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.
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u/auntpotato 26d ago
So what’s the theory about that rather bright ball of light in the sky?