The Crazy Experiment Used To Prove Earth Is Flat

What if I told you that the Earth was actually

flat? Governments across the world have come together

to deceive the public. The North Pole is here in the center of the

earth, with the continents spread out over this flat plain. And there's a 100 meter tall ice wall that

surrounds our flat earth. And if you even think about going there, I'm

God's will be there waiting to get rid of you over our heads. Right now is a massive dome and the sun, moon

stars and everything we see in space is no more than little lights in the sky. There are now millions of people around the

world who genuinely do believe this. But we proved that the Earth was round over

2000 years ago with nothing more than a hole in the ground. So I guess there's just one question. Are these people serious? No curvature there to be found. How can it be a ball if nothing about it is

round? NASA's definitely in on it. And we absolutely know for a fact this ain't

it. Is it an image? Image is images can be Photoshop, right? You're going to notice some cartoon clouds

here. Can't Photoshop. That the

strange part about this flat earth belief is that it's relatively new. You see, the ancient Greeks had proof that

the earth is round in like 500 B.C. and how they did it is pretty crazy. But we'll get to that in a second. And yet the flat Earth is only really started

emerging in the 1800s. And it all started with one main guy, Samuel

Rowbotham. So it's the 1830s in England and science is

taking off. There are discoveries popping up everywhere

and technology is advancing at a ridiculous rate. But our friend Sam, he's not a big fan of

all of this and he believes that the Earth is actually flat. So he sets out to conduct an experiment to

prove it. So he heads down to Old Bedford River in Cambridge,

Cambridgeshire, a ten kilometer long, relatively straight stretch of water. He proposed that if the Earth was really a

globe, we should be able to measure the curve along this stretch of river. It should curve away from the observer. Eight inches after one mile, then 32 inches

after two miles and so on. So he jumps into the river with his little

telescope and watches as a boat with a flag standing One meter above the water rose away

from him. He claims that he could still see the boat

even after the full ten kilometers. And his calculations were correct. The boat should have been more than three

meters below the horizon. He presumably exclaimed Eureka. And then wrote a book with his findings called

Earth is Not a Globe. Under the pseudonym Parallax, which is honestly

pretty damn cool. It wasn't until Alfred Russel Wallace, an

English surveyor, repeated the experiment, avoiding the errors made by parallax to prove

that the Earth is actually a globe. He accounted for atmospheric refraction. And so that's the end of this idea, right? No more flat earth theories. It's so obvious that the Earth is a globe. But that's where you're wrong. And you know why the Internet? But before we get into that, I want to thank

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thank you again to Surfshark for sponsoring today's video. I mean, I literally went and bought my wife

and told her that the ass is flat. That's why because of my my multimedia background,

I knew that all that stuff could be fake, you know, take it into Photoshop, take it

in the after effects. You know, just looking at that evidence, they

can lie about the moon landings. They can certainly lie about pictures and

satellites. And I can guarantee you that there is no curvature

of or distance. As we mentioned, the age of social media,

people are free to post about whatever they want. And as a result, the flat earth theory has

seen a huge increase in interest from YouTube videos to viral tweets and even a mr. Beast video. This idea has spread like wildfire. And I'll be honest, some of it is genuinely

hilarious. And now with platforms like TikTok, where

15 second clips can be viewed by millions of people every single hour, this idea and

ones like it are given more power than they've ever had. But hold on. Surely they must have some proof that the

Earth is flat, right? They must have done some experiments. Oh, they have. And let me just say, they are definitely something. In Netflix's documentary Behind the Curve,

a group of flat earthers performed an experiment that flat Earthers have been using since 1836

in an attempt to prove that the Earth isn't a globe. They use two boards, both with a hole five

meters above water level, a camera and a torch, and by lining up the torch with the holes. The light was able to go through both holes. And if the earth was flat, no matter the distance

between the boards, the light would come through the holes. And so they did it. They turned the light on, but no light seemed

to appear on the camera. And I'll give you one guess as to why. Because the earth isn't flat. My favorite part about all of this is that

this very experiment was literally performed by our good friend Parallax. In that same verse, English River. They have honestly tried everything from laser

gyroscopes. When we turned on that gyroscope. We found that we were picking up a drift. We obviously were not willing to accept that. And so we started looking for ways to disprove

that it was actually registering the motion of the Earth. Taking a spirit level on a plane, using telescopes

and cameras at the beach to even using weather balloons. And yet the results are always the same. They show that the earth is aglow or there's

an issue with their experiment that physics can explain. But wait. I keep saying that we have known for thousands

of years that the Earth is a globe, but how is that really possible? I mean, we only started launching satellites

like 60 years ago, and that's the beauty of it. It's not really that hard to tell that the

Earth can't be flat. There seems to be a bit of a common misconception

that Christopher Columbus discovered the shape of the earth. But in reality, we had known that the Earth

was a sphere for centuries before he was around. The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle argued

that the Earth must be a sphere based on his observations of the stars. He assumed that every star was the same distance

from Earth, and they appear to be moving in a circular pattern around the planet. And then along came Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Awesome name. I know he was a geographer and a poet, and

he set out to measure the circumference of the earth, proving it was a globe. So he devised an experiment. He figured that if he could compare the position

of the sun's rays in two locations, he would be able to calculate the spherical size of

the earth. He had heard a rumor that there was a well

in the Egyptian city of Syene, and at midday on the summer solstice each year, the sun's

rays shone down directly into the well, illuminating just the water at the bottom, not the walls

of the well. And so when the summer solstice came around,

Eratosthenes built a pole in Alexandria, and he observed that it cast a shadow proving

that the sun was not directly overhead, but was instead slightly south using the distance

between the two cities. Eratosthenes was able to calculate using trigonometry,

the circumference of the earth. He measured the angle of the sun's rays off

the pole to be 7.2 degrees, and he knew that the circumference of the earth could be represented

by a circle 360 degrees. So using a value of 5000 stadia, which translates

to about 800 kilometers for the distance between the two cities, he found the circumference

of the earth 250,000 stadia, or about 40,000 kilometers. His calculations were less than 2% of the

Earth's actual value that we can measure today. Pretty impressive given he really just used

a stick. Other than this famous experiment and the

stars, it's really not that hard to come to a conclusion that the Earth is a sphere. Our lunar eclipses look like this. But if the Earth was flat, they should look

like this. Every other planet appears to be a sphere,

too. And we can see boats disappearing over the

horizon. In fact, this was one of the key observations

that caused Aristotle to suppose the Earth wasn't flat. Ultimately, I'm not really sure that this

flat Earth belief is entirely genuine. I mean, it's clear that these people have

a distrust in governments, the education system and science as a whole, and maybe that's for

good reason. But that's the beauty of science. Science can help to remove personal bias and

get to the truth using observations and experiments. But it's easy to take knowledge for granted. Fields of science and technology are so complex

and extravagant in 2023 that it's borderline impossible to understand for the everyday

person. So maybe these people aren't stupid or misguided. Maybe there's something more that we could

be doing to help them accept the truth. It is hard to say, but maybe next time you

meet a flat earther, you can send them this video and maybe, just maybe, they will see

the light. Don't forget to check out Surfshark VPN. The link is at the top of the description.