It's True, Water is Level... Because We Live on a Sphere

I have been writing about the meteoric rise of the flat earth phenomenon, and my articles are an attempt to answer and rebut their often wild and crazy claims with easy to understand science. One of them is that they use an argument to incredulity to say that we can't live on a sphere because water is always level, and therefore it cannot curve to conform to the shape of the earth.

Image credit: it's a meme

They make this argument, frankly, to confirm their bias. But they claim to be making it because they 'trust their senses' and water LOOKS level, therefore it must be. And no 'evil freemasonry scientism' is going to tell them water can curve and stick to a ball when they can see that it can't with their own eyes! However, our senses are fallible, and we go over the The Misconception that We Can Trust Our Senses on that page.

Water Curves All the Time

It seems that the senses of flat earthers are worse than the rest of us, because most of us see not flat water quite frequently in the form of dew, waves, and the meniscus in a test tube, as just a few examples of curved water we can see with our own senses that they ignore. Perhaps they simply refuse to believe that it's the FORCES acting on water that shape it into the forms that we see, and that there is no inherent property of water or law of physics demanding water lie flat or level. Or perhaps they simply have worse perceptual abilties than the rest of us who can obviously see the waters here curving.

Image Credit: Pixabay

And in another article, we'll discuss how tides are curved water. Even flat earthers can't deny the existence of tides! However, in one way they are right. Water IS level. But they simply do not understand what that means. We'll show you why flat earthers are right (in a way) that water is level. Because water is (somewhat) level, they are admitting it, without understanding what they are saying, that we live on a sphere!

Denial and Circular Reasoning

Flat earthers not only believe the earth is flat, but they answer the age-old question of why no one falls off the edge through the invention of a 60,000 mile ice wall that encircles the entire planet. I've Debunked the Flat Earth Ice Wall, but in order to maintain their claim that the earth cannot be a sphere, they also reject the existence of gravity, and claim that the waters of the earth are held in by the 'container' of this giant ice wall and not because of gravity.

While it eludes them that life on a flat plane without gravity would be a very different world than we live on now, that is a topic for another day. In any case, they make an argument of incredulity combined with circular reasoning that since there is no gravity, and water always lies level because it looks level, then we cannot live on a spinning ball! Voila, two fallacies in one that allow them to confirm their bias!

Level is a Relative Term

One of the characteristics of flat earthers is that they simply do not understand the concept of fact checking. They repeat what they hear on YouTube videos and simply do not understand the concepts they are repeating. Case in point is the word 'level'. By demanding that water is level, they are actually admitting the earth is a sphere without knowing it! Let me explain.

Image Credit: mine

Most people are familiar with a hardware store level with the bubble in a bit of water. But when the bubble is in the middle and we say that something is level, what does that actually mean? Level is a relative term that must be level to something. It's not simply level to itself, and it's obviously not level to the roof or the wall or the floor, because you could put up a perfectly level picture in a house that is on a slope and the picture would not be level to the slope of the ground, but something else.

Image Credit: Pixabay

In the image above, the room is evenly spaced to all of the other components in the room. It LOOKS level to itself, and because of the slope you are on looking at it, the room actually looks perfectly normal and level to you as well. So, why does the guy have to stand sideways in a room that looks perfectly level from your perspective?

What is the Reference Point for a Level?

I hope I've made it clear that a level has to have a reference point. So, what is the reference point for 'level' on the earth? It is the center of the earth. The mass of the earth exerts a force pulling everything on the planet down towards the center off the mass. Since this force is measurable, we know that it's not exactly the same everywhere on earth, but from these measurements, scientists create a rough outline of the earth based on it's gravitational pull.

Image credit: NOAA

This rough outline of the surface of the earth that corresponds with the gravitational pull is called the 'geoid', and it's shown in the image above. Level is defined as being perpendicular to the direction of gravity on the geoid, just as altitude is a function of the height above this geoid (or more specifically the ellipsoid, which is very closely related to the geoid).

“The surface that is everywhere perpendicular to the direction of
gravity (an "equipotential surface") and that on average coincides
with mean sea level in the oceans is called the geoid.”
From Directional Drilling and Earth Curvature

Yes, it's Gravitay. Deal with it.

This is where flat earthers start jumping up and down, turning red in the face, and telling you that if you believe in gravity, then you must also believe in Santa and unicorns. They simply cannot understand (or choose not to so they can confirm their bias) that the pull of gravity towards the center of the earth is what makes things level. We already showed that water's ability to curve is simply dependent upon the forces that are acting upon it, and since gravity pulls everything towards the center of the earth, the concept of level means that water can and does curve and stick to a spinning ball.

Image credit: it's a meme

Gravity is the reason why a bubble in a level is not level to the ground, per se, but to the center of the earth. If this were not true, there would be no reference point for the bubble in the level. That is why the guy in the photo is standing crooked in a room that looks perfectly level. He's being pulled towards the center of the earth. That is why, when we fall, we fall towards the earth and not towards the mythical dome in the sky, or the elusive ice wall.

Original Image Credit: Pixabay

This is how you can stump a flat earther; just ask them why we fall towards the earth and not towards something else, and why it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. They will usually answer something like, "Because that is just how it works". But there has to be a REASON, some force, that explains why we fall towards the earth, and why the bubble in a level is not in the center if you are standing on a hill with the level parallel to the ground. The force that does this is gravity.

They will then tell you that you are spouting pseudoscience because science demand that things be OBSERVABLE and measurable. However, we can both measure gravity and observe the results of it just in the same way we cannot see magnetism or electricity, but we can measure them and see the effects of these phenomenon.

Flat earthers have no problem accepting magnetism and electricity as science. In fact, one of their alternate explanations for gravity is the unobservable force of magnetism! They have no problem accepting invisible forces proven to exist by science, they only have a problem accepting the invisible force called gravity because it's required for the ball earth to exist, and it's easier to simply deny gravity exists than to prove their own model; a model that is impossible in dozens of easily provable ways, and that has been scientifically falsified for over a thousand years.

Local Flatness

It still might be counterintuitive that something can be level on a sphere, but that is exactly how it works in reality. I discuss this in the article If We Live on a Sphere, Why Does the Earth Look So Flat?.

The take-away concept from that article is something called 'local flatness' where, when you are on a big enough sphere, such as the earth, each small section of that earth will seem flat. There is curvature, it's just too small for the human eye to detect. Even at altitudes as high as 100 miles, the curvature is so small that it's incredibly hard to detect without measuring the images of it carefully.

Image credit: It's a meme

This geoid is a universal reference point used by thousands of scientists around the world, and anyone can access the Raw Open Source Geoid Data. There are many studies, such as this one entitled Modelling the salar de Uyuni, Bolivia as an equipotential surface of Earth's gravity field, that use this geoid data for research. Check out the name of the study again, as it's worth rereading. An equipotential surface of the Earth's gravity field? It just means that the Uyuni salt flats are really really flat... relative to the geoid (Travel tip: they are also worth putting on your bucket list. I've been there and they are mind-blowing!).

Because this geoid data is open source, if you still do not believe this is the reality of our earth, you could download the files, download an app on your phone that detects gravity, and do 'rough' measurements of gravity yourself (the apps still have a larger error rate than more sophisticated measuring devices) to see if the NOAA measurements are in line with your own measurements. While the world might seem flat to our senses, it's simply not. And again, yes, water is (mostly) level... because we live on a sphere.

Thanks for your support. Please upvote, resteem, and comment to keep supporting sanity and reason to combat this insane flat earth phenomenon.