After a few years of marriage, it came to light that my wife thought the earth was flat. It wasn’t some religious thing or cult thing, she had no affiliations. She just came to that conclusion based on visual cues in the world (like ground looks flat) and believed it without it ever being challenged in it.
It came up when she mentioned that a plane fkying near the sun must be getting hot, and I’m like Whaa?
I explained the sun is so far outside the earth that that plane isn’t feeling much different than us.
She revealed she though the sun was inside the earth (like we lived in a snow globe on a flat planar surface) and the sun just went down behind the mountains at night like half hour away.
I was stunned. We had a 4hour talk about the earth as a planet and the solar system and how gravity works.
She curled up in a fetal position and had an existental crisis for the rest of the day.
Somehow she missed school for the gravity, solar system etc. And I’d destroyed her entire core belief system; that she had developed herself.
This is really fascinating to me. Do you mind my asking, with no intended disrespect, how intelligent your wife is? And did she have any kind of unusually isolated situation for much of her life?
😀 I haven’t IQ tested her. As a note I’m what she considers a smart engineery computer guy, but she can beat me at almost every game of Scrabble (like 400 vs 250). She can beat me at Tetris every time. She has played this 1010! android game for 3 years straight and not died once. Which is incredible to me. So she has reasoning skills and planning, and some abstract shape solving ability that is very tuned.
But she has zero science background, grew up Catholic, where god did everything, so she never thought critically about the humans on a planet situation.
But she doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to things outside of her realm. So maybe it is an attention issue not an intelligence issue.
i.e. she saw this red car go by and said thats nice and a bit different looking. I said yeah it’s our neighbours down the street She said I’ve never noticed it, how do you know its the same car? So I said: it’s had the front emblem taken off and re painted. Suspension is lowered, there is a performance parts logo on driver rear quarter window, it has smooth rims without a lot of cutouts, and a black subtle wing added on the tail.
When she asked how I knew all that I said because we see it everyday on our evening walk together. For her she’s walked by it 100s of times without remembering it ever being parked on our street.
Well I had to explain it as if it were a kids class. We didn’t get into deep theory , constants, equations type stuff. Just overall concepts.
Saying earth surface was round and each country gets different day and night sequences etc, she immediate went to why aren’t Australians dangling off if they are at the bottom. So we had to go over center of gravity and gravity itself.
Which led to the Sun and moon being outside the earth. And I had to talk about the immense distances and speed of light concepts. (Since she thought she could get to the sun in about 45 minutes)
Then the questions came about why, if the earth rotates for day and night, aren’t people flying off. So I had to go over gravity and inertial laws. Referencing something she knew like being in a car and dropping something, it drops relative to you and doesn’t fly back at 100km/h ( inertial frame of reference stuff).
She was obviously skeptical still, especially about stars being distant suns.
And then she came to the conclusion of: how did we get here, if we are tiny spec in the universe on a planet. So we touched on evolution theory.
We eventually got her kids solar system books, and watched some good documentaries on netlix about these subjects and the one about the stages the earth has gone through.
She eventually understood the concepts, but still though we were trying to trick her. Until she went skydiving and realized “the air is 3D” ( her words ). All along she saw the sky as a background 2d backdrop on the INSIDE of the snow globe earth.
I don’t know how she missed this concept most of her life, I guess her circle just didn’t include people that talked about science stuff, and she took her cues from what she could see…flat ground, sky seems far away, sun is tiny but looks like it hits the mountains and water.
I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.
did you tell her if the sun was so small it can fit inside the earth, everything wouldve been vaporized near its vicinity, let alone the gravitational effects being to a object that small and that close to it.
She wasn’t initially at that level to comprehend the sun as an object with intense heat and super mass. She saw the sun as a lightbulb inside the earth dome.
After a few years of marriage, it came to light that my wife thought the earth was flat. It wasn’t some religious thing or cult thing, she had no affiliations. She just came to that conclusion based on visual cues in the world (like ground looks flat) and believed it without it ever being challenged in it.
It came up when she mentioned that a plane fkying near the sun must be getting hot, and I’m like Whaa? I explained the sun is so far outside the earth that that plane isn’t feeling much different than us. She revealed she though the sun was inside the earth (like we lived in a snow globe on a flat planar surface) and the sun just went down behind the mountains at night like half hour away.
I was stunned. We had a 4hour talk about the earth as a planet and the solar system and how gravity works.
She curled up in a fetal position and had an existental crisis for the rest of the day.
Somehow she missed school for the gravity, solar system etc. And I’d destroyed her entire core belief system; that she had developed herself.
This is really fascinating to me. Do you mind my asking, with no intended disrespect, how intelligent your wife is? And did she have any kind of unusually isolated situation for much of her life?
😀 I haven’t IQ tested her. As a note I’m what she considers a smart engineery computer guy, but she can beat me at almost every game of Scrabble (like 400 vs 250). She can beat me at Tetris every time. She has played this 1010! android game for 3 years straight and not died once. Which is incredible to me. So she has reasoning skills and planning, and some abstract shape solving ability that is very tuned.
But she has zero science background, grew up Catholic, where god did everything, so she never thought critically about the humans on a planet situation.
But she doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to things outside of her realm. So maybe it is an attention issue not an intelligence issue. i.e. she saw this red car go by and said thats nice and a bit different looking. I said yeah it’s our neighbours down the street She said I’ve never noticed it, how do you know its the same car? So I said: it’s had the front emblem taken off and re painted. Suspension is lowered, there is a performance parts logo on driver rear quarter window, it has smooth rims without a lot of cutouts, and a black subtle wing added on the tail. When she asked how I knew all that I said because we see it everyday on our evening walk together. For her she’s walked by it 100s of times without remembering it ever being parked on our street.
What were your core talking points and structure that you managed to teach gravitational theory and heliocentrism in 4 hrs?
Well I had to explain it as if it were a kids class. We didn’t get into deep theory , constants, equations type stuff. Just overall concepts.
Saying earth surface was round and each country gets different day and night sequences etc, she immediate went to why aren’t Australians dangling off if they are at the bottom. So we had to go over center of gravity and gravity itself.
Which led to the Sun and moon being outside the earth. And I had to talk about the immense distances and speed of light concepts. (Since she thought she could get to the sun in about 45 minutes)
Then the questions came about why, if the earth rotates for day and night, aren’t people flying off. So I had to go over gravity and inertial laws. Referencing something she knew like being in a car and dropping something, it drops relative to you and doesn’t fly back at 100km/h ( inertial frame of reference stuff).
She was obviously skeptical still, especially about stars being distant suns.
And then she came to the conclusion of: how did we get here, if we are tiny spec in the universe on a planet. So we touched on evolution theory.
We eventually got her kids solar system books, and watched some good documentaries on netlix about these subjects and the one about the stages the earth has gone through.
She eventually understood the concepts, but still though we were trying to trick her. Until she went skydiving and realized “the air is 3D” ( her words ). All along she saw the sky as a background 2d backdrop on the INSIDE of the snow globe earth.
I don’t know how she missed this concept most of her life, I guess her circle just didn’t include people that talked about science stuff, and she took her cues from what she could see…flat ground, sky seems far away, sun is tiny but looks like it hits the mountains and water.
Good job lad
Relevant xkcd
But hey, she listened. Thats something most never do.
Whenever someone curls up in a fetal position and has an existential crisis, I KNOW that they are doing something right.
I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.
Yes, the true flatearthers deny what they are hearing and dig in deeper
Agree, and if earth was indeed flat, these people would claim it was a sphere.
did you tell her if the sun was so small it can fit inside the earth, everything wouldve been vaporized near its vicinity, let alone the gravitational effects being to a object that small and that close to it.
She wasn’t initially at that level to comprehend the sun as an object with intense heat and super mass. She saw the sun as a lightbulb inside the earth dome.