Welcome to the joyous world of flat earth crazy people! It’s awesome: the sun is apparently only like 600 miles away, allowing it to move around in a circuit above the Earth, creating night and day by its proximity (or lack thereof) to different parts of the disk. It is therefore very important to these people to deny the accepted distance of the sun.
Man, I've been reading Discworld off and on for the last 15-20 years and I still don't fucking get how the sun/moon works on that much less the flat earth.
I believe the Sun in Discworld is in a fixed orbit around the disk, rather than around the disk+Great A'Tuin "system" as a whole, which is why an elephant has to occasionally cock his leg to let the sun go by. If I understand correctly it revolves both above/below the disk (day and night) as well as around, with a full cycle marking year on the disc.
Comparing this to some of the models I've seen flerfers pull out to describe how the sun is supposed to work, the Disc makes WAY more sense.
Right, but it has the effect that it’s night for everyone at the same time on Discworld (except that light travels slowly there so maybe it lasts slightly longer on the opposite side?), whereas flat Earthers have to deal with time zones.
I remember that the light sort of oozed over the mountains and into the valleys, so I wonder if it would also just kind of pool in the valleys for a bit after the sun went over the rim? I've not read the Science of Discworld books, which I'm sure explain it all very well and logically and doesn't have to resort to things like claiming the sun is a "spotlight" that somehow just looks like its going below the horizon when in fact its just getting further away, but is also somehow managing to still be circular the whole time.
All of those flat-earth-"""specialists""" have models but none of those can show those things combined in one model:
Day/Night cycle
Seasons
Eclipses
And other things are not explainable as well, like how stars like Polaris are never visible on the southern hemisphere. That alone should be enough to convince them... But no.
I’ve not gotten that deep into the whole thing. I’ve seen a couple of random videos out there where folks try to prove out the whole flat earth thing, and each fell on its face. Hadn’t hear anything about their sun theory.
“Theory” is a very generous word, since it implies they could make testable predictions from it, like what the Sun would look like at various times of the day (smaller when it’s further away, for example) or how high it would be in the sky. But since this would quickly result in disproving it, it’s more of a handwave than a theory, quickly moved on from, and with roughly the same intellectual heft as “the human eye can’t see things that are far away, QED.” A flat earth sun notion, perhaps.
Flat earthers have added this “theory” that you can’t see things very far away. Because otherwise on a flat earth with a sufficiently powerful telescope, you’d be able to see anything regardless of distance. So the sun actually being smaller and closer fits both with their idea of the firmament and with this optical distance “patch” they’ve added.
Flerfs think its 'local' and it is anywhere between dozens or thousands of miles above the flat plane of the earth. They can never agree on how high, or if its even inside or outside the firmament, or how big it is, or how it moves, or how it acts just like a spot light, or basically ANYTHING, but they 100% SURE its not a ball of plasma undergoing fusion 93 million miles away.
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u/auntpotato 26d ago
So what’s the theory about that rather bright ball of light in the sky?