This story came up a few days ago and has had some interesting twists and turns, with Neil deGrasse Tyson doing an epic rebuttal to this idiocy on the Nightly Show. Much of the details and videos can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/29/entertainment/neil-degrasse-tyson-bob-flat-earth-twitter-spat/index.html
There are of course any number of ways to refute the notion of a flat earth, but I guess as always, the internet can be a home for all sorts of ideas that are just weapons-grade stupid, and proponents of these ideas will show up all over twitter and comment threads to endorse them. Some of this can be seen here:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/45541_Dear_Diary-_Today_I_Read_an_Article_Defending_People_Who_Think_the_Earth_Is_Flat
I think a good example of the kind of arguments given by proponents of this “theory” is in the above link, made originally in the comments section of an article about this on Salon.com:
A lot of people, including myself, who claim the earth is flat came to it reluctantly, but they were convinced by doing the math and geometry and looking at the observable phenomena. For hundreds of years people believed the earth was a globe without any proof, and now all the “proof” is coming from one government organization - NASA.
There are two elements to this. First is a claimed number-crunching and the second is a conspiracy. Like I said before, there are any number of ways to refute this but two stand out to me as debate-ending here:
1. Think of global air travel. Airlines fly all over the globe in different directions every day. You could, for example, depart out of New York City traveling west and eventually arrive somewhere such as China. You could, also, depart out of New York City traveling east — the exact opposite direction — and eventually arrive in the same place, China.
This is simply impossible if the earth is flat. There is no way you could depart from one place on the flat earth going in exactly opposite directions and somehow wind up in the same place if you just keep going far enough. The only way this can happen is if the earth is round. Think of a chess board. Now start from any square on the board. If you move in one direction from that square you can never arrive at the same place as you would if you had moved in the opposite direction from that square. In fact, the further you go in opposite directions you would only get further apart all the time. What “math” calculations or “geometry” could possibly change this?
2. The conspiracy is apparently that NASA has built an elaborate series of fake pictures, videos and testimonies, and maintained this ruse impeccably for decades, all to fool humanity into believing the supposed falsehood that the earth is round. Ok, the first point here is it hasn’t just been NASA or the US government. The Soviet Union also had a very successful space program. They have their own pictures and videos, etc. So…. were the US and the USSR, major enemies at the time, in cahoots on the round earth conspiracy? Even if you were to believe something so absurd, a simple question still stands in the way here: WHY?!
Why would the US government, let alone the USSR and other governments, all be so determined to even create this particular “myth” of a round earth, let alone build and protect it so successfully for decades? What is to be gained and by whom, and for what? I’m not hostile to any or all conspiracy theories. There are sometimes conspiracies in the world, but a viable conspiracy theory has to at least make some kind of sense at the outset. There has to at least be a sensible reason why the supposed conspirators would want to conspire in that way, and some kind of reasonable way they could pull it off. This whole story seems to fit Bill Maher’s latest commentary on how the internet has become such a vehicle for spreading of misinformation.
That a prominent scientist had to go on television (even tongue in cheek) and many articles have had to be written in prominent news sites about a flat earth conspiracy theory is pretty telling of exactly what he’s talking about here.