Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: David Buehrer dbuehrer@******.carl.org
Subject: Flat/Curved Earth
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 07:18:12 -0700 (MST)
Dave Post wrote:
/
/ ...some folks even still think the world is flat.

Oddly enough, they are correct thanks to Mr. Einstein and curved
space. Don't think of the surface of the earth as a sphere, but as a
flat plane curved into the shape of a sphere (by gravity). So, the earth
is both flat and round :)

(Or, my amature knowledge of physics is off base and I'm completely wrong
:)

Hmmm... I wonder if there are any forces that can warp the astral plane
like gravity does to the physical plane..

-David B.
--
"Earn what you have been given."
--
ShadowRN GridSec
email: dbuehrer@******.carl.org
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/1068/homepage.htm
Message no. 2
From: Adam Getchell acgetchell@*******.edu
Subject: Flat/Curved Earth
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 13:55:16 -0800
>Oddly enough, they are correct thanks to Mr. Einstein and curved
>space. Don't think of the surface of the earth as a sphere, but as a
>flat plane curved into the shape of a sphere (by gravity). So, the earth
>is both flat and round :)

Well, not exactly, but somewhat.

Globally, the universe is thought to be flat. There are revelations in
Cosmology since more accurate measures of Hubble's constant have been taken
and neutrinos have been shown to have mass. There are thought to be about
10E^55 photons in the Universe and an order of magnitude more neutrinos.
Most nuclear reactions release neutrinos at some point, energy which is
essentially 'lost' due to the neutrino's extremely weak interaction with
matter.

At any rate, gravity curves spacetime (a 4D Lorentzian manifold if you keep
up with Kip Thorne) into geodesics, more or less. A geodesic is a path that
minimizes total proper distance. Spacetime around the earth is affected by
the Sun, Moon, and Earth itself, a classic case of the pathological (ie
nearly unsolvable) n-body problem in gravitation. Nevertheless, one might
characterize this condition as "weak" such that General Relativity boils
down to a linearized theory aka Newton's law of Gravitation.

Or another way to look at it, local spacetime is flat.

The easiest way to think about it is that mass tells gravity how to curve,
and gravity tells mass where to move.

>Hmmm... I wonder if there are any forces that can warp the astral plane
>like gravity does to the physical plane..

Totems? Metaplanes?

>-David B.

--Adam

acgetchell@*******.edu
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu

Further Reading

If you enjoyed reading about Flat/Curved Earth, you may also be interested in:

Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!