature given the reported altitude would imply planet that is smaller than its own moon.
Looks like I missed your reply. Gotcha now. About those YouTuber science folks, they're bound to slip up now and then, especially when they step out of their expertise. Sabina, for instance, was criticized by other YouTube peers over a Climate Change video, but I think she bounced back with a reply video or something like that. Despite the heat, I'm still a fan; her work is high quality. I also appreciate Dave's work.
Thank you for your explanations.
Flat-earthers don't care about science as they mostly just want to have the 'special knowledge'. As you say it is vital to debunk them with real evidence, but it's not really worth arguing with them. There have been some on here, but their 'theories' are laughable.
I thought flat earthers were there just for entertainment. Why is there even a need to debunk them? I pay as much attention to them as I do to a child declaring the moon is made of cheese. I don't get it. Unless everyone (including debunkers) are in on some joke I don't understand. :)
Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!
Please consider delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).
You may also include @stemsocial as a beneficiary of the rewards of this post to get a stronger support.