"'What we often see with this Flat Earth movement is a fundamental failure to really understand the model that they're rejecting. 'I think what a lot of Flat Earthers don't understand is how gravity actually works.' In our day-to-day lives, it might look like gravity is a force that simply pulls things 'down', but this is only because we are so small relative to the size of the Earth."
"'Flat Earthers think that gravity just points down, but it doesn't point down, it points towards the centre of mass,' Mr Marshall explained. 'The world we live on is a spherical Earth. It has a centre of mass at the middle of that sphere. We are always being pulled towards the middle of that sphere.'"
"'Down is always the direction gravity pulls you: towards the centre of the Earth, wherever you are on the surface. 'In space there isn't any built-in "up" or "down" - those directions only make sense relative to something like a planet's gravity.'"
Belle Hassan asked whether the Earth is flat or round and maintained a flat-Earth viewpoint, asking why inhabitants on the 'bottom' would not be upside down. A fellow islander could not explain how gravity works. Gravity defines 'down' as the direction toward a planet's centre of mass, so 'up' and 'down' have no absolute meaning in space. The common flat-Earth confusion arises from treating 'down' as a single universal direction rather than as an attraction toward the centre of mass of a spherical Earth, which produces the everyday sensation of weight.
Read at Mail Online
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