12.
“ The Manchester Ship Canal Company published in the Earth Review stated, “It
is customary in Railway and Canal constructions for all levels to be referred
to a datum which is nominally horizontal and is so shown on all sections. It is
not the practice in laying out Public Works to make allowances for the
curvature of the earth”
And it is based on a quote that can’t be found anywhere but
other flat earth publications.
The quote says it’s not the practice to take
account of the negligible difference of 8 inches over a mile, and that’s
probably true, because it doesn’t matter when building a canal. When building
an accelerator, it does matter, so engineers do take it into account.
11 “A surveyor and engineer of thirty years published in the Birmingham Weekly
Mercury stated, “I am thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of
civil engineering. However bigoted some of our professors may be in the theory
of surveying according to the prescribed rules, yet it is well known amongst us
that such theoretical measurements are INCAPABLE OF ANY PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATION.
All our locomotives are designed to run on what may be regarded as TRUE LEVELS
or FLATS. There are, of course, partial inclines or gradients here and there,
but they are always accurately defined and must be carefully traversed. But
anything approaching to eight inches in the mile, increasing as the square of
the distance, COULD NOT BE WORKED BY ANY ENGINE THAT WAS EVER YET CONSTRUCTED.
Taking one station with another all over England and Scotland, it may be stated
that all the platforms are ON THE SAME RELATIVE LEVEL. The distance between
Eastern and Western coasts of England may be set down as 300 miles. If the
prescribed curvature was indeed as represented, the central stations at Rugby
or Warwick ought to be close upon three miles higher than a chord drawn from
the two extremities. If such was the case there is not a driver or stoker
within the Kingdom that would be found to take charge of the train. We can only
laugh at those of your readers who seriously give us credit for such
venturesome exploits, as running trains round spherical curves. Horizontal
curves on levels are dangerous enough, vertical curves would be a thousand
times worse, and with our rolling stock constructed as at present physically
impossible.””
This is just a repetition of the false claim in point 7, using a weirdly
ill-informed historical quote from an evidently incompetent engineer.
Incompetent, that is, if he thinks a locomotive couldn’t manage an incline of 8
inches in a mile. He also makes a
childish howler by assuming that he can multiply up the difference between the east and west
coats of Britain and add the product to one end. Why does that make the
slightest sense?
But in any case, it’s the same
foolish inability to understand that moving along, around the curve of the globe is moving on the
level, not climbing. Up and down on the surface of the earth means moving
further from the centre of the earth, or closer to it, respectively.
Moreover, this alleged engineer
repeats the bizarre mistake of point 10: he confuses a real “hump” in the
ground, where the railway would rise up further from the earth’s centre and
then fall back towards it, with following the curved surface of the earth while
remaining at the same distance from the centre.
And to repeat, when it matters, engineers do
take the curvature into account – see the referenced docs in point 7, about
Japan’s Proton Accelerator Complex, and a number of other examples. There, as
in other big scientific projects like CERN large Hadron Collider, the lines really, really had to be straight,
so the engineers did what this video pretends they “never” do - they took the earth’s curvature into account. And guess what; it worked! If the earth had been flat, their calculations would
have been wrong, and a hugely expensive installation would have been useless.
Tuesday, 2 February 2016
7) “Surveyors,
engineers and architects are never required to factor the supposed curvature of
the Earth into their projects. Canals, railways, bridges and tunnels for
example are always cut and laid horizontally, often over hundreds of miles
without any allowance for curvature.”
When it matters, on large-scale projects, engineers do always
take account of the earth’s curvature.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C06092511/presents/TU004_PPT.PDF
and
search for the word “curvature”.
And more such documents here;
http://www-psearch.slac.stanford.edu/SLACSearch/app/slac/index?style=mainSite&qt=earth%20curvature
And another example: When designing the Humber Bridge “the towers, although both vertical, are 34 mm
(1.3 inches) farther apart at the top than the bottom due to thecurvature of the earth
It looks like surveyors do take account of the curve, and Mr Dubay doesn’t know what he is talking about. Again.
To reject this evidence you have to believe that
a) All of these many documents, and the huge number of similar ones around the world, are faked simply in case someone might happen to look at them, and also
b) None of the engineers and architects who have used them in practice have complained when they found that the 'faked' information didn't work. Are they all part of the 'conspiracy'?
And from the 19th century, where Dubay's claim comes from:
Given that some people claim the curvature of the Earth is not accounted for in surveying, I thought it would be interesting to document various historical instances of this, and of accounting for refraction.
Curvature comes up in two ways. Firstly it arises when determining latitude and longitude by observation of sun and stars. The Earth here is assumed to be a sphere, and the stars essentially fixed in a "celestial sphere" infinitely far away.
Secondly it comes up in the practice of levelling which is the art of determining how high things are above a nominal level surface, such as the surface of the sea. Interestingly this use of the word "level" is often misinterpreted as meaning "flat", when the books on surveying make quite clear this is not the case.
...
And of course "history" extends up to the present day. I don't want people to get the idea that this is some archaic technique. The shape of the Earth has not significantly changed in the last 200 years, nor has atmospheric refraction. So the same numbers still apply.
Here's a course in surveying leveling from Fresno State Lyles College of Engineering:
Jaranism is another Flat earther who is very inclined to make false stements.
For example, here is his FAQ section he quotes some lecture notes for surveyors to support the same flase claim, that surveyors and engineers never take the earth curvature into account:
You would think that a surveyor, one who is attempting to retrieve the most accurate results of the ground they are surveying, would have to adjust for or take into account, the curvature of the earth. This is simply not how it is done. Notice to begin chapter 2 below… it states that most surveying activities are performed with the pseudo assumption that measurements are being made with reference to a flat horizontal surface.
But here is the very next page, his own source disproves his claim:
