RE: Understanding Cognition: The Dissonance Of Flat Earth
However he did disprove one flat earth model, which is that gravity is an illusion made real by the fact that the earth is accelerating up at 10 metres per second squared (10 m/s2). If this was the case then anything accelerating quicker than this would be able to get into space. Even though Mike's rocket got to a speed of around 500 k/ph it didn't reach escape velocity and came back down to earth.
If a rocket can sustain an acceleration of 10 m/s^2 over a longer time, then it will be able to escape the gravity of the earth. It does not need to reach "escape velocity" at any point.
According to his world view one will constantly have to accelerate with 10 m/s^2 (and eventually one will hit a ceiling?). According to my world view, the higher you get the less you need to accelerate, and if you direct some of the acceleration sideways one will eventually get into orbit and can stay there without neither falling down nor accelerating.
According to my world view, there exists an escape velocity, meaning that any object reaching that velocity will eventually fly out in space and never get into orbit nor fall back again, without needing to accelerate more. In his world view, escape velocity is the speed one must have for hitting the ceiling? I don't know ...
My point was that earth's escape velocity is roughly 11.2 km/s, about 33 times the speed of sound. This is due to earth's gravitational mass the way Newton describes.
Flat earthers say gravity doesn't work like that (they have to otherwise, gravity would drag us all towards the centre of the earth if we lived on a disc.). Rather they say that we are accelerating upwards at 10 ms/2 (presumably going many millions of times the speed of light at this point in history.)
So if that were the case, the earth's escape velocity wouldn't be 11.2 kilometres per second it would be around 11 metres per second (regardless of acceleration).
So anything going faster than that would simply go straight up into space and wouldn't fall back to earth like Mad Mike's rocket did.
Cg
For all practical purposes, the real figure is higher - due to air resistance. But it doesn't really matter, with rockets and continuous acceleration it's no need to get up in such kind of speeds. Besides, most space transport does not escape gravity, it merely goes up to low earth orbit.
I don't understand your reasoning.
If earth is accelerating, then no matter what speed one jumps with, one will eventually fall down again at some point. While gravity can be escaped by speed alone, continuous acceleration can only be escaped by a greater continuous acceleration.
Wind resistance does play a factor however if you are on a body moving at 10 ms/2 then you too are accelerating. Also you could escape if you jumped at an angle near the edge of said body.
However yes, you would be caught eventually if you carried on going straight up. This doesn't change the fact that escape velocity would be a lot lower than 11.2 km/s though :-)
Although as I said earlier, the earth accelerating upwards theory can be killed by the fact that we're not moving at light speed or more.
Cg
Let's ignore the air resistance for a bit to make it easier. Let's leave out the edges too (no flat-earther has fallen off the edge and lived to tell the tale), and horisontal acceleration.
In this "accelerating pancake"-paradigm, one is accelerating together with the ground as long as one is standing on the ground. The acceleration of the ground exerts a force on your feet (or, more probably, your ass - we've apparently gone from being homo erectus to being homo sedes). As soon as your feet leaves the ground (or someone pulls the chair away from you), you stop accelerating, and the pancake will soon overtake you, with great pain. Exactly the same is observed if we exchange the accelerating pancake with a gravity ball.
This is not a fact, this seems like a misunderstanding. Escape velocity in an "accelerating pancake"-paradigm must be much higher - actually, infinitely high.
When disregarding the above-mentioned complications, when travelling vertically with the escape velocity and without any further acceleration one will eventually leave the system. In the gravity-ball-paradigm one will leave the system because gravity tapers out with the distance. In the accelerating-pancake-paradigm, one will never leave the system. No matter how much vertical speed an object have, the flat earth will sooner or later overtake the object. You can never reach any escape velocity.
Of course, now I'm having a mental model of a pancake accelerating through space in my head. It may be that the details differ. As far as I've heard, there is a dome above our heads, and the starts are attached to said dome (what about the planets?). With that in mind, sooner or later one will hit the dome if travelling too fast. Perhaps it's made of glass and that one will crash through it. Perhaps that's to be considered an "escape" and hence the escape velocity is smaller in the flat-earth paradigm. The only way to find out is to build a rocket powerful enough to actually crash with the said dome. As far as I can tell, Mad Mike did not crash with the dome yet, hence he cannot do any estimations on the escape velocity.
@cryptogee & @tobixen,
Just a quick expansion on what Cryptogee said because a lot of people don't understand what m/s2 means.
The Earth's gravitational pull accelerates an object towards the Earth's center of mass (the center of the Earth) at 9.8 m/s2. What that means, is that every second, an object falls 9.8 meters faster than it did the second before.
So, if you dropped a ball from a tall building, after one second, it would be falling at 9.8 m/s. After two seconds, it would be falling at 19.6 m/s ... and so forth.
Because Earth has an atmosphere, eventually the ball would reach a maximum rate of fall ("terminal velocity") due to air resistance.
What the Flat Earthers are claiming though, is that objects are not "falling down" towards the Earth, but rather that the Earth is "accelerating up" towards the objects.
As the Earth, and its atmosphere, would be accelerating through the vacuum of space, there would be no resistance, and so, the rate of acceleration would continue, unhindered, forever. An additional 9.8 m/s, ever second.
Earth's age (roughly 4.5 billion years), multiplied by an increase in velocity of 9.8 m/s every second, would result in a current velocity of ... a lot ... as Cryptogee stated, many many times the speed of light (I'll leave it to him to do the math).
But where would the energy to create such an acceleration be coming from? Just to accelerate a mass the size of the Earth to 99% of the speed of light would require more energy than all the stars in the observable universe.
Cognitive dissonance, indeed.
Quill
Well, if one does not want to believe in simple Newtonian physics, I see no reason to believe in relativistic physics. Hence speed of light is no problem, and the energy requirement can also be ignored for the same reason.
Even within the relativistic point of view, maintaining such an acceleration is unproblematic - it's a question of reference frames. If someone falls off the edge of the pancake, they will see the pancake accelerate with 9.8 m/s^2, but as the speed between the man-over-pancake and the pancake gets a significant fraction of c, the MOP will see the acceleration of the pancake decrease. The speed of the pancake will grow towards c in an asymptotic way, never reaching c.
This is a great devil's advocate argument by the way!
So @tobixen I would say that when you made this statement, you were 100% correct:
So therefore we can disprove the constantly accelerating disk earth with . . .
aeroplanes!!!
If the earth is constantly accelerating, then every plane that took off would come crashing down to earth as soon as it stopped accelerating and hit cruising speed. Because as you rightly pointed out, (or at least alluded to) the only way to stay at a constant height above the ground in the accelerating pancake model would be to keep accelerating yourself.
Ergo planes would not work unless they were continually accelerating upwards, and landing would be problematic to say the least. :-)
I think even the most logic-deprived flat earther would have problems getting out of that one without using the words; 'because magic.'
Cg
Sorry. As far as I can see, the only difference between the "accelerating pancake"-theory and the "gravitational planet pull"-theory is that the actual g experienced by the airplane at cruising altitude would be a tiny bit less than the actual g experienced on ground. Except for that, both theories are compatible with airplanes flying. The thing that keeps the plane from falling down is aerodynamic lift.
Though, what I do wonder about in the accelerating pancake theory is ... what is keeping the air in place? It should spill over the edges and fall of the pancake as the pancake is accelerating.