Wednesday 9 March 2016

123) "Heliocentrists’ astronomical figures always sound perfectly precise, but they have historically been notorious for regularly and drastically changing them to suit their various models. For instance, in his time Copernicus calculated the Sun’s distance from Earth to be 3,391,200 miles. The next century Johannes Kepler decided it was actually 12,376,800 miles away. Issac Newton once said, “It matters not whether we reckon it 28 or 54 million miles distant for either would do just as well!” 
How scientific!? Benjamin Martin calculated between 81 and 82 million miles, Thomas Dilworth claimed 93,726,900 miles, John Hind stated positively 95,298,260 miles, Benjamin Gould said more than 96 million miles, and Christian Mayer thought it was more than 104 million! Flat-Earthers throughout the ages, conversely, have used sextants and plane trigonometry to make such calculations and found the Sun and Moon both to be only about 32 miles in diameter and less than a few thousand miles from Earth.”

Yes: real science changes, it progresses, it tests itself, corrects error, and becomes more precise as new methods develop. So it’s result change. The mark of dogmatic faith positions like flat-earthism is precisely that they do not change, don’t progress, don’t examine their own error.

And by the way, how can you tell the difference between a small orb (or disk)  close by and a much larger one at a correspondingly greater distance, just by measuring their apparent size? You can’t.

For more on the rays from the sun, see 125

This is worth a look, on the subject of the moon, too:

Flat Earth theory simple debunking by the moon's appearance

https://www.metabunk.org/flat-earth-theory-simple-debunking-by-the-moons-appearance.t7358/#post-177004



1 comment:

  1. Add to this: Since we measured the distance to the sun using the transit of Venus in 1769, this value has only changed by about 2 % later and has remained virtually constant for many decades.

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