SultanOfSwing

I think it's because he turned his attention to deep sea exploration after the balloon expedition, so unless you're into that, or follow aviation altitude records, you'll not have heard of him. It doesn't look like he was a pioneer of technology or did much actual discovery other than breaking the altitude record in the balloon.

Red Eric

Surely that's not curvature of the Earth at all, though. That's refraction of light through the atmosphere.

SultanOfSwing

kimilseung

That's a still from "The First Men in the Moon" I am on to these fakes stories.

Sally Redux

No enquiring minds on here then?

SultanOfSwing

As in, people who think there is any validity in Flat Earthism? Doubtful, since we have known the Earth was a sphere, with observational evidence from antiquity and have, in the modern age of flight and space exploration directly observed the spherical Earth.

It's 'cool' these days to reject science (antivax, Christianity, etc), this is just another fad.

Sally Redux

Hmmm OK

SultanOfSwing

Seriously, with the best will in the world, it's bollocks. There is no evidence whatsoever for a flat Earth and we've circumnavigated the globe in ships and aeroplanes; we've been into space, we know it's spherical. Where do these people think ships go when they disappear over the horizon?

Oakvillian

Quite. I have an enquiring mind. That's a default position that a scientific education leads one to adopt.

But having an enquiring mind doesn't mean one needs to pay attention to crackpot ideas.

The earth is an oblate sheroid. Ptolemy knew the earth was roughly spherical, and demonstrated it using elementary trignonometry. Columbus knew the earth was a sphere (although he thought it was much smaller than it actually is). Newton, Copernicus, Galileo... there hasn't been an significant challenge to the idea that earth is a spheroid for millennia. For sure, the Roman church dogmatically clung on to an earth-centred model of the universe long after scientists (or "natural philosophers" as they were called at the time) had suggested otherwise, but even most of those models had a spherical earth at the middle of it all.

The idea of "luminiferous aether" has been redundant since the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. Again, there were some individuals and institutions who clung on to the idea of luminiferous aether for some time after its existence had been successfully disproved, but no serious physicist has promulgated the idea for well over a century now.

Lion in Winter

SultanOfSwing

I'm all for having an open mind on things that we don't yet know everything about (string theory, the origin of the Universe, origin of life, extraterrestrial life etc), but the shape of the Earth is, and has been for millennia, widely known. This one's been wrapped up boys.

I mean, there's your proof right there

Oakvillian

It's also worth pointing out that, on the Metabunk page from which your graphic is taken, the whole of the rest of the page is devoted to explaining that Nikola Tesla did not say this. He did mention "the stars in the firmament" in passing, but not in the context of being "attached."

Aside from anything else, Tesla did not refer to what we now call a "Tesla Coil" by that name. He called them "oscillating transformers" or similar terms.

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-ea...la-coil.t8466/

DaveLovesDee

That may be so, but please don't call me Shirley!

The Bermuda Triangle?

SultanOfSwing

Red Dwarf season 1 episode 4 ...

RIMMER: All right, then, the Bermuda Triangle. Go on, explain that one.
You know all the answers.

LISTER: No, I agree there. That is a genuine mystery. How did a song
like that ever become a hit? It defies all reason.

Bahtatboy

And also a non-religious one...

But that's a whole different can of potatoes.

Or is it...?