Why is it a Scientific Fact The Earth is Flat?
Or the best answer to “What is a woman?” that any person can give
I have to confess, I am going to love writing this article and I am going to enjoy every second of the fun I’m going to have with it. I cannot even pretend to be sorry for the title and I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
I studied physics at university. I went to Oxford for my undergrad and that apparently “makes me clever (tm)” (as I sarcastically say to people who are too impressed with my qualifications). And given this, not only am I going to convince all of you that it is indeed a scientific fact that the Earth is flat, I’m going to do it in a way which is also absolutely relevant to the main topic most people probably follow me for — trans issues. Oh yes, this is going to be good, so strap in!
Physical intuition
Every physicist who has ever existed has generally relied on what we in the physics world call physical intuition. This is the intuition that generally says what you’d expect to see happen if a physics problem gets set up.
In fact, lots of non-physicists engage in physical intuition all the time, and a better name for it might be “folk physics”. This is the physics that’s programmed into your brain and allows you to do things like catch a ball by predicting its path, and all of your favourite sports people are really good at this in some way!
As physicists go through learning about physics, we start to supplement that physical intuition with mathematical learning, usually in the form of mechanics. Many people have probably solved the kind of problem where a body is at rest and another body hits it. In some cases the bodies stick, in some cases the collision is purely elastic. Sometimes there’s friction and other losses, but the problem essentially remains the same and, apart from discounting things like friction and air resistance, the maths doesn’t hugely surprise.
As the physics gets more advanced, however, something weird happens. Throw special relativity into the mix, and suddenly, physical intuition breaks down. No longer do we live in a world where a physicist can solve a problem where the maths looks “right” and the problem “feels” right. Now the problem feels wrong and it only gets worse adding in quantum mechanics on the very small scale, or General Relativity on the large scale. By now, your brain is an active drag on your problem solving abilities. What is happening?
The Flat Earth Mafia
It turns out that the Earth being flat/round is one of those perfect examples of what is happening in our brains.
When you solve a mechanics problem like two balls colliding on an infinite plane, when you’re solving them on the Earth, you’re never solving them on a flat plane, you’re really solving them on the curved surface of a sphere.
Now, it probably goes without saying that planets are Big. The Earth is no exception. It’s so big that the curved surface we live and work on never actually, for the purposes of maths, needs to be a curve. It can be treated as an infinite flat plain. It can be approximated.
This is so true that, as you learn physics and can actually construct Newton’s Laws of Motion in a rotating frame and use polar coordinates to solve the problem (AKA science speak for moving those bodies on a curve), you can actually check and see what the difference between the real answer to all those mechanics questions you took in school and the fake flat-earth version your mechanics teachers showed you in school is. When you do, you’ll see it’s actually really small. So small it’s just not worth bothering about most of the time. And so we don’t. This is why your secondary school mechanics teacher is the best emissary of the flat-earth conspiracy mafia you have ever met.
A Scientific Fact… Just Not A Physics One
And here we get to the fun part. Because it turns out that, not only has human maths decided that “the Earth is flat” is a totally appropriate position to solve most problems from, but so has evolution.
Oh yes, your brain has evolved its folk physics to see the world as flat. This is why masts disappearing over the horizon are so damn magical because they are literally breaking your brain physics.
Your brain knows the Earth is flat. It doesn’t need photos or scientific experiments or any of that stuff to know this fact, because it’s already programmed. In short, it’s a fact in psychology that your brain knows the Earth is flat.
Yes, now you see what I did. Now you get it. I never said the Earth being flat was a scientific fact in physics. The Earth is round(*) in physics, it’s fine.
This is also why everything after Newtonian physics starts to feel weird. Because all of your folk physics, your physical intuition, is just not built for the small world of quantum mechanics, or the crazy worlds of Special or General Relativity(**). The Earth never needs more than basic Newtonian physics so that’s all you and I get.
Burning Galileo At the Stake
Believing that the Earth is flat is something we will all do if we don’t think too hard about it. Although the spherical model of the Earth has been around since the 3rd Century BC and spread around the world, we’ll always believe that medieval people thought the Earth was flat for this reason and we’ll be prone to subscribing to modern conspiracy theories that tell us the Earth really is flat as well.
In modern times, we have many people who subscribe to the supremacy of their own internal brain systems. For those people, the Earth can only ever be flat. They believe that the world is only as they perceive it, not that their perception of the world can be in error.
And, to tie all of this back to trans issues, your perception of transgender stuff is also subject to internal brain wiring, which is why so many people also believe that their internal programming about sex, gender and sexual orientation also trumps reality.
The question “What is a woman?” is usually a just a nod to your brain’s internal programming. It’s a short-cut that says “don’t think about it too hard”. “Common sense” will tell you, and of course it will tell you what your brain already knows, which is what it’s programmed to know, and for most cis people it is that “being trans is weird and messed up”.
But if that’s the way you see the world, then of course, the world should be flat. And that’s why one of the best answers to “What is a woman?” is “Why is it a scientific fact the Earth is flat?”. Because it is, in the same way a woman is an adult human female.
(* If you read that and thought “it’s actually oblate”, you are my kind of nerd.)
(** I really recommend Greg Egan’s Incandescence as a novel which basically makes that point so much better than I can by imagining an agrarian society in orbit around a neutron star discovering General Relativity as their first bit of “basic” physics simply because it’s so damn easy for them to do so because of the environment they find themselves in.)
