I mean, in a vacuum, and given enough time (and provided you remove the heavy bucket afterwards and are in no other gravity well), A. And flat-earthers DO believe this because they somehow accept that every OTHER planet is a sphere… For some reason… Just not our special little disk of god-made mud.
The dumb leading the dumb.
First, the globe would have to be solid and sufficiently dense to scale.
Then, it would have to be removed from any other significant gravitational field - such as the actual earth.
Then, the layer of water would be as deep as about half the width of a pin.
Then yes, it would work and the water would settle on the globe correctly.
(I am not a scientist and have probably missed a variable or twenty in this summation)
You’re mostly correct, but hilariously even all that wouldn’t be good enough because water behaves differently at different scales. Surface tension would dominate in a miniature model, and the water would be trying to stick to everything in a way which oceans simply don’t do
Now I’m wondering what high surface tension oceans would look like.
I did think about that, but I don’t know how surface tension works. I’ll certainly take mostly correct. Not bad for an amateur who just watches physics videos for fun.
I am not a scientist
That’s okay, neither is the person who made that Facebook meme.
Were they a YouTube scientist?
They went to Trump University.
A working model will be scalable.
A 1:6 model of The Queen Mary will capsize in still water.
Why is that? I couldn’t find any info on that.
Probably because volume increases faster than surface area.
Edit: To expand on that, assume the Queen Mary is an airtight cube. A small model of the cube might have 1m sides, with a volume of 1m³. If the real cube had sides of 3m, it would have a volume of 27m³. Buoyancy is a function of the volume of water displaced by an object, so since volume increases so much faster than surface area (and, by extension, weight), the larger cube would displace enough water to overcome its weight where the smaller one wouldn’t.
Good on you for challenging that and bad on me for repeating that without knowing precisely. Heard that decades ago and use it as a general reference to the fact that functional models are absolutely not scalable. I’m not a trained engineer and I don’t know if the 1:6 part is right but there is a scale where that design would capsize because it was designed to function at the scale it was built for. At sufficiently different scales different properties of water would become dominate and upset the intended function.
At a super small scale it might just kind of stick in the water. That’s a funny image. With water I just imagine it as kind of like ‘resolution’. Take a small boat and a cup of water, then scale that up 10,000x. You’re not really ‘scaling’ everything because the molecules aren’t growing, there’s just more of them, and the dynamics that govern the interactions of 10 molecules are very different from 10,000.
I also remember something about Gulliver’s Travels- proportionately scaled giant’s bones couldn’t support the weight because square-cube law. I should have used that reference because I do know how that works. Could just be that with the Queen Mary too but I vaguely remember it being something about water itself.
But again good on you for asking. And since you are the kind of person that challenges things you probably already understand everything I just babbled about but thanks for giving me a minute to pretend I remember stuff I sort of learned once.
Can’t help myself so I’ll take a total guess that maybe the Queen Mary thing something about friction of water not having enough effect at smaller scales to provide resistance the keel needs? idk- that was probably an embarrassing guess but I’m just a dilettante so who cares.
Good on you for expecting the best out of a person. I did suspect something like surface tension or viscosity, but I was curious about the exact reason. The relationship of volume to weight should be about the same, and thus the ship should still float. That was my reasoning.
Anyway, thanks for the lengthy response, even if you don’t have a source.
In light of the last decade, I’ve come to almost appreciate the dumb, harmless conspiracy theories like this one.
Flat Earth, birds aren’t real, etc - if folks think spending their time on that shit is fun, then more power to em.
More of the fun dumb shit, less political conspiracies that almost invariably shepard idiots over to supporting fascists.
Most flat earth conspiracy is part of a larger biblical conspiracy, which lines up with pushing for Christian theocracy. Most of the flat earthers are not “one and done.” They are part of deeper and way more harmful conspiratorial groups like Qanon.
It’s not at all harmless joke conspiracies like “birds with arms” or other kinds of one off cryptozoology like Bigfoot or Nessy.
Oh. Well… fuck.
Reality always finds a way to disappoint
I agree. I like the idea of the loch ness monster.
Problem is though, this stuff all seems to blob together and you start a conversation about the Baghdad battery and all of a sudden someone is making some pretty antisemitic theories about the world.
Conspiracy theories generally involve a worldwide conspiracy to hide the “truth”. There’s almost always at least an implied “them” who doesn’t want this truth to be revealed. The illuminati, the freemasons, or, inevitably, the Jews get blamed for suppressing shit. It’s a short road from flat earth or the lizard people to “a worldwide Jewish cabal is trying to sacrifice our children to Satan”.
Both actually, assuming lots of time and no external gravity field.
Both will also have a problem with surface tension.
This is one of the few times a spherical cow in a vacuum is accurate
Just have to make our globe working model dense enough to distort space-time and then spin it at a thousand miles an hour. 'Course this will require a working model of the sun to power the working model of the Earth.
answer is clearly “the earth is shaped like a bucket”
I just learned that I don’t care for relief globe. It’s unsettling somehow.
Aside from the lack of accuracy when it comes to scale?
Because at that size, a smooth globe would definitely be more accurate.
I just want one that shows the actual shape, with the bulges at the equator.
I don’t think you would be able to see those at that scale either.
A yes, the Pour a Bucket of Water creation story. We all know it, we all grew up with it. It’s checkmate, rounders!
No, B yes
And also this is scalable, assuming you also scale the gravity fields.
You’d have to be in freefall to eliminate the earth’s gravity messing it up, and at this scale surface tension would likely be the overwhelming force so not really fair there anyways. Never mind that those elevations are crazy exaggerated; the differences in the real earth are far less pronounced.
A properly scaled model of the earth should scale the water molecules, too.
Oh, good point… I propose a 1:1 model just to eliminate all these issues
I may be lonely, but I’ll never be, “give a bunch of crackpots some attention so I can at least hang out with other dudes at conferences and stuff until they invite me to join whatever the incel equivalent of Amway is” lonely
Hrmmmm. 3! Wait, no… False! Er… 4i over pi!
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