If the World is Round....

Imagine a "point" in the center of the earth...and a line down to that point for each item on the earth as it accelerates down toward that singular point.

Simply put, They are!

It's the way we are built.

That's why our feet are on the bottom.

No, the world is not round. This implies the world is two dimensional, flat.

The earth is a sphere.

Take a basketball (or similar size) in hand, stand a figure (Barbie, G.I. Joe, Beanie-Baby...) on the top of the ball. Now, hold feet of figure against ball and rotate so figure is not quite upside down, maybe a 45 degree angle or so from horizontal. Original position, figure is on the North pole; second position, figure is in Oceania.

From the head to the feet a line can be drawn that will intersect the center of the earth.

This, unlike many of the fine products from LynDoor Industries, works anywhere on the surface of the planet. Heck, this even works on other planets!

Extra credit: Why is a standard desk globe in Australia, NZ, South Africa, southern South America, and McMurdo Station oriented with the north pole at the top? Why not South pole on top? Easier for them to use it, better represents their general view of the orientation of things. Upside down maps exist, how about globes?

Picture yourself as loosely woven lint, and there's a hole in the center of the Earth that is sucking air in at a tremendous speed and expelling it to another dimension...Now picture that air getting thicker and thicker, the thickness of which is determined by the mass of the Planet...The closer you get to the center of the Planet the more fierce the flow becomes....There is nothing quite like gravity, it's invisible and exudes a force only on matter.....It's like a giant powerful invisible magnet and all matter is ferric material...

You have just entered The Twilight Zone.

OK Einstein, what happens at the center of the Earth?

The "moment of weightlessness" as depicted in movie "TOTAL RECALL" when everybody starts floating before crashing back down upon the floors.

There's a hole which is the entrance to a wormhole that leads to the center of the universe....HA!

The earth's a ball, we're all attracted to the center of it...

If you are standing upright at noon, a person on the other side of the earth would be in nighttime and have his feet toward the sun.

Stop,, yer' makin' me dizzy.....

Your not attracted to the center rather being pushed by space time.

You seem to be implying a lack of space time where matter exists.... otherwise it would be pushing equally from all directions.

Do you imagine space time is totally excluded by the presence of matter, or partially depending on the density of matter?

Realitave.....there is space in matter.

Well, if there is no lack of space in matter, then the observations of gravity are not satisfactory described by saying (paraphrasing...don't want to go back and look) 'mass isn't attracting, space is pushing'.

"Space time" is pushing. Space has matter in it.

You do realize that 'space time' is comprised largely of 'space", right?

Wait, is this some sort of excercize wherein you are practiicing extemporaneous commentary devoid of understanding yet repleat with buzzwords?

Bot

Space time is curved, possibly back on itself, and spheres and vortexes prevail. Spirals, spheres in space time, no squares......except for Borg.

How fast would the earth have to spin before you would fly into orbit?

Back of my envelope suggests a rotational period of about 5000 seconds for "weightlessness". Any more offers, anyone?

If "things" spin fast enough, they are no longer "they", and become quantum.

Sounds like your understanding of 'quantum is not a generally accepted standard.

Do you think that the smaller you get the faster you can spin?

Do you find the less meaningful the thought, the more quickly you can spit them?

Hum.....are you the "anonomus" poster? I'll be gentle.

What happened to the 'Not for Deniers' thread?

Deep state, much?

Be me, next.

Alls well, looks like Stuart just got banned (w/o notice) from 'Not for Deniers' thread for suggesting free patents for inventors of AGW / anti CO2 solutions. Actually, what I did mean was patents without bankruptcy.

If anyone could see if my posts are still there (I see the thread is still active ;-) would be grateful for any screenshots to stuart21@gmail.com

TIA!

Anonymous I am not. Neither am I 'anonomus', at least I have not claimed to be such. I have no idea what 'anonomus' actually is, so beyond knowing I have not claimed to be such I cannot definitively rule out being such.

Oops.....I guess spelling is "less meaningful" to me. Maybe "meaningful" is somewhere between "less" and "more" .

Spelling isn't all that important. I wouldn't have mentioned it, except you put it in quotation marks. At first I thought you were pointing out a misspelling I had made, but after reviewing I decided it was a reference to a source of which I was unaware.

Simplistically: escape velocity is about 25,000 miles an hour and the speed at the equator is about 1000 miles an hour, so, if a day was reduced to just less than an hour you'd fly off.

If I kept very still, why would gravitational attraction alone not keep me on the surface ?

Every single thing is moving through space time, if you were "still" you would explode like in the big bang.

Exploding doesn't seem very still at all.

Very still in what frame of reference?

If the past, present, and future, are just an illusion, what reference to you pick? Since we're moving among the speed of light, how does mass relate to wave lengths. Does a mirror absorb the speed of light?

The greater scheme of things ? Nah, that's quite a good answer you give, but you know what I'm getting at - that whole gravitational attraction thing. If my deluded ego had mass, surely I would remain stuck to Earth if it stopped spinning ? I could argue that the Earth is stuck to me, but that would be disingenuous.

Quite an interesting insight , and for me it goes back to relative position. You can always add 1 to a number, and always take half of something. So if we're always getting bigger... and..... smaller every single thing is forever "traveling somewhere" . To me "god" and the human mind is the ultimate explorer.

It's entirely possible to argue that Earth is stationary and that the universe moves around it. As mentioned by several people, it's all about frame of reference.

Maybe the "singularity" ( sp) was stationary, and ever sense, well...........in the beginning it was "good". And chaos afterwards.

Ever since.....

Chaos will always win, it's better organized. (OK, I nicked that from English Rose).

Can somebody explain why Amundsen/Scott did not fly off at the Pole ? After all, they would have just been turning around on the spot with no force throwing them into space.

Jordan Peterson has a great concept about dealing with chaos, the dragon.

Did he nick that from Plato's Cave ?

Sounds more like Plato's Retreat.

I actually watched that on YouTube.

It's pretty good. And, it's not just about dealing with chaos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QtOWpV8d_0

No it's not.

That only counts as a rebuttal. For a full-on argument, refer to the post again.

OK, technically correct - 'you can argue'

But only if you are as divorced from reality as some of our leaders -

I offer a subtle observation, nothing is stationary. For something to be truly stationary requires an implied and therefore ill defined absolute frame of reference.

No absolute frame of reference exists. I believe this is a corollary of Newton's third law of motion once one adds the perspective of three or more bodies interacting in motion. If there's anything I've learned in life, it is that in all things there are always more than three things in motion.

I could do the divorced from reality bit (to about 50% of requirment), but I'd be hard pressed to match the corruption levels that seems to be a needed.

Sorry, but I can't get it through my thick head that someone on the opposite side of the globe is upside down relative to my position.

In space, there is no up and down...You only have a sense of up and down because you were born, raised and lived, in a gravity environment....Then again, you wouldn't exist without gravity...So you live in a very rare place, the surface of a planet...and a planet with just the right mass that allowed life to evolve and you to exist...and the perfect distance from a star...You exist in the only spot you could survive in, for more miles than you could travel in ten thousand years in any direction...

Imagine this: You're right-side-up, as you are, where you are. On the exact opposite side of the world, so is somebody else. If both of you sunk to the center of the earth, you'd be "standing" on each other's feet. Relative to the center of gravity, you're both right-side-up. But relative to each other, you're both up-side-down (to each other).

...You may as well put them at the North and South poles so they are staring at each other in the opposite direction while seeing nobody!?!? get it

<...why someone say in Australia is not standing upside down in relation to...standing rightside up here in the U.S....>

Ahem. Um, er, it is likely that there is someone in Australia thinking quite the opposite.

Yes...Everything here looks the right way around.

It's all about perspective:

Ah, ok, that's better...

As of yet, no one has found a sign anywhere on the earth saying: "Other Side Up" (wink,wink).

How about 'north in the middle'?

Poor New Zealand ... all alone.

North Island & South Island, divorced from their 'West Island'

Poor Americas. All alone...

You seem to have a preferred frame of reference.

It looks like there's no Arctic sea ice in this animation. I wonder why?

Finally! Somebody got it right!

& a pom, at that! (Should the p in pom be capitalized?)

I dub thee Sir PW!

Gravity is, of course, the issue. Do astronauts in the ISS know where up and down are?

"... of course, the issue. Do astronauts in the ISS know where up and down are? ..."

Your question isn't as prompting of insight as your style suggest you thought it would be. Are you suggesting the ISS exists in an absence of gavity?

Also, knowledge of and ability to directly sense are distinct. Close your eyes and decide whether you still know the difference between blue and yellow.

Stephen Hawking reportedly replied to a question about what happened before 'big-bang' as meaningless. Akin to asking what land lay South of the South Pole.

I'm probably wrong, but if ET ever arrived he/she/it would have no idea of directions unless given a frame of reference (ie examples marked on a sphere). Up/down, East/West are just conventions that us earthlings use. Even then we are not consistent.

Humans lost their sense of direction a long long time ago, now only migrating animals and birds and butterflies, bees, have a "true" sense. Maybe ET is watching us bump into each other.

"I understand that gravity keeps us on the ground in an upright position."

Gravity keeps us on the ground, but, it's a fantastic combination of skills and mechanics which keeps us upright. Try it after about ten pints strong beer.

"why someone say in Australia is NOT standing upside down in relation to me standing rightside up here in the U.S."

That's just it: they ARE standing upside downish relative to your frame of reference.

By the way: posting anonymously wouldn't stop us inferring anything about you apart from your identity. (Notice I said wouldn't: it doesn't mean I have.)

Sideways gravity....

But they ARE UPSIDE DOWN relative to you. That's why it swirls COUNTERCLOCKWISE there (or widdershins if you must). It's the price they pay for not living on the right side of the world.

If the world were flat cats would have pushed everything off the edge many year ago.

to the AOP..

It's all about the gravitational center of an object in space.

The sun has a lot of gravitation pull towards it's center, but (aside from the obvious) there is no solid surface to try the balancing act known as standing.

If you were free floating in space you would have a small gravitation center that microscopic versions of yourself could stand on.

Gravity? What's gravity?

The gravity of the situation of course.

No matter where we're standing, each of us has an individual vertical axis which is parallel to the direction of gravity at the particular point we each happen to be standing on, at the particular point in time, and perpendicular to the surface of the idealised oblate spheroid that officially represents the Earth's surface...

...and, due to gravitational anomalies, our personal vertical axes do not all point to exactly to the physical center of said spheroid...

... but, relatively speaking, any two of us, standing at exactly opposite points on the surface of said spheriod will seem to be standing upside-down in reference to each other...

I'm sorry, but it is something I just can't comprehend. Maybe a kid in middle school might be able to explain it to me.

Look at Rixter's picture in reply #6.

Should get you thinking the right way.

The key to most problems of understanding, is realizing that reference-points are mostly arbitrary. If you can easily shift your view-point from one reference-point to another, then you'd be able to understand the "weirdness" of different views. When talking to someone else, it's best to ensure that both of you are using the same point-of-reference, instead of just assuming you are. Then, Relativity becomes a completely different (interesting) animal.

^{you should reveal yourself.......this is something we all know. Don't be embarrassed. And the Aussies stand proud and never upside down.}