All of these processes can deform the Earth’s crust by the order of millimeters to a few dozen centimeters daily and by much larger amounts over geologic times.

Additionally these bumps change overtime due to the movement of continental plates, the changing weight of the oceans, lakes, ice masses, and atmosphere, and the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. The Earth is an oblate spheroid, but the southern hemisphere is wider than the northern hemisphere giving the Earth a bit of a pear shape.įine, so the Earth is an oblate spheroid: false, the Earth is a pear-shaped, oblate spheroid: true, right?Īctually, even this is false! The Earth’s mass is not distributed evenly across the planet, and the greater the mass, the greater the gravitational force, which leads to the creations of bumps in the Earth’s crust. OK, so, the Earth is round: false, the Earth is an oblate spheroid: true, right? So, the Earth is flat: false, the Earth is round: true right?Īctually, the Earth is not round! As Isaac Newton proposed and was later found to be correct, the Earth, due to its rotation, is an “oblate spheroid”, which means it is flater at the poles and bulging at the equator (the distance from the Earth’s center to sea level is 13 miles longer at the equator). The Earth is round and we know that for a fact nowadays. For people in antiquity living in a flat place like the plains or a desert it probably made sense to think this, but eventually the ancients figured out that the Earth was not flat. For this purpose I will use an example.Ĭonsider the idea that the Earth is flat. I want to argue that this absolute truth notion is unsatisfactory and impractical at addressing the worthiness of scientific theories. We will call this notion the “absolute truth”.

For them things can either be true or false, because that which is false cannot be true, and that which is true cannot be false. Most people hold a “binary” notion of the truth.

The earth is neither round or flat