The Greatest Laser Experiment In History - FECORE

[Dr. Zack]

Earth is said to be a sphere with a circumference of 25,000 miles, or 40,000 km, therefore it has to have a curvature of about 8 inches per mile squared. Can we observe or verify this?  
 
We are taught about the ancient observations like a sailing boat going over the horizon and the measurements of Eratosthenes. They are all falsified by our current observations and better understanding of the optical effects of the atmosphere. But how can we really measure the curvature of Earth in the 21^st century?  

FECORE has established the Terrestrial Laser Targeting method, or “TLT method” for short, to measure the geopotential surface of the Earth. Geopotential means the shape that the ocean surface takes under the influence of gravity.  

With the TLT method, you can accurately verify or falsify the curved surface defined by the WGS84 geoid model on large bodies of water. 

This is what FECORE did to measure the curvature of the Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsSanuUNygI

Please, watch the entire video and let's discuss it here. 

Edited May 3, 2021 by Dr. Zack
Forgot to add links

[zapatos]

No one here is likely to watch an entire hour long video on the chance it may be interesting enough to discuss.

Can you summarize the video for us?

[studiot]

Please, Please, Please

Not another Flat Earther ?

Does anyone remember the one from Lake Balaton (Hungary) ?

[Dr. Zack]

2 minutes ago, zapatos said:

No one here is likely to watch an entire hour long video on the chance it may be interesting enough to discuss.

Can you summarize the video for us?

Yes sure, here is a link to a PDF with all the DATA, but this is something you may wanna see with your eyes to understand it better.
https://pdf.ac/6FFHm

Just now, studiot said:

Please, Please, Please

Not another Flat Earther ?

Does anyone remember the one from Lake Balaton (Hungary) ?

Very bad start. I thought this was a science forum. It doesn't look like it. 

[ALine]

@Dr.Zack Are you sharing this because you are interested in the subject of earths curvature and wanted to discuss you findings on a means of finding it or are you placing into question the fact that the earth has a curve and is overall not flat?

[zapatos]

41 minutes ago, Dr. Zack said:

Yes sure, here is a link to a PDF with all the DATA, but this is something you may wanna see with your eyes to understand it better.
https://pdf.ac/6FFHm

I was hoping for a summary from you, perhaps a paragraph or two describing why this is significant.

[swansont]

1 hour ago, Dr. Zack said:

Earth is said to be a sphere with a circumference of 25,000 miles, or 40,000 km,

Said to be?

1 hour ago, Dr. Zack said:

therefore it has to have a curvature of about 8 inches per mile squared. 

Nonsense. What if the area I take is 0.01 miles wide by 100 miles long - does it still have 8 inches of curvature?

1 hour ago, Dr. Zack said:

Please, watch the entire video and let's discuss it here. 

Rules say you post the info for discussion, as nobody is required to watch a video in order to participate 

[Area54]

40 minutes ago, Dr. Zack said:

Very bad start. I thought this was a science forum. It doesn't look like it. 

I agree it is a very bad start, but the bad start is yours. Here are principle problems with your opening post:

• You have taken no time to familiarise yourself with the forum style. Had you done so you would have recognised the suspicion with which videos are provisionally regarded. Science is best presented in refereed papers, not videos. I think there is even a forum rule about posting videos without a clear summary of contents.
• You failed to post such a summary.
• You failed to indicate what exactly you wished to discuss.
• You have failed to make it clear what your position on Flat Earth thinking is. You OP is ambiguous in this regard.

With that in mind, why don't you give it another go, since you may very well have something well worth discussing. I'd be interested to learn what that is, without first having to invest time in watching a video sans summary.

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, studiot said:

Please, Please, Please

Not another Flat Earther ?

Does anyone remember the one from Lake Balaton (Hungary) ?

It's the same group, by the look of it, including some person called Bob Knodel. They seem to have a glossy website called FECORE on which various "projects" are described, connected with investigating the curvature of the Earth. Knodel was I think involved in the Lake Balaton caper.   

But, be that as it may, I have my own evidence the Earth is flat. If it were round, people in New Zealand would be upside down. Well, I've been there, and I can tell you they are the right way up. So there. 

 

Edited May 3, 2021 by exchemist

[studiot]

13 minutes ago, exchemist said:

It's the same group of nutters, by the look of it, including some wacko called Bob Knodel. They seem to have a glossy website called FECORE on which various "projects" are described, connected with investigating the curvature of the Earth. Knodel was I think involved in the Lake Balaton caper.   

But, be that as it may, I have my own evidence the Earth is flat. If it were round, people in New Zealand would be upside down. Well, I've been there, and I can tell you they are the right way up. So there. 

 

Thanks for the comment

I you want a laugh look at the lengths we went to to try to engage with the Balaton guy (Sandor Szekely) and his laser video. Mercifully this vid was rather shorter than 1 hour.

The attempts at the mathematics of the geoid

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/98386-laser-curvature-test-on-lake-balaton/comments?ct=1620073192

 

2 hours ago, Dr. Zack said:

With the TLT method, you can accurately verify or falsify the curved surface defined by the WGS84 geoid model on large bodies of water. 

The last lot of 'failed mathematics' in relation to the geoid spawned another thread all by itself.

I look forward to you 'expert' maths in relation to this.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/98891-questions-about-the-geoid-split-from-lake-balaton-thread/page/2/?tab=comments

 

Edited May 3, 2021 by studiot

[beecee]

2 hours ago, Dr. Zack said:

Earth is said to be a sphere with a circumference of 25,000 miles, or 40,000 km,

The Earth IS a sphere, or more correctly, an oblate spheroid due to its rotation. There is absolutely no evidence to indicate otherwise and plenty of evidence to support the "oblate spheroid" fact.

No, I didn't watch your video.

[exchemist]

33 minutes ago, studiot said:

Thanks for the comment

I you want a laugh look at the lengths we went to to try to engage with the Balaton guy (Sandor Szekely) and his laser video. Mercifully this vid was rather shorter than 1 hour.

The attempts at the mathematics of the geoid

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/98386-laser-curvature-test-on-lake-balaton/comments?ct=1620073192

 

The last lot of 'failed mathematics' in relation to the geoid spawned another thread all by itself.

I look forward to you 'expert' maths in relation to this.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/98891-questions-about-the-geoid-split-from-lake-balaton-thread/page/2/?tab=comments

 

Hmm, I see.

In that case we may want to be careful how responses are dealt with, so as not to provide, inadvertently, ammunition for a disinformation video later, as apparently happened last time. 

Edited May 3, 2021 by exchemist

[John Cuthber]

4 hours ago, Dr. Zack said:

watch the entire video and let's discuss it here. 

I watched the first 20 minutes, at which point they said something that's plainly wrong (so I stopped watching).

 

I will try to dig out an interesting reference from Daedalus about it.

 

[sandor]

15 hours ago, zapatos said:

I was hoping for a summary from you, perhaps a paragraph or two describing why this is significant.

We have done 7 curvature experiments on lake Balaton (Hungary) and lake Ijssel (Neatherlands), and our results do not conform with the WGS84 model.

We developed a Terrestrial Laser Targeting (TLT) method to make long range precise targeting and measurements possible. We talk about this method in the video, and the pdf document as well.

The expected target hidden hight is never obcured in any of these long range 12 to 40km (upto 25 miles) measurements.

Refraction calculations, as well as ellipsoid, MSL and geoidundulation are presented in the pdf document.

We would like to discuss this topic and hear your opinions.

15 hours ago, swansont said:

Nonsense. What if the area I take is 0.01 miles wide by 100 miles long - does it still have 8 inches of curvature?

Yes it will have the very same curvature in any direction on a ball.

Width is not a factor here, as curvature calculation is not for an area, but for a line between 2 points. A 100 mile long line will have 6667 feet of curvature in any direction regardless of position.

We have done all ellipsoid, MSL and geoidundulation calculations in the pdf and showed, that all the corrections are negligable in our case of curvature measurement.

[uncool]

15 hours ago, swansont said:

Nonsense. What if the area I take is 0.01 miles wide by 100 miles long - does it still have 8 inches of curvature?

Um. What?

Don't get me wrong, I think the OP is wrong, but this almost sounds like the objection to acceleration in the form of meters per seconds squared because there's no such thing as a square second. "8 inches per miles squared" just means that each mile, the rate at which the Earth "drops away" changes by 8 inches per mile (using an approximation where the surface looks like a parabola).

The units of curvature are inverse distance, and 8 inches/miles^2 is inverse distance.

[swansont]

2 minutes ago, uncool said:

Um. What?

Don't get me wrong, I think the OP is wrong, but this almost sounds like the objection to acceleration in the form of meters per seconds squared because there's no such thing as a square second. "8 inches per miles squared" just means that each mile, the rate at which the Earth "drops away" changes by 8 inches per mile (using an approximation where the surface looks like a parabola).

The units of curvature are inverse distance, and 8 inches/miles^2 is inverse distance.

Ah, of course.

(I took that as square mile, not mile squared. Stupid brain)

[sandor]

13 hours ago, John Cuthber said:

I watched the first 20 minutes, at which point they said something that's plainly wrong (so I stopped watching).

That's what we're here for, to discuss what you disagree with.

Please tell what exactly that is.

[uncool]

That said, curvature of a (near-)circle is supposed to be 1/radius, which in the case of the Earth is (if I haven't made a mistake) 16 in/mi^2.

I'm guessing that the source thinks that the deviation from flat is supposed to be curvature*distance^2, rather than half that (similar to how the displacement after constant acceleration from a standstill is not a*t^2, but (1/2) a*t^2).

Edited May 4, 2021 by uncool

[studiot]

22 minutes ago, uncool said:

That said, curvature of a (near-)circle is supposed to be 1/radius, which in the case of the Earth is (if I haven't made a mistake) 16 in/mi^2.

I'm guessing that the source thinks that the deviation from flat is supposed to be curvature*distance^2, rather than half that (similar to how the displacement after constant acceleration from a standstill is not a*t^2, but (1/2) a*t^2).

The standard surveying (perpendicular) offset of a circular curve from its tangent point with a staight line is

[math]\frac{{{{\left( {distance\;along\;straight} \right)}^2}}}{{2*Radius}}[/math]

This formula is developed by truncating a Maclaurin/Taylor expansion of the geometry.

[sandor]

15 hours ago, studiot said:

Balaton guy (Sandor Szekely) and his laser video

Hello Studiot and everyone else I know.

I'm Sandor Szekely, but with a new account as I could not recover the old one.

The supposed rate of curvature is 8 inches per mile squared. But most important is the target hidden height calculations for the measurement distances. Upto 98% of the globe model curvature is missing in these measurement observations.

[John Cuthber]

46 minutes ago, sandor said:

That's what we're here for, to discuss what you disagree with.

Please tell what exactly that is.

As I said, I'm trying to track down a reference from this
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Inventions_of_Daedalus/0Xt2QgAACAAJ?hl=en

What I disagree with is the idea that they think it is appropriate to publish stuff that is obviously wrong.

The essence of the point is simple.
As they say, a alight beam will bend towards a "denser" medium (one with a higher refractive index).

 

Imagine a beam of light shining horizontally  as in their experiment.

Eventually, if it didn't hit anything, it would go over the horizon and into space, But clearly "space"  has a much lower density.

So the light beam is bent towards the denser medium, i.e. the beam bends downwards.

It's not a big effect, but nor is the curvature of the Earth.

 

The book includes a couple of interesting  calculations.

One is that, if the earth was a bit smaller, the gravitational gradient would be a bit steeper and the curvature would be a bit more, and light would actually go all round the earth  by refraction.
 
The other is that, if you used a slightly more refractive gas - They suggested sulphur dioxide- the curvature would match that of the earth's surface.

That would mean that light shone into a tube full of SO2 would go round the world.

Now, I recognise that the predicted effect would only completely cancel the effect of the Earth's curvature if the planet was a bit smaller.

But the effect we do get will cancel out most of the curvature.

 

So their insistence on 8 inches per mile squared is simply wrong.

 

And, by now, it's fair to assume they know it.

Incidentally, at about 2 minutes in to the video, they point out that they are a not-for-profit organisation.
That doesn't stop them claiming expenses.

And I guess that's why they are ignoring physics that was widely published decades ago.

 

[sandor]

8 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

Imagine a beam of light shining horizontally  as in their experiment.

Eventually, if it didn't hit anything, it would go over the horizon and into space, But clearly "space"  has a much lower density.

So the light beam is bent towards the denser medium, i.e. the beam bends downwards.

It's not a big effect, but nor is the curvature of the Earth

 I am part of FECORE and this experiment.

It's very important to distinguish between volume density and optical density. For the optical density profile calculation and the direction of light bending, only optical density is important.

In normal conditions - temperature decreasing upwards - the light is bent upwards in levelling refraction (near horizontal measurement), towards the optically more dense colder air.

17 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

That would mean that light shone into a tube full of SO2 would go round the world.

No it wouldn't.

Light bends at the border of mediums with different refractive indexes. Light does not bend in a homogenous medium.

[John Cuthber]

8 minutes ago, sandor said:

It's very important to distinguish between volume density and optical density.

Did you notice that I put the word "denser" in quotes?

9 minutes ago, sandor said:

Light does not bend in a homogenous medium.

And that's the lie: the claim that the air is homogeneous, when we know that it gets less dense as you go up.

Here's the first page of the explanation from the 70s
 

And here's the second page

[studiot]

47 minutes ago, sandor said:

The supposed rate of curvature is 8 inches per mile squared.

What's this nonsense that is confusing everybody ?

 

I already gave the correct formula

Radius of Earth = 3959 miles

So the offset from a circular curve is

[math]\frac{{{{\left( {1mile} \right)}^2}}}{{2*3959}} = \frac{{1*1}}{{2*3959}}miles = \frac{{63360}}{{2*3959}}inches = 8inches[/math]

Miles squared are a figment of someone's misunderstanding.

 

Also what's this greatest laser experiment in history stuff ?

Surely the first experiment to successfully make a working laser was and always will be the greatest ?

 

+1 John, although I fear that level of sophistication may be beyond FECORE

 

Edited May 4, 2021 by studiot

[sandor]

3 minutes ago, studiot said:

So the offset from a circular curve is

(1mile)22∗3959=1∗12∗3959miles=633602∗3959inches=8inches

Miles squared are a figment of sonmeone's misunderstanding

Curvature of a ball is deviating from the level line of the starting position with distance squared. Otherwise it would be a straight line, not a curve!

First mile is 8 inches, than second mile 32 inches, third mile 72 inches and so on.