An Astronomer Responds To Flat Earth Theory

I'm Dr Stuart Clarke. I'm an astronomer and I'm the author of The Unknown Universe. It's so clearly obvious that the world isn't flat. We see when ships leave the harbour, you can see as they gradually disappear below the horizon. You can see if you go up onto a tall tower or a hill and you see more over the horizon. All our physics is constructed now. The physics of orbits, actually things going around the Earth, is all constructed with three-dimensional spherical world. And the pictures from space show our world as a globe. And yet somehow, yeah, there are some people that still seem to believe that the Earth is flat. So as human beings, we love stories because stories make sense of our lives, of our world. They endow it with meaning and they can be understandable. Science is a way of constructing what we hope is a true story, something that is demonstrably true through experiment. But as we see throughout the ages, the prevailing scientific theories of the day can be overturned as we move to more precise understanding of the universe around us. And generally speaking, those become more complicated. So there is a tendency for people to reject that reality, the science of the day, and just fall back on uncomfortable myths, things that make them feel at home, things that make them, you know, much happier that they know what's going on. Maybe this obsession with flat Earth, the flat Earth, is one of those. Or maybe they're just people who are just contrarian. I don't know. It's one of those things that I find so difficult to get my head around. I mean, I really do. My own pet theory is that they're just doing it for comic effect, just to see how far they can push it. Imagine for a moment that, yeah, the Earth was flat. Well, how much thickness does it then have? These are the kind of questions you'd have to ask. You know, okay, you've got an edge. Well, would things fall off the edge? Well, how do you generate gravity to make the things fall? What is it that's actually causing the gravity to make things fall off the end? A flat surface is fairly unstable to the other forces. It would be flexible and moved around. It's hard to even begin, actually, to talk about what a flat Earth would be like, because it's just so impossible.