MONDAY’S SOLAR ECLIPSE NOT ONLY CAUGHT THE EYE OF DONALD TRUMP, BUT A GROUP OF FLAT-EARTHERS, TOO.
Eclipse suggests Earth is flat, group says
As the moon briefly blacked out the sun on Monday in a swath across the U.S., a rambunctious sect of conspiracy theorists on the internet pointed to the spectacle as proof that the Earth is flat.
The Flat-Earthers questioned why they were told not to look at the eclipse directly. What was being hidden? They also questioned how an object could cast a shadow smaller than itself.
Flat-Earther Walt Johnson personally conducted experiments to simulate the eclipse, shining a light on an object to see if he could find a way for an object to make a smaller shadow.
“There is no way to do it,” he told Mic news outlet, which did a roundup of YouTube videos and blog posts of prominent online FlatEarthers in anticipation of Monday’s solar eclipse.
“I’ve tried it with a spotlight, an LED light, a quarter, a ball.”
But as Bryan Gaensler, director of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics points out, you can’t recreate an eclipse “in your living room.” That’s because the sun is not like a lamp or a flashlight. It’s a diffused source of light, spread out evenly over a vast surface. You’d need a massive beach ball that emitted light, he said. And you’d need to take it far away, across the street perhaps, to simulate the distance between the sun and the moon.
Another Flat-Earther suggested the eastward movement of the eclipse across the continent was evidence that the Earth doesn’t actually rotate. That would prove one of the tenets of most Flat-Earth theories — that the Earth is a stationary disc with a similar-sized sun and moon rotating above it. The logic here was that if the Earth rotates west to east — as conventional science maintains — the eclipse should have moved from the east coast to the west coast. If the moon takes roughly 28 days to orbit the Earth, and the Earth makes a full rotation once a day, the Earth must be moving far faster than the moon, some FlatEarthers suggested. And so the moon’s shadow would be fairly stagnant, dragging from the east to the west as the Earth turned eastward.
The flaw in the theory is the moon’s speed. While it spins slower than the Earth in terms of degrees per hour, it’s still travelling at a high speed. Think of it as a race track, suggests Prof. Gaensler. The moon is in the outer lane, and would have to go quicker to get around the track than if it were in an inner lane. “It’s not in lane 8. It’s in lane one million,” he said. So the speed of the moon passing over North America outmatched the rotation of the Earth, causing the eclipse to move east.