Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why
This is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 27, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. I’m going to let my guest introduce himself in a moment, because he does a better job than I could.
MM:
So I'm Michael Marshall and I'm the project director of the good thinking society, which is a charity based in the UK. Uh, the whole purpose of our charity is to promote science to challenge pseudoscience. So we'll do work, uh, to forward science education. And then another part of the, the work that we do, which is the bulk of my work, is to find ideas that aren't backed by evidence and find people who are promoting those ideas, find people who are buying into those ideas and to explore them and figure out if anything can be done to prevent people being confused by them, harmed by them misled by them in those kinds of things. So I spent a lot of my time looking at things like alternative cancer kills and the people who promote those and alternative medicine. I've spent a lot of my time going to see people who say they can talk the dead. Who say they can do faith healing.
And then another part of my, uh, my time is spent talking to people who believe in, uh, unusual ideas and who are kind of proponents of them. And that's how I came across the flat earth world, uh, is through my, uh, slightly odd, uh, hobby. Uh, at the time before I was working full time as a, as a skeptic, it was a hobby of mine to, um, be in rooms filled with people who disagree with me. To just understand what brings people to ideas that I would look at and say, well, this can't be true. These kinds of fringe and extreme and unusual beliefs. Um, what brings people to believe them and what kind of paths lead people there? What evidence supports, uh, supports their position in their minds and how do they engage with the world with that worldview and try and have conversations.
I've got a podcast where I talk to people who have kind of fringe beliefs and instead of having a conversation that a lot of people would have, if they are a skeptic about something and they're talking to a believer where you shout at them and tell them they're wrong and point out all the evidence and tell them, and it gets into quite a volatile discussion sometimes instead of that, I try and have a civil and polite chat to try and explore the gap between us. So I say, I don't believe in this idea of yours, but I'm really interested to figure out why I don't believe it and why you do so let's have a conversation. So I have these kinds of civil discussions and that's kind of how I came across a that the flat earth theory and the idea that there are people walking around today who think the world is flat.
SM:
It's really interesting and serendipitous that we're sitting here because I knew that there was some flat earthers out there and I just thought it was kind of strange and funny. And about a week ago, I discovered a friend of mine who is very well educated, she's got a doctorate in biochemistry and, uh, she has a sister who's also very intelligent and very well educated. And my friend told me that her sister is a flat earther and that her sister is very indignant about the, uh, idea that, um, we don't take them seriously. And she said something to the effect of, this is hearsay that we're getting from me right now. That, well, you know, if you looked at the evidence, then you'd know that what you've been told isn't true. So all of a sudden I became fascinated with the flat earth people and then just on Twitter and I hadn't, I had not been a follower of yours until I saw this tweet that somebody I follow must've retweeted a, that you had just given a talk in Edinburgh where I had been. And, uh, so I reached out to you and it turns out you live in Liverpool and here I am in Liverpool today. So, uh, that's why we're here talking. So tell me what do the flat earth people, uh, think and why do they think it?
MM:
So you've got to sort of unpack that question a little bit because it's very easy for us to see, uh, the flat earth movement as one singular cohesive movement. And that's how I first thought about it when I first came across it in 2013 and when I came across the flat earth society in the UK. And so I had a conversation with the vice president of the flat earth society. And I assumed, as you probably have in your mind, that people who believe the world is flat think that the world is a disc. And in the center you've got the Arctic circle, then you've got all the continents of the world sort of splayed out to fill the circle. And an Antarctica is like the edge of the disc. But what I found out that when I first spoke to the flatter society is that not everyone in the flat earth world has that version of the world in their heads.
Some do believe it's a disk, but others believe that, yes, there's Arctic circle in the middle and there's the land masses around it. And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions. That bisect reality, which is a really lovely idea.
SM: What does that mean?
MM: So it will go on in North, South, East, West, just go on forever and there is the above and the below, but there's no way of getting from the top to the bottom because it's just infinity of all ice in all directions forever. So there's no way of getting below the earth. And so this was a, when I first came across the flat earth moving in 2013 this was quite a vociferous debate that was going on.
And it was quite a schism really. And so they had the, the flat earth society at the time, it was largely a forum where they would bring forth their proofs of one version of this theory or another. And I also think there's another schism going on in the movement at the time, which is between one side, which are people who genuinely really believed the world was flat. And the other side, which absolutely did not believe it, but enjoy the intellectual pursuit of arguing a position they need to be false. And so they would find quite esoteric and off the wall proofs that most people wouldn't think of. And so when I first came across it in 2013 there were people waiting into these arguments who believed the world was round but had never thought about it before, but just assumed in a sort quite an arrogant way that they must know better than anybody who's ever thought about it and come to a different conclusion.
And so they were stomping into these arguments saying, well, what about photos of the earth from space and what about this? And what about ships going over the horizon thinking, well this is the gotcha, but not realizing that those were the first things they'd thought about, that they thought that the world, the approved worlds round. And therefore it's probably likely that the people who think the world is flat, I've had the same idea and yet they're still flat earthers, so at least in their mind they must have a good answer to that. That the people who believe the world was round having these arguments didn't have cause they'd never scrutinized the idea. They rejecting it. And so what was happening was I think to a degree, the part of the schism that were just having fun and knew very well the world wasn't flat, but just enjoyed the pursuit of doing that.
They were winning those arguments with people who were coming in and arrogantly assuming that they could answer everything. And in winning those arguments, they were really converting even more people who really believed it. And so you had this kind of effect where it was sort of spiral out of control a little bit, but I think it wasn't, it wasn't viral in the way that in 2013 as a in the way that it was in 2016 and 2017 and I think part of that is because that esoteric off the wall version of proofs can be quite complicated to get your head around. So for example, if you have the disk version, the world and the infinite plane version, both models suffer from an inability to explain gravity. You don't have a spherical mass, you don't have a central mass, you don't have a central point pulling it all to one point.
So it's very difficult to explain gravity in either one of those models. But these people who were doing kind of esoteric arguments were saying, well, what is gravity? Gravity is an accelerant, falls towards the ground, I think 9.8 meters per second squared, accelerates downwards. They said that is identical to a world in which the ground accelerates upwards to meet you. And so when you let go of something, it isn't that it's accelerating downwards, it's a, the ground's actually accelerating up to meet it.
SM: So it's a form of relativity.
MM: This is exactly where they come to. So people would then say, well, if it's, if the ground is the earth is, you know, an infinite plane in all directions that bisects reality and is accelerating upward at 9.8 meters per second squared and always has been since the Dawn of time, you'd hit a problem, which would be the speed of light.
You can't go fast. The speed of light. So people don't have a gotcha for this. And so the people who were putting forth esoteric off the wall trollish arguments would say, well, look at Einstein's theory of relativity as you approach Lightspeed, time itself slows down and the maths in their head works back out again. So yes, we're getting quicker, but time's getting slower and we can account for gravity in that way. And that's quite a complicated idea to get your head around. And so I think the fact that these people were winning arguments was getting, was converting some people to movement, but the way in which they were winning them were keeping people away from the movement because they were quite complex ideas. You couldn't stick them on a meme as you can these days. Here's a picture of the earth. You couldn't explain all that stuff about science, the relativity proven gravity and an infinite plane version of the world.
So I think there was a limiting factor going on and that's why when I first came across the flat earth movement, it was probably still pretty small, pretty unknown. I've been given talks about pseudoscience for the last kind of five, six plus years. And I've mentioned that I came across the flat earth movement and people would always say to me, there's nobody who actually believes that nobody actually, they don't really exist, that people are having fun. So it stayed quite small. And then in 2015 and 2016 a couple of things happened that really ignited a movement. And it was the publishing of two videos on YouTube or two video series on YouTube. Um, one I believe was, uh, Eric Dubay, 200 proofs. The earth is not spending globe. Uh, and the other was Mark Sargent's, uh, uh, 14 videos in his flat earth clues series.
SM: So now, we're going to actually be converting more people.
MM:
Well, it's, they are genuinely worth looking up because what I found really fascinating about the Eric Dubay 200 proofs, the are 200 of them in there, is that, uh, it was published in 2016 so it was three years after we had the, uh, infinite plane and the gravitational kind of explanation via Einstein's theory relative to, so it was three years of what you'd expect to be evolution and sophistication and, but in fact, proof number one, the horizon looks flat proof. Number two, even if you go up a mountain, the horizon looks flat. Proof number three, water, uh, cant stick to a curved surface. It always goes level and you can't get it. So there's no way it could stick to a ball. So they're all very, very simplistic arguments. And there's 200 of them. Um, some of them stick to sort of a pseudo physical properties. Others go to a conspiracy theory.
So I think proof 199 is saying that, well Isaac Newton and Neil Armstrong and Galileo, they were all Freemasons. Therefore the world is flat. And so you have this kind of a, this video and it was also published as a free ebook which collected lots of different so-called proofs of the world being flat that picked from lots of different genre of proof. So if you came to the flat earth, if you, if you were generally interested in conspiracy theory, you'd come to it and you'd find enough conspiracy theory reasons to believe the world is flat in there. If you came to it because you, uh, placed way too much emphasis on the, uh, the, the, your own powers of observation. You know, you can't show me the curve. I'm looking out at horizon. I can't see the curve. You can't tell me my eyes are wrong. If that's your, your style of thinking.
There were arguments in there for you that would tell you that that would support the idea of the world is flat. So I think it kind of covered all its bases a little bit. If you came from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, uh, in a biblical literalism the world is 6,000 years old and created in seven days as per the Bible, uh, which a large part of, of flat earth movement is actually crash creationism in a, in another guys. Um, there were creationist arguments in there that would support, uh, the, the, the idea of the world is flat. So it really did pull together different genre of flat earth arguments into one document. And I think that's why it became quite successful because it had a little bit in for anybody who might be, uh, in any way inclined to doubt the veracity of the round earth theory.
SM: That inclination is usually a preexisting condition.
MM:
I think so. I think so. So a lot of the way that people are stumped, we're coming across this information was through YouTube recommendations. Uh, this is, I think it was a study by the American Academy of sciences at their last kind of convention, which actually went there. The a scientist went along to the a U S flat earth convention and spoke to people there and asked, how did you get into the flat earth movement? And of the 40 people they asked, 39 of them said, I saw it recommended to me on YouTube. And the faulty of said, my son saw it, recommended to him on YouTube and pass it along to me. So it's what's appearing in that right-hand bar of up next on YouTube. So I think when there were people who were looking for moon landing denial videos, YouTube, once these Flat earth videos started getting out there and started having a sensationalist kind of style, so it'd have a sensationalist title, uh, there'd be people, people would come and watch it because they believed it.
This is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 27, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. I’m going to let my guest introduce himself in a moment, because he does a better job than I could.
MM:
So I'm Michael Marshall and I'm the project director of the good thinking society, which is a charity based in the UK. Uh, the whole purpose of our charity is to promote science to challenge pseudoscience. So we'll do work, uh, to forward science education. And then another part of the, the work that we do, which is the bulk of my work, is to find ideas that aren't backed by evidence and find people who are promoting those ideas, find people who are buying into those ideas and to explore them and figure out if anything can be done to prevent people being confused by them, harmed by them misled by them in those kinds of things. So I spent a lot of my time looking at things like alternative cancer kills and the people who promote those and alternative medicine. I've spent a lot of my time going to see people who say they can talk the dead. Who say they can do faith healing.
And then another part of my, uh, my time is spent talking to people who believe in, uh, unusual ideas and who are kind of proponents of them. And that's how I came across the flat earth world, uh, is through my, uh, slightly odd, uh, hobby. Uh, at the time before I was working full time as a, as a skeptic, it was a hobby of mine to, um, be in rooms filled with people who disagree with me. To just understand what brings people to ideas that I would look at and say, well, this can't be true. These kinds of fringe and extreme and unusual beliefs. Um, what brings people to believe them and what kind of paths lead people there? What evidence supports, uh, supports their position in their minds and how do they engage with the world with that worldview and try and have conversations.
I've got a podcast where I talk to people who have kind of fringe beliefs and instead of having a conversation that a lot of people would have, if they are a skeptic about something and they're talking to a believer where you shout at them and tell them they're wrong and point out all the evidence and tell them, and it gets into quite a volatile discussion sometimes instead of that, I try and have a civil and polite chat to try and explore the gap between us. So I say, I don't believe in this idea of yours, but I'm really interested to figure out why I don't believe it and why you do so let's have a conversation. So I have these kinds of civil discussions and that's kind of how I came across a that the flat earth theory and the idea that there are people walking around today who think the world is flat.
SM:
It's really interesting and serendipitous that we're sitting here because I knew that there was some flat earthers out there and I just thought it was kind of strange and funny. And about a week ago, I discovered a friend of mine who is very well educated, she's got a doctorate in biochemistry and, uh, she has a sister who's also very intelligent and very well educated. And my friend told me that her sister is a flat earther and that her sister is very indignant about the, uh, idea that, um, we don't take them seriously. And she said something to the effect of, this is hearsay that we're getting from me right now. That, well, you know, if you looked at the evidence, then you'd know that what you've been told isn't true. So all of a sudden I became fascinated with the flat earth people and then just on Twitter and I hadn't, I had not been a follower of yours until I saw this tweet that somebody I follow must've retweeted a, that you had just given a talk in Edinburgh where I had been. And, uh, so I reached out to you and it turns out you live in Liverpool and here I am in Liverpool today. So, uh, that's why we're here talking. So tell me what do the flat earth people, uh, think and why do they think it?
MM:
So you've got to sort of unpack that question a little bit because it's very easy for us to see, uh, the flat earth movement as one singular cohesive movement. And that's how I first thought about it when I first came across it in 2013 and when I came across the flat earth society in the UK. And so I had a conversation with the vice president of the flat earth society. And I assumed, as you probably have in your mind, that people who believe the world is flat think that the world is a disc. And in the center you've got the Arctic circle, then you've got all the continents of the world sort of splayed out to fill the circle. And an Antarctica is like the edge of the disc. But what I found out that when I first spoke to the flatter society is that not everyone in the flat earth world has that version of the world in their heads.
Some do believe it's a disk, but others believe that, yes, there's Arctic circle in the middle and there's the land masses around it. And then on Antarctica is the ice around the edge, but instead of it being a discreet disc, some people believe, in fact Antarctica just goes on forever in all directions. And so they believe that the earth is actually an infinite plane in all directions. That bisect reality, which is a really lovely idea.
SM: What does that mean?
MM: So it will go on in North, South, East, West, just go on forever and there is the above and the below, but there's no way of getting from the top to the bottom because it's just infinity of all ice in all directions forever. So there's no way of getting below the earth. And so this was a, when I first came across the flat earth moving in 2013 this was quite a vociferous debate that was going on.
And it was quite a schism really. And so they had the, the flat earth society at the time, it was largely a forum where they would bring forth their proofs of one version of this theory or another. And I also think there's another schism going on in the movement at the time, which is between one side, which are people who genuinely really believed the world was flat. And the other side, which absolutely did not believe it, but enjoy the intellectual pursuit of arguing a position they need to be false. And so they would find quite esoteric and off the wall proofs that most people wouldn't think of. And so when I first came across it in 2013 there were people waiting into these arguments who believed the world was round but had never thought about it before, but just assumed in a sort quite an arrogant way that they must know better than anybody who's ever thought about it and come to a different conclusion.
And so they were stomping into these arguments saying, well, what about photos of the earth from space and what about this? And what about ships going over the horizon thinking, well this is the gotcha, but not realizing that those were the first things they'd thought about, that they thought that the world, the approved worlds round. And therefore it's probably likely that the people who think the world is flat, I've had the same idea and yet they're still flat earthers, so at least in their mind they must have a good answer to that. That the people who believe the world was round having these arguments didn't have cause they'd never scrutinized the idea. They rejecting it. And so what was happening was I think to a degree, the part of the schism that were just having fun and knew very well the world wasn't flat, but just enjoyed the pursuit of doing that.
They were winning those arguments with people who were coming in and arrogantly assuming that they could answer everything. And in winning those arguments, they were really converting even more people who really believed it. And so you had this kind of effect where it was sort of spiral out of control a little bit, but I think it wasn't, it wasn't viral in the way that in 2013 as a in the way that it was in 2016 and 2017 and I think part of that is because that esoteric off the wall version of proofs can be quite complicated to get your head around. So for example, if you have the disk version, the world and the infinite plane version, both models suffer from an inability to explain gravity. You don't have a spherical mass, you don't have a central mass, you don't have a central point pulling it all to one point.
So it's very difficult to explain gravity in either one of those models. But these people who were doing kind of esoteric arguments were saying, well, what is gravity? Gravity is an accelerant, falls towards the ground, I think 9.8 meters per second squared, accelerates downwards. They said that is identical to a world in which the ground accelerates upwards to meet you. And so when you let go of something, it isn't that it's accelerating downwards, it's a, the ground's actually accelerating up to meet it.
SM: So it's a form of relativity.
MM: This is exactly where they come to. So people would then say, well, if it's, if the ground is the earth is, you know, an infinite plane in all directions that bisects reality and is accelerating upward at 9.8 meters per second squared and always has been since the Dawn of time, you'd hit a problem, which would be the speed of light.
You can't go fast. The speed of light. So people don't have a gotcha for this. And so the people who were putting forth esoteric off the wall trollish arguments would say, well, look at Einstein's theory of relativity as you approach Lightspeed, time itself slows down and the maths in their head works back out again. So yes, we're getting quicker, but time's getting slower and we can account for gravity in that way. And that's quite a complicated idea to get your head around. And so I think the fact that these people were winning arguments was getting, was converting some people to movement, but the way in which they were winning them were keeping people away from the movement because they were quite complex ideas. You couldn't stick them on a meme as you can these days. Here's a picture of the earth. You couldn't explain all that stuff about science, the relativity proven gravity and an infinite plane version of the world.
So I think there was a limiting factor going on and that's why when I first came across the flat earth movement, it was probably still pretty small, pretty unknown. I've been given talks about pseudoscience for the last kind of five, six plus years. And I've mentioned that I came across the flat earth movement and people would always say to me, there's nobody who actually believes that nobody actually, they don't really exist, that people are having fun. So it stayed quite small. And then in 2015 and 2016 a couple of things happened that really ignited a movement. And it was the publishing of two videos on YouTube or two video series on YouTube. Um, one I believe was, uh, Eric Dubay, 200 proofs. The earth is not spending globe. Uh, and the other was Mark Sargent's, uh, uh, 14 videos in his flat earth clues series.
SM: So now, we're going to actually be converting more people.
MM:
Well, it's, they are genuinely worth looking up because what I found really fascinating about the Eric Dubay 200 proofs, the are 200 of them in there, is that, uh, it was published in 2016 so it was three years after we had the, uh, infinite plane and the gravitational kind of explanation via Einstein's theory relative to, so it was three years of what you'd expect to be evolution and sophistication and, but in fact, proof number one, the horizon looks flat proof. Number two, even if you go up a mountain, the horizon looks flat. Proof number three, water, uh, cant stick to a curved surface. It always goes level and you can't get it. So there's no way it could stick to a ball. So they're all very, very simplistic arguments. And there's 200 of them. Um, some of them stick to sort of a pseudo physical properties. Others go to a conspiracy theory.
So I think proof 199 is saying that, well Isaac Newton and Neil Armstrong and Galileo, they were all Freemasons. Therefore the world is flat. And so you have this kind of a, this video and it was also published as a free ebook which collected lots of different so-called proofs of the world being flat that picked from lots of different genre of proof. So if you came to the flat earth, if you, if you were generally interested in conspiracy theory, you'd come to it and you'd find enough conspiracy theory reasons to believe the world is flat in there. If you came to it because you, uh, placed way too much emphasis on the, uh, the, the, your own powers of observation. You know, you can't show me the curve. I'm looking out at horizon. I can't see the curve. You can't tell me my eyes are wrong. If that's your, your style of thinking.
There were arguments in there for you that would tell you that that would support the idea of the world is flat. So I think it kind of covered all its bases a little bit. If you came from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, uh, in a biblical literalism the world is 6,000 years old and created in seven days as per the Bible, uh, which a large part of, of flat earth movement is actually crash creationism in a, in another guys. Um, there were creationist arguments in there that would support, uh, the, the, the idea of the world is flat. So it really did pull together different genre of flat earth arguments into one document. And I think that's why it became quite successful because it had a little bit in for anybody who might be, uh, in any way inclined to doubt the veracity of the round earth theory.
SM: That inclination is usually a preexisting condition.
MM:
I think so. I think so. So a lot of the way that people are stumped, we're coming across this information was through YouTube recommendations. Uh, this is, I think it was a study by the American Academy of sciences at their last kind of convention, which actually went there. The a scientist went along to the a U S flat earth convention and spoke to people there and asked, how did you get into the flat earth movement? And of the 40 people they asked, 39 of them said, I saw it recommended to me on YouTube. And the faulty of said, my son saw it, recommended to him on YouTube and pass it along to me. So it's what's appearing in that right-hand bar of up next on YouTube. So I think when there were people who were looking for moon landing denial videos, YouTube, once these Flat earth videos started getting out there and started having a sensationalist kind of style, so it'd have a sensationalist title, uh, there'd be people, people would come and watch it because they believed it.
Comment:
Nailed that mf entry..
