The very first thing to say about ‘flat earth’ is that 1) as a ‘thought’ it is nonsense, - 2) it is a 100% propaganda, as the title of ‘thread’ states; and these two are essentially one and the same. It’s more than useless to argue with propaganda or with people who function as mere mouthpieces for propaganda items (and these two are just the same again - the debate being entirely in the media and nowhere else). If there are innocent victims of this propaganda, doubtful, but maybe possible, I think it is better to leave them alone. Anybody not being a ‘hopeless case’ will certainly recover within days in ‘isolation.’ This isolation, however, should be left to his own discretion. There is no other way.
Now, on ‘social channels,’ ‘flat earth’ always appears as if to be in the ‘fiercest controversy’. But he must be a very naive man who does not see through it very soon that they are fighting with artificially pre-worked arguments on both sides.
In this country (Hungary), a few years ago, the Academy of Sciences launched allegedly a tender to work out a method for ‘proving the sphericity of the Earth, ’i.e., to refute “flat earth”’. The frontmen here (those five or six or so existing in this area/language) reacted to the news and propagated it as ‘finally making a breakthrough’. And they were right indeed about that, since where the Academy of Sciences deals with ‘nonsenses’ on the merits before the public, the ‘breakthrough’ is truly complete. In the meantime, articles on previous, historical ideas of how to make the shape of the Earth evident started to appear on the Academy’s official websites.
Now, I do not think it was these things that made the ancient Greeks great, quite the contrary; - in any case, the essential difference is that today it is not a question of explanation or proof but of a refutation and a debate, preferably an interminable (since it is meaningless) debate. (‘At the times of the old Greeks, the “flat earth” theory was already an exploded theory’ runs the academic argument.)
And if one takes on the opponent’s fighting style and means (such as ‘photographic evidence or proof’), one is actually joining them - in what is really relevant. (The whole thing is kind of a call, ‘Hey, buddy, do you have a nice photo device? Come on, use it wisely, and get reassurance that even Greek philosophers couldn’t be sure about!’)
As for Simon’s post : it doesn’t seem very likely that the problems of atmospheric refraction and that of optics will ever cease to be a problem. And they weren't even addressed. The following two quotes seem to say no more than ‘if the weather is nice’:
…should be EMPIRICALLY OBSERVABLE (that is, only under optical conditions that allow them to be observed).
Most of the time, the distant horizon will be a hazy and indistinct line - due to various unfavorable atmospheric conditions.
‘Photographability’ and what a living person really sees, so to speak, with his own eyes, that is, what a visual experience he has, are two completely different things. Every artist who is ‘old-fashioned’ enough - i.e. not being a child of modernity, people by the way being men of experience or observation
par excellence, - is horrified by photography.
The curvature of the Earth for the experience / perception, I think, is about the same as what the ‘fourth dimension’ is for the imagination.
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Maybe, not sure, the people of ‘geo-metry’ (now called geography, or geodesy) could say something about the business - but I doubt anyone of them has ever dealt with it or will ever deal with it. And this ‘indifference’ on their part I think is completely legitimate.
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One of the ‘flat earth’ arguments says that no matter how high a man climbs or ascends by any means, the horizon will always remain at eye level. The horizon cannot be looked downwards. Under no circumstances. Well, few lives in the Himalayas or the Andes, so the passenger plane seemed to remain the only thing that this - possible - curiosity can be checked out by a casual enquirer. Since it was unlikely that I would take a plane in the near future, so a few years ago I asked someone to check out, if he was traveling during the day: whether the horizon seen through one of the windows, his observing eye, and the horizon seen through a window on the other side of the plane fall in a straight line. Unfortunately, the answer was that due to the small windows (and its low position) and the conditions there in general (passengers, compliance with general etiquette) this could not be clearly established there.
On the website of ‘Wild-heretic’, a frontman of ‘hollow earth’ (another ‘alternative’ ‘theory’), I read an old report on a hot air balloon trip, from the ’30s, if memory serves: he writes, it was all as if he and his balloon were floating in a huge cauldron…
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An interesting detail may be that at the very first appearance of the ‘flat earth’ who represented ‘modern, enlightened progress’, i.e. science, was none other than the young Wallace, long before he went in for evolutionism, maybe even for biology (philosophy of nature) at all.