"Batman, is the world flat?"

"Only one way to answer this, Robin... TO THE LIBRARY!"

(cue spinning image of books and fast trumpets going 'duhnuhNUHNUHnuhnuhnuh!' transitioning us to the library scene... we see Batman thumbing through a large book...)

"... says here that the Earth is in fact, spherical."

"Holy quadric-surfaces Batman!"

Yes, well I dont doubt the sincerity of "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth." but the problem is: surely a few well read historians, scientists etc was "in the know", but we all know how many books were read TO the illiterate masses, lets just say that they could all be counted on one finger, and one of them ends with "ible". The masses were kept in the dark. And occationally, some populist dictator or warlord of some kind would wipe out the few scholars there were.

The Qu'ran was written in the 7th century, btw, but as I tried saying, going backwards in time trying to put a date on when we knew what, is basically a hopeless task, because information didnt flow that good. its all well and good that we can dig up a book or piece of paper with some great thinker who knew much more than we'd expect from the timeline, but again, was it "Established" knowledge? Its sometimes difficult to know.

Take Darwin, next year there will be 150 years since he published "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection", yet half of America still dont fuckin get it, and its not even the dark ages(or so they tell me) And we DO have all this information flow, and most people can read, and so on. Just imagine how much more crippled progress was earlier.

Thats what I mean with information flow.

I gotta say BicycleRepairMan, I think you grossly underestimate the information flow and knowledge of both the ancient and the medieval world. A discovery like Aristotles evidence of a spherical earth (which was a lot more then just 'guessing' at its shape) would likely have been all over the hellenistic world within a few years.

And nothin I have ever read on the topic has said that the concept of a flat earth was ever wide spread during the 'dark' ages. In fact Klaus Anselm Vogel stated in his disseration from 1995 that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth." (in german at http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/diss/2000/vogel/index.htm#inhalt).

I dont know much about Islamic history and I've never read the Qu'ran so wouldnt really feel comfortable commenting on that part though.

Errrm, feels very errendous to claim that Eratosthenes (ca 240 BC) 'discovered' that the earth was not flat when that fact had been a strong hypothesis since atleast ca 600 BC (and probebly as far back as 900 BC from memory) and Aristotle (ca 330 BC) provided quite compelling observational evidence for a spherical earth, Eratosthenes really mostly added to that.

So contrary to what is still sometimes a popular belief 'intellectuals' in the European (dont know enough about arabic/asian/south american etc to comment really) world have not believed the earth to be flat for atleast 2000 years and probebly longer.

Still Carl Sagan does have a purty voice, rawr.

The final part of this video is NOT nonsense and has been taken very seriously since the 1970s.

The preconceived notion has historically been point particles, then wave/particle duality, and in the last 40 odd years electron as standing spherical wave.

Wave theory can indeed give you the correct answers - this is surprising, controversial, not mainstream (although moreso in the last ten years) but does in fact seem to be true in all scenarios. The answers that electron as wave can give you are origin of mass and origin of spin amongst others. It is also mathematically elegant and won't hurt your brain as much as the standard model.

I'll see if I can dig out some electron as wave video worthy of the sift.

Pi 'occurs' (actually almost never, but 'close enough' circles and ellipses are all over the place) in nature because as far as we know it is fundamentally built into the physics of our world. A point charge creates a spherically symmetric electric field. A point wave source creates a spherically propagating wave.

Phi is just the positive solution to X^2 - X - 1 = 0. It has nothing to do with symmetry, an altogether separate concept.

Of course it's a 'real' ratio (as opposed to i/2, which is an imaginary ratio), but then so is every other real number; there isn't anything mystical about ratios.

As for Da Vinci's discovery... the golden ratio is approximately 1.618; e (a much more important constant) is approx. 2.718; maybe the 'real' proportion is e - 1 (approx. 1.718)? I bet if I look hard enough, I could find e - 1 all over the place.

There is problay other life out there that think we look like ants.

Yes, but actually smaller planets would be more conducive to having very large life forms on land, because of the weaker gravitational pull. As you make larger and larger versions of a structure, its mass grows faster than its strength. If s is the scale than mass is O(s^3) and strength is very roughly O(s^2). This is one of the reasons why all sufficiently large planets are roughly spherical. This is why an ant can lift 20 times its own body weight but no known large creature can. This is why you can't build an arbitrarily long bridge without supports in the middle.

I had seen a video of Pixel(the one with the four spherical tanks) attempt one of the Lunar Lander Challenge competitions. It landed about a foot off the pad and busted one of it's legs, they tried a repeat, but the missing leg threw off the flight charateristics and caused a crash.

They have a lot of videos at their site:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=337

Good crash video, of one of the other designs:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/48InchCrash.mpg

Hi Fletch, I think you are right about his intentions. The trampoline model has the mass at the bottom of the well, not flush with the top of the well as this video portrays. So this is really bizarre and flawed if this is spherical rotation of the trampoline model. It would have been just as interesting also to see the results of spinning the line around with the correct center of rotation. If this wasn't flawed enough the final "Looks like the Earth!" is ridiculous.

A YouTube user-produced and submitted video that seems to be an effort to literalize (that a word?) and extrapolate into 3 dimensions a view of space-time that is often used to demonstrate the concept of space-time and gravity's interaction with it (the ol' bowling ball on a trampoline). I'm not quite sure what he was trying to show (and I watched his other, similar video on the same topic), if anything. The ultimate conclusion he seems to arrive at is that space-time warps around planets in a spherical shape (????) Or... something. I guess.

Deathcow, I think he was just trying to visualize space-time in 3 dimensions, rather than the trampoline model we've all seen. I don't think he meant it as a serious scientific explanation. More thinking out loud (but in a video). I read his other posts and he didn't exactly come across as a hard-core sci.physics.relativity type. I'm not either, but I dig this type of stuff. This video just doesn't have any information, or even anything interesting or scientifically correct, imho.

Try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV9nBz3Mlog

Or this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFUG6itL_0M

Yes, the following can contribute to orbital decay.
Perturbations due to Non-spherical Earth (including tidal drag)
Third-Body Perturbations (moon, planets, etc.)
Perturbations from Atmospheric Drag
Perturbations from Solar Radiation (Intense solar activity causes our atmosphere to expand outward in addition to the effects of solar wind itself)

"The space shuttle and the ISS both orbit within the thermosphere. The thermosphere is about a million times less dense than the atmosphere at sea level, but that's enough to affect the orbits of these satellites."

http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faqs.html
12). How long will orbital debris remain in Earth orbit?
The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit. Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 1,000 km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a century or more.

IIS altitude: roughly 350 km
Hubble altitude: roughly 600 km
"The ISS will sink a couple of kilometers per year in the future because of atmospheric drag - in its current configuration"

Over a thousand more pieces of junk just added:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6398513.stm

Jim Griggs, inventor of the Hydrosonic Pump, is no longer a part of Hydro Dynamics Inc.

Stan Meyer was convicted of fraud in 1996. Meyer was found guilty of fraud when his Water Fuel Cell failed to impress three expert witnesses. When one of the court experts went to examine the Water Fuel Cell driven car, it was impossible to evaluate because it was not working. Meyer later died of apparent poisoning which led to a slew of retarded conspiracy theories. He bitched about funding and support yet, The James Randi Foundation had a standing $1 million dollar offer, all he had to do was prove his claims.

Color me skeptical. When Griggs says he was confused as to why the pipes were getting hot, and goes on to describe his pump, at no time is cavitation mentioned. This is a common, fairly well understood phenomenon. Yet it goes unmentioned in the video? WTF

Cavitation:

"This is a process in which tiny bubbles grow in size and then collapse as a result of pressure variations in the turbulent water...The temperature reached by the collapsing bubble depends on how much of the focused energy is lost by sound emission at the collapse and how much is consumed by internal processes such as vibrations, rotations, dissociation and eventually ionization... If there are many collapsing bubbles, they disturb each other, which leads to a less-spherical collapse and therefore less-efficient energy focusing. Nonetheless, temperatures can rise so high that the bubbles start to glow...Analysis of the emitted spectral lines4 indicates that the temperature reached inside these bubbles is around 5,000 kelvin."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7029/full/434033a.html

The phenomenon where in light is emitted is called "Sonoluminescence." Sonoluminescence was discovered in 1934 by two German physicists.

http://watersciencenews.com/sonolum.htm
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=000950E3-6815-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7

There was an interesting documentary on a hydro power plant at a dam where they showed the tremendous damage that caviation was causing to the turbine blades and housing. Typically, cavitation is seen as a source of inefficiency.

Here's the patent for the Hydrosonic Pump mentioned:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5957122-fulltext.html

This has a lot more to do with super-nifty computer graphics than anything remotely close to what an event like this would look like.

Asteroids don't look spherical and round like the moon, and an object that large would either go into orbit around the sun or hit a planet with a stronger gravitational pull first, like Jupiter.

Pretty silly stuff. But, hey - whatever, it looks cool, and some bible-thumper left an inadvertantly funny comment about the Book of Revelatons on the YouTube page for this vid.