I intend to use flat-earthers to explain my view of science.  People in general of cause know the Earth is round like a ball.  But how the round Earth works is often the subject of misconceptions.  Flat-earthers point to such misconceptions and make it sound like they made a round Earth unreasonable.  Otherwise, they don’t seem to agree on how the flat Earth works.  Someone may even contradict him- or herself.  I don’t know if they are trolling or never thought about it.

Flat-earthers seem to have the wrong idea of where scientific facts come from.  The few ones they know about they seem to believe to be dictated by the government.  Usually their own national one, however, the American one seems particularly common.  I think scientific facts are produced by more than a million people working all over the world.  They can cooperate across borders, but they don’t have to.  In contrast they communicate openly on which scientific finds they make.  In connection with this they tell how they came to their conclusions.  So if they make any error others can find out which errors they made.

The maybe worst misunderstanding is about scientific experiments.  They take machines for demonstrating phenomena and believe they should show all the aspects of the phenomenon.  Naturally they don’t.  The machine only represents those aspects relevant in context.  Flat-earthers try to build a “model” matching predetermined conclusions.  If the “model” shows some of characteristics of the real phenomenon it is supposed to show all its characteristics.  This is not how science is done!  Scientists make systematic observations of the real phenomenon.  If experiments are possible, they also involve the real thing.

Scientific research has to have some sort of connection with the obvious reality we humans live in.  Otherwise, it would not have had the internal consistency which I perceive it has.  I mean that scientific results roughly match each other.  Please note they only have to match approximately.  The perfection imagined by flat-earthers don’t exist within science.

Such an internal consistency in science can be contrasted by fictitious universes.  There are long-running ones with loads of authors.  Take for example Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Are the turtles’ teacher a human who has been turned into a rat-like being?  Or is he a former pet rat who has become a human-like being?  Science lacks this degree of contradiction at least during the past 50 years.  Do you think there are loads?  Then you rely on individuals which has failed to understand what scientific concepts mean.

Flat-earthers have asked the question if we can’t just accept that we don’t know what something specific is.  Science has always imagined a world which is possible to understand.  Not by seeing deception every time one does not immediately understand something.  Instead, it is by consciously reflecting on what one sees.

Uploaded on the 2nd of October 2023.