Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is the Earth round?

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

How do we know the earth is actually round and not just "global conspiracy?" Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer-free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that

drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it all! I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing,

where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the Iheart radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. No such thing.

Betrayal Weekly is back for season two with brand new stories. The detective comes driving up fast and just like screeches right in the parking lot. I swear I'm not crazy, but I think he poisoned me. I feel trapped. My breathing changes.

I realize, wow, like he is not a mentor. He's pretty much a monster. But these aren't just stories of destruction. They're stories of survival. I'm going to tell my story, and I'm going to hold my head up. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, how do you feel about skepticism? I don't know. I'm a little skeptical of it.

I mean, do you think it's always a good thing to be asking questions? I'm always in favor of questions. I mean, that's definitely how we got where we are. That's how we learned so much about this incredible universe. But, you know, there are caveats. Okay, so I got a good one for you. Do you believe the Earth is round? Actually, no, the Earth is not round.

What? Are you one of those flat earthers? No, no, no. Those people are crazy. There are a lot of them out there. I know. There are flat earthers all around the globe. All around the globe, not on top.

or below the globe. Exactly. Well, what's your take from a physicist? The official answer. Is Earth round or flat? It's a false choice. The answer is neither. Stay tuned and find out.

Hi, I'm Jorge. cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist by day and a podcaster by any other time. And welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we try to explain crazy things about the universe. Sometimes things really far away. Sometimes things in our neighborhood. Sometimes things right. We try to tackle big questions, small questions. Questions you think you know the answer to, but maybe the universe has a way to surprise you. That's right. Round questions, flat questions, square questions, squiggly questions,

and squishy questions. We love all the questions. Questions are our business. Ooh, I like that as our company motto. That's right. Do we have a company, Daniel? We should make one, yes. We're in good company. All right, well, so today we're tackling a question that obviously humans have been, had been struggling with for a long time. And I think for pretty much the last couple of centuries, people think we know the answer to, right? That's Right. This is the kind of question people ask, and it's the kind of question that can be hard to answer immediately just by looking at what's around you. But it's a fun question because it's the kind of question that, you know, sort of the beginning of cosmology. It's like, let's try to get a larger scale understanding.

Let's try to understand not just the world I live in every day when I walk to my friend's house or go to the river and wash my food, but like the larger context, where we find ourselves and how it all works. to the beginning of that intellectual struggle. Yeah, kind of asking like what's beyond what we can see and touch, right? That's right. How does it all fit in, right? Like, you know, the picture frame that my life lives in, am I a tiny little dust mode in the corner? Am I in the center of it?

How big is that picture frame? You know, these are interesting questions. And I wonder sometimes, like, who would the first people to think of those questions? You know, as humanity emerge from, you know, pre-humans into intelligence, like when did people first post humans when did people first start to ask these kinds of questions you know how big is the earth what is its shape you know where is the sun all these kind of questions about our basic cosmology yeah like who do you think was the first sentient being that just kind of wondered like if i keep going in that direction what's going to happen or if i shoot straight up what's going to happen or straight down i don't know but i think the answer would probably make you happy because i think i I think that a lot of anthropologists imagine that humans have been intelligent for tens of thousands of years, and the major evidence of that is basically cartoons. Oh, yeah.

I always say that's a sure sign of intelligence to draw them, to be able to draw them. Or the sign that society is about to crumble. That's right. And go extinct, like those ancient civilizations. No, but it's cave paintings, right? I mean, we can see which are basically cartoons. like people doing symbolic thinking and describing dogs and buffalo and all sorts of things on the walls of caves describing them. I think that's the first sign of intelligence.

So probably around then people started to have thoughts about their situation and how it works and what's the bigger situation that their life is in. And so I think that's what led them to ask this question. So yeah, that's kind of the question. What did humans think about when they ask themselves, what happens if I keep going in one direction? And so today on the program, we'll be tackling the question. is the earth round That's right What shape is this crazy rock that we're living on

And you can look at a lot of things People describe early on You know drawings from hundreds or thousands of years ago People trying to draw maps And imagine what the earth looked like And there's some pretty crazy ideas out there But if you just sort of look around you Or if you're just like born in the world

And you look around The world looks pretty flat Right? Like as far as you can see, the ground is pretty flat. You think that we're sort of on a flat surface, right? Because your immediate surface around you is flat and kind of you look out a little bit further, it's still flat. Yeah, and it seems simple, right? And if your goal is to understand around you, what's around you, then the first thing you're going to do is think of the simplest thing. And the world looks kind of flat and you can't see that far away.

And, you know, many surfaces, if you're only looking a small portion of them, look flat. I mean, the Earth could be all sorts of crazy shapes, and if you only look in your neighborhood, it might look flat in the vicinity. Yeah, and I imagine most of our listeners probably think or know that the Earth is not flat, but we're wondering if people actually know the real answer to the question is the Earth round.

Yeah, or what is the shape of the Earth? That's a different question. What shape is it in? That's right, what shape is it? Socially, politically, fitness-wise. I think we should not. be judgmental of the earth. I think we should be earth positive. I think

this is the only one we have and he gets depressed and decides to end itself and plummet into the sun. You'll be sorry. That's right. The earth is round and proud. That's right, exactly. Who wants to be on a slender planet anyway, you know? All right, so as usual, we were wondering

how people out there in the street would answer this question. And so Daniel went out there into the street and accosted innocent bystanders and asked them a very basic question. That's right. And not only did I ask them if they believed the Earth was round, but I asked them how they knew, which I thought led to some of the more fascinating answers. Well, let's see what people had to say. Do you believe the Earth is round? Yes. Why? What evidence do you have that the Earth is round?

I think it is best answered by astronomy. It's like, the Earth is round. If the Earth is not round you go you start from a point and you keep going and you never reach to the to your first place do you agree with me says one reason and there are i i'm pretty sure there are like lots of proofs about it yes why what evidence do you have the earth is round because the idea that satellites are free fall and that they free fall around the earth so if you throw a ball it goes it has a curve and so that kind of goes ahead and proves that like we're falling in a sense and so that I can go ahead and explain how satellites can fall around the earth

constantly? Cool. Orbits. Okay, good answer. Yes. Why? What evidence do you have? Well, based on what everyone else has said, I don't know, there's some evidence, but I do believe the Earth is round. Do you believe that the Earth is round? Yes. What evidence do you have to the Earth is round? Airplanes. I don't know. Pictures of, like, from the ISS, things like that.

All right, pictures from space. Other astronomical objects are also round. Good point. Other plans around? I do believe the earth is around. Why is that? What evidence do you have? I believe the earth is around because just what I've learned in my education growing up, middle school to high school to college is just what I'm familiar with. Yes. Why? What evidence do you have?

Pictures from NASA. All right. Pretty. No flat earthers. You couldn't find any flat earthers out there in Irvine. That's right. Good job. UC Irvine. I was really relieved to not run into any flat earthers. I mean, I was a tiny bit curious. like, what would I do if I met a flat earther? Would I, like, engage them in debate on the spot and be able to persuade them? Anybody who believe the earth is flat is probably not really open

to actual scientific dialogue on the subject. But I was also sort of relieved that, like, in this educational community, at least we've succeeded at that level, that everybody understands the basics of the world around them. I think the flat earthers only exist on the internet. Sometimes I wonder if the flat earthers

are all just trolls. You know, if they're just, being ridiculous to make everybody mad because they get their kicks by pissing people off. But I did some research, and there's a pretty hardcore group of people out there that really honestly, sincerely believe the Earth is flat. So you got pretty much, everyone said yes, and they all had all pretty good reasons for believing that the Earth is around. Yeah, I would grade some of the reasons as excellent and some of the reasons is a little weak.

Like, the weaker ones are like, well, everybody says so. You know, and that's okay. Like, you should be a skeptical person. You should try to think about these things for yourself. On the other hand, like, if there's something that everybody's believing, probably it's true. I mean, there's probably a good reason why, you know, scientists and experts and everybody are saying X, Y, Z is true. So while you should be skeptical, you shouldn't just toss out everything that experts are saying

just because you can't prove it yourself. Well, it gets a little bit philosophical because, I mean, it's impossible to know everything and to be aware of all the evidence for every single thing out there in the world. And so at some point, you do sort of have to be like, all right, most scientists believe this. I guess it's probably true. That's right. Yeah, sometimes you have to talk to an expert. And, you know, what's the point of talking to experts if you're not going to believe what they say, right?

Like, you ask me physics questions. You don't go off and double check every single thing I say, or do you? I triple check it, Daniel. Does that mean you have two other physicists on the line who are, like, giving you the thumbs up and the thumb I have some secret Daniels in my pocket. Man, I'd like some secret Daniels in my pocket and do some of that I work for me. That'd be awesome. I have a Daniel Grayson and a Daniel in green sun.

Different shades of Daniel. All the colors of Daniel. Different roundings, 50 shades of Daniel. There's a fascinating book. I don't know what that book is about. This should be the fan fiction version of this podcast. Right, the Not Safe for Work version. The other answer is that I really liked were the people who had their own reasons, you know, who had thought about it.

They're like, well, that's impossible and here's why. They could actually make an argument, you know, like everything else out there is round, or we know the things are in orbit, right? These are good reasons. Or, you know, people who don't think that the government is lying to them about everything. They believe the pictures. They believe the, you know, they believe the pictures of other, I mean, and I guess you can see other planets, right? You can see the moon, and with a telescope, you can see other planets? Yeah, you certainly can.

You can see other planets, and they're all round. Pretty much everything out there in space above a certain size is round. And for a good reason, right? It's, or roundish, at least. And the reason is just gravity. You know, if you have a big enough object, it's going to have a lot of gravity. And then if it's not round, that means that some part is further from the center than another part, and eventually it's just going to break and roll downhill.

Like all mountains on Earth. All mountains on Earth will eventually crumble, right, due to rain and gravity and other forces. And now a quick word from our sponsor. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

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and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i don't write songs god write songs i take dictation i didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years i think culture is any space that you live in that develops you on a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about thoroughly before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realize just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem? I was eight years old, and the Motown

25 special came on. And all the great Motown-Ton-R-Ton-Rour. Martin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Ross. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane

with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out, real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If we're going to answer this question, is the Earth round? Let's start kind of where humans started, right? And so let's start, first of all, with how do we know the Earth is not flat? because that's kind of what your intuition would tell you if you never traveled or seen pictures from space.

Right, okay. So if you haven't seen pictures from space and you're like natural science kind of person a few thousand years ago, how might you figure out that the earth is not flat? Well, the history of it is that people did things like they did experiments where they stuck sticks in the ground and they looked at the shadows.

Now, if the earth is flat and the sun is just like above us, then every stick is going to have a shadow the same length. But if the earth is round, then those shadows are going to be different lengths at different places. And so this is like what a Greek guy did. He put tall sticks in different towns in Greece,

and he knew how far away those towns were from each other, and he measured the angles of those sticks and the length of the shadows. And from that, he could estimate, he could prove that the earth was round and estimate its size to pretty good accuracy. What? Is this like an apocryphal,

story or for real? Hey, you know, everything about ancient Greece could be apocryphal, right? The whole thing could just be invented as far as we know. But, you know, this is, as far as we understand it, this really happened. Are you a Greece, truther? Yeah, let's talk about whether Greece really happened, right? Is Greece just a conspiracy man? No, but, you know, the thing about ancient Greece is that we know so little.

of what happened because the dark ages and so much of what they did was destroyed. And, you know, we have like a tiny trickle of the vibrant intellectual product of that civilization. So we really don't know what was going on in ancient Greece. We know a tiny little sliver, which is such a tragedy. It breaks my heart to think about all those great ideas

that were just, like, lost, you know. But anyway... All those big wine parties? No, it's just, to me, it breaks my heart when I think about, you know, progress that's been made, things have been figured out, mathematics that's been developed, and then just discarded or lost, you know, like in huge fires of ancient libraries and destructions of civilization.

Anyway, we do have some clues about what happened in ancient Greece, and there are stories about folks measuring the size of the earth using basically just two sticks in the ground. Okay, and so the idea is that he planted a stick in one town, and then it's kind of like if you plant a stick in California and then you run over to Florida and plant another stick there, at any given time of the day, the shadows might be different. Yeah, there will be different lengths, right? Because those two sticks have a different angle with respect to the sun. They're seeing the sun at different points in the sky.

Yeah, exactly. But if the earth was flat, the shadows would be identical. That's right. No? Yes. Is that true? That's the point, yeah. No, they wouldn't be the same, would they?

They would be the same length. They might be the different angle, but there would be the same length. Are you sure? Pretty sure. I mean, it depends on your particular flat earth model, right? But on a sphere, it's definitely true that there are different length and angles and that you can use that to measure the size of the sphere. And another key element, of course, is knowing that the sun is really, really far away,

so that the light that comes from it is basically always parallel. Because otherwise, you could try to explain the different angles that you get from sticks at different places, and make it consistent with the flat earth, you could try to do that by saying, oh, well, maybe the sun is really close to the earth, and that's why we get different angles, right, over a flat earth. But that's silly. We know the sun is far away.

If the sun was that close to the earth, you could see its apparent size like change as you move around the earth, and we don't see that. So that's an important part of the argument. Oh, interesting. But wouldn't that require you to have, like, a walkie-talkie between the two places, you know, to say, all right, right now, measure the length of the shadow. But if you don't have that instant communication,

how would you, like, coordinate it and know that it was measured at the same time? That's a good question. I don't know how they managed it. Maybe they had walkie-tonkeys in ancient Greece. In Greece, that's right. No, they definitely didn't. We don't know anything. They could have burned with the libraries.

No, I mean, the power of the test is greater the further the sticks are apart. But I don't know how far apart they have to be for you to have a measurable effect. It might not have to be very far. you know so you might be able to say like all right we'll both walk for an hour and then plant a stick and then measure the length and that might be enough oh I see

or maybe like a smoke signals or something like if it's several miles and you could still do it yeah smoke signals exactly you'd be good at inventing physics experiments in ancient Greece yeah I definitely want you around but there are also other ways you don't have to do two sticks in the ground like there are other ways to figure out that the earth is round

even without technology all right what are those ways Well, you can just look at the stars, right? Travel the earth and look at the stars. You see different stars from different parts of the earth, right? If the earth is flat, then everybody should be seeing the same sky. I mean, you'd be seeing it from a slightly different point of view if you're in a different spot on the earth. But some stars are blocked by the earth, right?

You walk from North America to South America. You're going to see different stars in the sky, right? The northern stars, you can't see them because the Earth's curvature is in the way. Oh, I see. Assuming you can remember the sky, right? Or you can draw it, for example. Yeah. You heard of that drawing?

Only in caves. I only know that kind. And you can't see the stars when you're in a cave, so you sort of... You chiseled on the side of... You draw it in the side of a cave. You walk to South America. You draw in another cave. And you're like, hmm.

I should have brought my cave with me. That's how they invented the portable cave, probably. Otherwise known as a tent. Okay, so that's another way you would tell, right? You would notice that the stars are different in different parts of the earth, which means that the earth can't be flat. That's right. That's another reason.

Another way you can tell, again, without really much technology, is just seasons. Like, how do you get seasons on a flat earth? I mean, different parts of the earth have different... You might say, okay, we can get winter or the sun goes. further away. We can get summer when the sun gets closer. But we have different seasons on a different part of the earth, right? We have summer in the northern hemisphere when we have winter

in the southern hemisphere. How do you account for that? Well, I mean, if I lived thousands of years ago, I mean, I wouldn't know anything, right? For all I know, there are gods and weird magical beings that make it winter here and summer there. Yes, absolutely. And there is

always another explanation that's like ridiculously complicated it involves magic and gods are like crazy trajectories that can explain all the data. But we prefer the simplest, right? If the simplest explanation is that the earth is a body just like all the other ones we see, and it looks just like them, and it's also circular,

it's also basically spherical, and that explains everything we see. And so it's like by far the explanation we prefer to, there's some crazy magic aliens out there doing some crazy tricks on us. Or here on Earth. Oh, you're on Earth, exactly. Okay, cool.

And then what's the last experiment you as a Greek scientist can do? Well, the simplest one is that you can see hints of the curvature. I mean, you can look at ships, for example, coming over the horizon from far away. Like, what's blocking them, right? Ships coming over the horizon, you're seeing them come over the curvature of the earth. That's pretty direct right there. And in a similar way, you can see further when you get higher up. Like if the earth was flat, then you couldn't see any further by getting any higher up.

You could see at a different angle, right, but you couldn't see any further. But on a spherical earth or nearly spherical earth, the higher you go, the less the earth's curvature blocks you, the larger your field of view. And that's exactly what you experience. You go to a skyscraper or the top of a mountain. You can see much further. Okay, so I guess the idea is that if the earth was flat and you were standing at the beach and you saw a ship go off and away from you, it would just get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. It wouldn't ever disappear from view.

That's right. And you could eventually see it like dock in Japan or something, right? If you had a super duper telescope. Oh, it would just look really, really, really small. But you could technically see Japan if the Earth was flat. I mean, Japan is close. You'd be limited by basically the air, right? The air wiggles makes things fuzzy.

But yeah, technically you'd be able to see all the way across the ocean if the Earth was flat. Oh, wow. Oh, that would be cool. Yeah, that would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? It would be cool as well as it was flat. Though I guess it would be nighttime in Japan. That would be awesome, actually. You could, like, see different time zones.

Oh, I see. But even if I take a telescope and I look out into the ocean with a telescope, I would just at some point see nothing because my line aside would just go off into space. That's right. And if you're on a boat, in the middle of the ocean, all you can see is water, because everything else is around the curve of the Earth, right?

Okay, and then you have one last Greek experiment you can do, right, involving sunsets? Yeah, I mean, there's a long list of reasons that we believe the Earth is around, but another one is, yeah, it's sunsets. Like, how do you explain sunsets on a flat earth? You know, the models I've seen of a flat Earth that have like, I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, but you have this flat plane, and then you have the Sun, which is really small compared to the Earth, and it's sort of moving around the circular Earth, right? the flat earth. Like a lamp, like a lamp just going around it. Yeah, and it's like shining like a spotlight, like it's directional or something.

So, you know, I don't understand how you get day or night because the sun is a sphere. We can see that it's a sphere, right? It would shine on the whole surface of the earth all the time. I mean, if you had a flat earth with the sun above it, then you would never have nighttime unless the sun went below the flat earth, in which case every part on the earth

would see sunset at the same time, which definitely doesn't have. happen. Okay, so I think the point is that even if you are super skeptical of scientists and you don't believe anything anyone ever tells you or believe any pictures you see, there are still ways that you could be convinced yourself that the earth is not flat. That's right. And people did these things and they figured them out and that's why people believe the earth is round, even well before we had technology. But now that we have amazing technology, it's pretty easy to discover that the earth is round. So the, because, you know, I grew up in, um, in Panama. And for us, you know,

Christopher Columbus was like a big deal. And so, you know, as a kid, you just like, you always hear like, oh, he proved that the earth was round. But that's, um, that's a little bit of historical baloney, right? Yeah. I think it was widely spread among anybody who had any education, uh, the belief that the earth was round was already widely spread, um, by then. But I guess he was the first or one of the first to really kind of connected physically. I mean, I never really understood that argument because Christopher Columbus was trying to use the fact that the Earth was round to get to India, right?

And so he thought he got to India. He's like, okay, look, I got to India, and therefore the Earth is round. But the problem is he didn't get to India, so he didn't prove anything, right? He just proved that if you get in the boat and sail, you get to some more land. He didn't really prove anything at all. I mean, Christopher Columbus, like, there's so much trouble with Christopher Columbus, you know, on top of genocide and misnaming Americans as Indians and all that sort of stuff. But he didn't really prove the Earth was round at all.

Okay, but I guess we won't get into the politics of it. It's pretty dark. But yeah, all right, so then that's how we know the Earth is not flat. And so let's get into whether the Earth is actually round or not. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded in. to ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight.

That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop.

This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about Thurley before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realized just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem? I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on. And all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Raw. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane

with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my ice close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, show No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right.

I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we talked about how if you were a Greek scientist back in the day, you might be able to figure out that the earth is not flat. But yeah, how about today? Like, you know, we as citizens have, everyday citizens have access to a little bit more technology.

So how could a scientist today, if they didn't believe pictures or other scientists, How could we find out? How can we be scientists and conclude that the Earth is not flat? You mean without being Elon Musk and having our own spaceship company and going into space ourselves? Without being billionaires. Let's say you just have like $100, $10 in your pocket. Because the billionaire demographic of our listeners is probably pretty small, right? But if we have one, hey, give us a call, please.

That's right. Send us an email. All the billionaires out there, please send us an email. We want to record an episode from space. That's right, featuring you. Well, first I want to comment on, like, should you disbelieve other scientists? And again, it's healthy to be skeptical. There are times when people, everybody's wrong about something.

But let's remember that everybody out there doing science is trying to be right. You know, they want to figure it out. They're not out there trying to convince people of things that are not true. Like, NASA is not lying to people. There is no crazy agenda. And it's impossible for that to even be, it's not practical for that to happen because NASA is filled with a bunch of scientists who all want to figure out the right answer and share it. So if there was some absurd conspiracy to

like lie to the public for ridiculous reasons about the shape of the earth, somebody out there would disprove it. Somebody out there would be like, ha ha, look, I have proof. And somebody would get the credit for that. So science is filled with people who want the truth and want to share the truth. And sometimes they make honest mistakes, but it's impossible to imagine a widespread scientific conspiracy. I think also, even if you don't

believe in the altruism of scientists, I always like to think and say, tell people that, you know, like if you ever meet a scientist, each one of them, and maybe you can prove me wrong, but like I think each one, each scientist out there would love nothing more

than to be the guy that disproves everybody else. Yeah, exactly. from a cynical point of view, right? They all want the glory. I would love to reveal that all of science has misunderstood something. I mean, I think I've said that on this podcast before. That's my personal scientific fantasies to discover something which forces us to rethink foundational ideas, right?

That's fantastic. Everybody would love to be in that position. And so to prove that the Earth is a different shape than everybody thought, wow, that would be fantastic. So, yeah, you're right from a purely selfish point of view. If 99% of scientists say something, and you know that they're all trying to prove each other wrong, you know, the fact that they agree is like extra validity. Exactly, exactly. But imagine that, you know, you want to check it for yourself.

You want to be the scientist to disprove everybody. How could you do that? That was your question. And these days, it's actually not that hard because of the ubiquity of basically high-resolution cameras. All you need to do is take a picture from high enough. that you can see the curvature of the earth. And to get high enough to, like, really see the curvature in an indisputable way, you need to be, like, 35, 40,000, 45,000 feet up above the ground.

To see the curvature of the earth. I guess, you know, it's not immediately clear what that means. So I guess if you go out really, really far, like, to the moon, you would definitely see the earth as round, right? That's right. But down here, it looks flat. And so as you keep going up and out, you're going to see kind of more of the round. the shape of the Earth. Exactly. So as you imagine you're floating up from the Earth, right,

first it seems flat and then you get higher and higher up. You're like, you know, at airplane levels, it still seems mostly flat. But as you zoom out, you see it more as a planet and less as just a surface, right? You're zooming away from it. You have more perspective on the overall shape of it. And then you can start to see the overall shape. You can see this curvature. And, you know, above 40,000 feet or so, it becomes pretty clear. And you might be thinking, well, how How do I get about 40,000 feet? And the only way to do that through an airplane. And those windows are weird and have curves and whatever.

So how do I really believe that? Well, all you need to do is send your phone up there. And folks have done this. You can just build a weather balloon, which is basically just a big bag of helium or hydrogen, and attach a phone to it. And it'll go up really, really high, you know, 80,000 feet, 100,000 feet, basically up to near space. And high schoolers have done this. You know, you can Google for pictures of it.

Wait, what do you do? Do you start like a FaceTime conversation and then send it up? No, there's no service up there. But you start recording and you send it up. And then the trick, of course, is recovering it, right? Where does it come down? So you just have it like take pictures every couple of seconds. It goes up, the balloon pops.

It falls down. And then you recover it and you get the pictures. Yeah, exactly. You have a little parachute, right? So it doesn't just plummet to earth and burn up and reentry and smash. And then you get the pictures. And they're pretty fantastic pictures. and it's very clear in those pictures

the curvature of the earth. And they're gorgeous, too. I mean, they're beautiful pictures. It wouldn't be like an effect of the fish eye lance or anything. No, absolutely not. I mean, you can see it increasing with altitude, right?

So it's not an artifact. So if you have an iPhone to spare and a weather balloon, you could discover that the earth is round. Or are they right? That's kind of the question that we posted at the beginning, right? Is the earth actually round or not?

That's right. And so we're pretty sure the earth is not flat. and if you look at pictures from space you're like, okay, the Earth is round, right? It looks pretty round. But let's get precise. Like, do we really mean the Earth is like round?

Is it a perfect sphere? Well, the key is that the Earth is spinning, right? And spinning things have extra complications. Like if the Earth was not spinning, it would be perfectly round, you think? If the Earth was not spinning, it would be much closer to perfectly round. Now, perfectly, perfectly round is impossible.

I mean, even if you, like, sanded the Earth down, microscopically, there's no way to get all the atoms exactly the same distance from the center of the earth, you know. At a microscopic level, perfectly round, is impossible. Even perfectly round, like, the, you know, the one-mile level is pretty tough because you've got mountains, right? Mountains and valleys and all sorts of stuff. And eventually those will, you know, roll down into rubble, but then thanks to play technotics, you'll get new mountains. So at the one-two-mile level, you know, the level, even of like Mount Everest, it's pretty hard to have it be perfectly flat. But there's an even bigger effect, which is because the earth is spinning.

And so it's not perfectly symmetric anymore, right? The earth is round. You might think like every direction should be the same, but it's not because the earth is spinning on a specific axis. And that spinning has this effect of pushing things away from that axis, the north-south axis. It's like if you're on a merry-go-round and somebody spins it, you feel this effect that's trying to throw you off the merry-go-round, right, unless you're holding on. And so the same way, if you spin up, if you take a planet that's not spinning and you spin it,

it's going to make it a little bit flatter and a little bit sort of blobbier, right? It's going to make things further away from the center at the equator and a little closer in at the poles. Is it that it's pushing the stuff out on the equator outwards, or is it that maybe the stuff on the equator doesn't feel as much gravity as the stuff in the north and south pole? No, it's an effect of the rotation. It's like if you take a pizza, you take a pizza and you spin it, right? It gets bigger. Why does it get bigger?

Right? Because it's the spinning. The spinning has this effective force, this centrifugal force, that pushes things out. And it's an artifact of the spinning. So like if I'm feeling a little bit round and padded in my middle section here, it could be because I've been spinning too much. There are other explanations, but yes. Really? Simper explanations?

too many banana cream pies I don't know too many yeah yeah but if you take something you take like a ball of dough and you spin it then it'll flatten right it'll flatten and it'll get

wider in the middle and shorter on the top oh get shorter and so that's what's happened to the earth that's what happened to earth yeah but you know don't be alarmed as it formed or after it formed do you know what I mean

or like it's always been oblong or it's always been not round that's a great question it's definitely true as long as the Earth has been spinning. And I'm pretty sure the Earth has been spinning since it was formed because there's been angular momentum. But that must have changed.

Like, for example, on the planet Uranus, right? Uranus was hit by something really big that knocked it off and it's spinning in a different direction. That probably changed the shape of Uranus also. So that's a cool question. Yeah. Yeah. So if you change the spin of a planet, it'll change its shape.

And aren't there theories that say that our moon, we had a whole podcast about this, by the way, you guys can look at it. Look for it in the archive. But isn't there a theory that maybe we were hit by a giant rock and that's how the moon formed? And so maybe our axe has also changed. Yeah, it could be. It could be we were spinning faster or slower before that massive collision and that would change the shape of the Earth.

But, you know, taking a moon-sized chunk also changes the shape of the Earth. So, yeah, that was a big event in terms of shape of the Earth. But people might be wondering out there like, how big an effect is this? It's like, you know, because if you look at the pictures from space, the Earth looks pretty round. I mean, maybe people haven't done like precise measurements of those photographs, but it does look pretty round. And it is pretty round. The answer is that at the equator, the distance to the center is about 13 miles more than it is at the poles. So the Earth is wider than it is taller by 13 miles?

By 13 miles. And on one hand, that's a big difference. In each direction. Each direction, yeah, radius. On one hand, that's a big difference because, like, some of the biggest features on Earth, like Mount Everest, are only a few miles high. So this is, like, two or three times bigger than that, right? On the other hand, it's pretty tiny because, you know, the radius of the Earth is thousands of miles. So it's a really pretty small effect.

Like, if you were holding the Earth in your hand, could you tell this difference? If you, like, rolled the Earth against along a smooth surface, when you notice it not rolling perfectly smoothly? I'm not sure. I think we who live on the surface of Earth would notice it for sure I'm trying to be that cosmic alien that's playing games with us right that's playing tricks Galactus you're galactus

just picking up the earth yeah things from that point of view I think it would be pretty hard to tell you know I don't know for example like a very high quality pool ball you know like billiard ball what's the level of sphericity of that and how does it compare to the earth that's a good question

like a professional grade billiard ball is it actually also even a sphere? Yeah, I don't even know. It might be more spherical in the earth or it might be spherical within the same tolerance, right? Because 13 miles is a small fraction of the radius of the Earth. And you're talking about kind of like the average distance to the center of the Earth, right?

Because there are sort of dips in valleys and oceans and stuff, but like the average... That's right, yeah. Well, I guess the question is, why isn't it more oblong? You know what I mean? Like the Earth is spinning pretty fast, at least once a day that I know of and that's a lot of Earth to move

around. Why is it in more like opal shaped? Yeah, well that depends on sort of the internal strength of the earth right? If the Earth was made out of like, I don't know, cotton candy or something and you spun it this fast then probably a bunch of the cotton candy would get flung out in the space

but it holds itself together right? It depends on the strength of the material. Like if the Earth was made out of pizza dough we would be much flatter. that's right and also there's gravity right gravity does like to keep things together so there's a bunch of things at play there

but yeah if the earth is made out of pizza dough it would have a different shape than it does today let's do that experiment let's build a planet-sized blob of pizza dough just to find out that's right let's make a pizza shop for the galactuses of the universe any listening billionaires

that's where you should send your funds and then also send us into space to go eat some of this pizza that's right that's going to take a lot of tomato sauce all right well so that that's the answer to the question is the earth round and the answer is no

right it's a round dead right roundish but almost sort of round it's rounded more rounded in the middle the earth is definitely not flat but I mean it's definitely not flat that's right like many of us

the earth is definitely not flat definitely not flat so not flat oh my god definitely not flat it's almost perfectly spherical and well the other way you can just test that the earth is round is just go off in one direction right and just get on a plane and keep going

that's right you know the flat earthers have an answer to that they say well the earth is flat and if you move in a circle you're actually moving in a circle on that surface which is crazy it doesn't make any sense because oh I see there's an answer for everything but then you know those answers make sense like if the earth was flat they put the north pole

at the center and the south pole is like like this wall of ice around the circular flat earth. But if that were true, then that would really stretch out distances between stuff in the southern hemisphere, right? Because the sun in the hemisphere would become huge, and the northern hemisphere would be compressed. And so you would definitely notice, like if you tried to sail on a ship from, you know, Chile to China,

you would notice that it took you way longer than it should. Shipping captains and airplane pilots would definitely notice if the earth was flat. All right. Well, and then there's a whole totally different question, which is space flat, right? Like we could be a rounded Earth on a flat space, right? Or a rounded Earth on a round space.

That's right. And I'm definitely a flat spacer. You're a round earther, but a flat spacer. That's right. No, space seems to be flat, and that's really weird, right? We don't understand why space is flat. For those of you who don't even know what that means, check out our podcast on the shape and size of space. Space is a weird, crazy thing.

and do all sorts of stuff you never imagine, including being curved or not being curved. And you might be able to send your iPhone out into the universe to find out. That's right. Leave the round earth and go into flat space and learn some things. But this is what I love about these questions. They tell us so much about where we are in the world. And to discover that the earth is round and it looks just like all those other planets,

must have been a huge shock to the people who discovered that, right? to understand something so deep about this situation we find ourselves in. Those are the wonderful moments in science, right? When you get these flashes of insight and reveal something about the context of the human experience. Yeah. Or like challenges everyday conceptions or ideas that you might have, right? Exactly. The first guy to figure out the Earth was round, probably everybody scoffed at him and thought,

oh, he's crazy. He's one of those round Earthers, right? On the Internet. The Greek Internet. The marble net. I think they had a marble net back in ancient Greece. Yeah, they were all just talking under walkie-talkies, posting, trolling comments. It's too bad we lost.

I mean, the Greeks developed the walkie-taki technology, and then we lost in the dark ages. We had to reinvent it. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Man, we had to reinvent the walkie-talkie. Yeah, exactly. So much of human civilization was lost. No, but I think it's wonderful when we have those moments when we understand something deep about the human

experience. All right. Well, if you are a flat Earther, we're sorry that this podcast disappointed you. And if you were a round Earther, we're also sorry. Sorry that you're disappointed. The Earth is not round. But if you're a Pizza Ball Earther, then congratulations, you are right. The Earth is a pizza ball. And if you were a flat Earther and you listen to this podcast and you were convinced, then congratulations for having an open mind. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. Thank you for listening. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you.

You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Belisha Butterfield, media founder, political strategist, and tech powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling. impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership.

I am a free black woman. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Valicia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it off.

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