You are right, the earth is flat. Please teach me how I can use the sextant to pass on my new belief to other skeptics.

I think you pulled the distance of the sun out of your ass, yes. I measured the distance of the sun with a ruler, and it said it was 15 inches away from me. I won't explain what I mean, but its 15 inches away, and because of that, the sun is actually a 40 watt LED. The fact that we can measure the power over a square meter of the earth, and that its proportional to the total power emitted over a sphere by calculating using surface areas makes no sense right? Solar panels are a conspiracy.  At this point, we are making vastly different assumptions, so I'd venture to say that 99% of the laws of physics don't exist in the circumstances you are saying exist. I'm not interested in speaking with you, because your assumptions are just too wrong for me to be able to justify. You aren't providing anything to the conversation other than your continued desire to see me go "rope off". I dunno, autoerrotic asphyxiation isn't my bag.

@Joe, ozone aside, the "air" is not a uniform density. If the air is made of oxygen gas, nitrogen gas, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and various other things. Just going by densities, the more dense atoms would separate out and the less dense atoms would form layers above the lighter atoms. Like mixing water and oil.

The "experts" in finances stand to gain by fucking you over. The experts in physics stand to get laughed at if they are unreasonably wrong. Sure, medical knowledge sucked at some point. But after a certain amount of time and experimentation, you can draw conclusions. Antibiotics are better than amputating, our model for gravity is better than assuming that there are invisible gnomes that just like things to be on the ground. Lets call gravity some magical force that I can't describe, but I can predict at any point in the universe. Who cares whether I call it gravity or magic gnomes. As long as its consistent, I can still represent its effects on everything as "g" for gnomes. Im not against seeing proof of everything, but how can I prove observations at the bottom of the ocean without some crazy equipment. Sometimes you need millions of reference points to be able to prove that something is the same at all points. If we are talking exclusively about the physics that works here at the surface of the earth, we are leaving out a lot of variables.

Again, we are working in the wrong direction here. Find proof that something you witness happening doesn't agree with what physics can explain now, and use that as your basis for a required change. If you assume the change in size in sun to prove there is no gravity, you are assuming buoyancy, electricity and magnetism, optics, thermodynamics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and many other disciplines are broken as well. You can't use them in your explanations until you create a new unified model to explain how each thing works.

Well, one example I can think of is Ozone at the top of the atmosphere. It is more dense than oxygen gas, but its still up there. I also ask that you consider the case when there is no air, will everything fall? As I mentioned, our (slightly outdated) idea of gravity as a property of matter, is no more strange than Bill Nye's famous, "inertia is a property of matter." but no one has any problem with inertia. As a final thought, if the density of an object is the reason it falls or floats, why does density not effect the speed at which an object falls due to gravity? Lead is much more dense than a rubber ball, but they both fall at the same speed.

There is also something to note about gravity always only being in the -y direction, pointed towards the center of the earth. If it was just a matter of two objects being more or less dense than one another, there wouldn't be any vectors involved. So instead of 9.80 m/s^2 downward, an object falling at 6.9m/s^2 downward and 6.9m/s^2 to the left or right, would still fit the same scalar requirements for an object to be moving at 9.80m/s^2 since ratios of densities are not vectors. Gas exchange of water might also be something worth looking into. Oxygen on the surface of a lake goes down into the water, if it was just a factor of density, wouldn't the oxygen always rise up above the lake?

All of these ideas can be practically demonstrated, its just a matter of whether you have the equipment and understanding to do it. For example, I couldn't give you a practical way to prove a nuclear theory that requires a particle accelerator, without you having access to a particle accelerator. It seems a little silly to say that you wouldn't believe the concept unless you had a particle accelerator. This goes together with what I'm about to say. Of course I don't mind curiosity, more power to you if you'd like to perform your own experiments to better your own understanding, but why is it not acceptable to give the benefit of the doubt to people with expertise on the matter? (not me) I'm not an expert, someone who is an expert on astrophysics could probably explain gravity in 5 seconds in a way that'd make anyone understand. I don't go to a doctor and refuse to believe in penicillin because its inconceivable to me that mold could treat the clap. There have been guys for hundreds of years who have fought to prove things to themselves and everyone else. All it takes is one case where you point out what they proved was wrong, and you get a sack of money and a noble prize. Not really the authoritative group that stands to gain something by making people believe the earth is round.

Maybe you can clear this one up for me, what is the appeal to thinking there is some sort of conspiracy regarding physics? The whole basis of physics is that its just observing things so many times that you figure out how something works. When someone finds a flaw in physics, there isn't some massive cover up, the person gets a bunch of money, awards, and an equation named after them. I don't really care if you don't trust NASA, but how many space agencies are there?

Anyway, you guys are going about this all wrong. If you are going to propose a completely new theory, you need a uniform set of laws that describes everything that could possibly happen under the new system. If that sounds like a monumental and unfair burden to be placed, it is. I'd recommend going with finding something that isn't accurately described as it is now, and seeing if you can unify a new theory around that. I don't mean introducing some crazy variables, like air being made of lead or the sun being closer than a country across the Atlantic ocean. I mean, find something that you can observe that does not follow the existing law of physics, and use that to prove that theres a problem.

Again, you cannot, because the laws regarding buoyancy fall apart if you take gravity out of the equation. The proof that gravity exists, is that it works at every single point in the universe by the model we have. You cannot support your claim with facts that rely on the things you are trying to disprove. Honestly, I'm not interested in talking with you because you have yet to support any of your claims. I'd love to hear how you can answer why things fall with those three things, but you haven't said how, you just keep repeating yourself without providing any explanation.

I like Joe, being skeptical is great, Joe disagrees with me, but we are able to have a conversation regardless. Just saying, the sky is green, if it wasn't green, there would be balls in the sky, doesn't really help anyone.

I proved Eratosthenes experiment and how it concludes the earth is round. I did not prove how it falls apart in the case of the sun is 15 miles away, because you've given no explanation for why I should assume the sun is 30 feet in the sky. By your logic, I also failed to prove why the earth isn't a triangle.

Science has real answers, just because you can't understand the concepts doesn't make it false. If I don't believe that germs exist because the sun is so close that all of the ultraviolet radiation would kill them, that doesn't mean I won't get a cold. The burden of proof is on you, you have to prove that using only what you believe, you can more accurately model what will happen if we put it to the test.

Let me know what equations you are using, we'll perform the experiment and see the results. We'll then do it a million more times over 400 years, and see if it holds true in all cases. Thats what Physics is.

There is a more complicated answer regarding a mass' tendency to want to move through space time as time increases as measured by an ever increasing global entropy, but thats not super intuitive. Newtonian physics states that all objects have attractive forces towards one another, they are just typically so small that they are insignificant, unless you are talking about masses relative to planets. The Newtonian version of gravity works in all cases that I can think of, except with massively dense objects like black holes.
If the centripetal acceleration of earth was responsible for gravity, it wouldn't explain the gravitational forces felt on the earth by, say the moon for example. Its not very large, but it is at least measurable.

Of course the caveat that comes with that is what I've been saying all along, physics isn't perfect. Newtonian physics got us 99.999% of the way there. Relativity got us 99.999999% of the way there. And there are still some unaccounted for holes in certain problems. The holes aren't large enough to justify a flat earth, but maybe by looking at the holes from a different lens, such as if the earth were flat, you might be able to find some of those missing links.

I'd recommend looking up a relativistic model of gravity, but unless you are good with non euclidean geometry and multivariable calculus, using a fourth or fifth dimension, which isn't super intutitve, you probably won't find the sort of absolute proof that others here are looking for.

Well earth's rotation doesn't cause things to fall, earth is just an inertial reference frame for when that matters. Gravity is described as a force of attraction between any two objects with a distance between them and mass. Your chair is exerting a gravitational force on you, you are exerting a gravitational force on your dining table. As we talked about before, this force can be modeled by the equation F=-GMm/r^2 where G is that tiny constant, and M and m are the masses of the two objects, r is the distance between them. When we talk about gravitational forces, because G is 6.67x10^-11, the calculable force is essentially 0 if the product of your masses aren't on an order of magnitude to make up for multiplying by such a small constant, or if your radius is sufficiently large.

the moon, the sun, all of the other planets in the solar system, halie's comet, that 7-11 down the street, they all exert gravitational forces on you. However, 1) The moon/sun/other planets are far enough away that the force is negligible. The 7-11's mass is small enough that the force is negligible.

I didn't actually know the height you needed to be to witness the curvature of the earth, apparently the answer is just a little over 10km, and you can see it from an airplane on a relatively nice day. Thats just what a google search result yielded, so I wouldn't stake my life on it. But the answer should be easy enough to prove just by taking a look the next time you have a nice flight.

There are a lot of products from nuclear fusion that we get here on earth from the sun. Heat, light, EM and other types of radiation. The reaction on the sun is the same as the fusion reactions that we've created on earth. We can measure the products that are reaching the earth, such as light/heat, radiation/neutrinos, and observe the electromagnetic radiation that causes solar flares and other neat things.

"It's the same basic issue with the pressure gradient.  We know the pressure is there we can test it.  Why is the pressure there?  Can we prove it is the earths spin which allows us to have this pressure with no container?"

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but where is there? We do have a container so to speak. Our container is the atmosphere around the earth. Various forces including gravity keep the atmosphere around the earth.

For the sake of transparency, I'm mostly working off of Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics is accurate enough to launch a space ship, but if you get a room full of physics nerds together, someone will mention that there are other factors in play. Newtonian physics still holds true, it'll get you 99.999% accurate results in almost all cases. When people wondered where the .001% error was coming from, that's when Modern physics with relativity comes into play. I don't mind including that, but it'd take a lot more time than I may need to if we are just talking about observable things.

What is your definition of proof of existence? If we assume that it exists, all things make sense. If we assume that it doesn't exist, nothing that relies on it existing works anymore. I can say that gravity, however you want to define it, will always do the same thing we expect it to. Whether you want to call it gravity or ytivarg, it doesn't matter, it exists because there is no proof that it doesn't exist. Maybe you are right, and what we call gravity is actually some mysterious force + some effect due to ether or whatever, but those components will equal what we consider gravity. So until a more accurate model is found, we'll call it gravity and it'll be an acceleration of 9.80m/s^2 at the sea level.

I can tell you with 100% certainty, that a 32 mile wide thermonuclear reaction 3,000 miles away would destroy the earth, so that is why I don't believe the sun is the size or distance you claim, not because someone told me. If you set up solar panels, you can get an amount of power from them. That power is very closely related to the ~1400w/m^2 that we get from a sun considered 93 million miles away.


My greater point is, if you are going to claim there is no gravity, or that the sun is 3,000 miles away, please explain how that holds true to what we can observe or predict with some sort of consistency. Put the pieces together for us, and if it holds, it holds. Keep in mind, that if you change assumptions about gravity or the distance from the sun, you can't make the same assumptions that the experiments that prove your point still hold true, so make sure you double check that. Describing something as a function of something else that you claim doesn't exist isn't great math.  I can claim the earth is a triangle, because you can go up. But until I unify that theory with proof, theres nothing to talk about.

On a side note, I mean, you could wait 10 years until a trip to space costs the same as a plane ticket to observe for yourself. Or just launch your own weather balloon with a camera for a whopping ~$300 cost.


*edit* Sorry, I didn't ask the real question here. So if gravity doesn't exist, what does?

I'm not denying Einstein, Physics with Relativity included is so incredibly misunderstood, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who truly understands most of it. I certainly do not, and have no intention of trying to correct your mistaken interpretation of what Einstein concluded with my mistaken interpretation. If we can't establish common ground on how satellites work, I don't think we need to debate why their clocks are adjusted to make up for time loss.

As I said, I'm not interested in whos wrong and whos right, so I'm not going to stick around to bicker. I'm interested in interesting thoughts. Someone looking for proof of a mundane thing is great. Making claims and then rather than explaining your claims, trying to pick a fight is boring. Inspiring the idea that the current idea of the geometry of the earth does not allow for "X" situation to hold true, is interesting. If you come up with a way to justify your thoughts, please feel free to share. Even if I think you are mistaken, that doesn't mean there isn't a useful overlooked tidbit in what you say.

Well, you have to be pretty careful with terminology. Gravity is not a force, its an acceleration. There is a force due to gravity however. The simplest way to put it, is that you are constantly radially accelerating towards the center of the earth. The force felt by gravity is measured as weight.

I'm pretty confident I can answer any electricity and magnetism question you can ask, so feel free to propose your theory and what your justification is for it. I'm interested in the connection between buoyancy, coulombs force, and density, and how that can replace gravity.


We don't need to get into anything relativity for the context of this discussion. Dealing with a 99.999% accurate model that don't include vague concepts of time and space are good enough when explaining observable phenomena.

I honestly enjoy this, I feel like its helping my understanding of things a lot. The hardest course I took was a course that was solely dedicated to proofs. The hardest thing to explain is why addition works. Certain things we just kind of take for granted, and when someone asks why? Its hard to answer without assuming that they know or agree with all of the preexisting information that you might consider common sense.

Right, but buoyancy that people refer to on earth is a quantity defined by density, acceleration due to gravity, and displaced volume. You would need some sort of unidirectional acceleration. If you reverse the direction of the cylinder's rotation, I believe that'd change the buoyancy unless theres a term thats squared that makes only the magnitude and not direction relevant.

Care to elaborate? I'd consider myself to have a pretty solid understanding of density, buoyancy, and all things electrical from a modern chemistry and physics standpoint. In the post I made previously about pressure gradients I made a point of mentioning that my definition of "gravitational force" was the thing that kept you down on the planet, just in case there was some conflict with our definitions of gravity. I didn't need it to mean what I'd consider gravity, all that matters is its tendency to decrease the further away from the surface of the earth you get.

A mention though, buoyancy doesn't exist without gravity. And still curious about your justification for the sun being the size and distance you claim it is.

Is it just the numbers used, or the concepts in my statement that are the issue? Like I said, I'm not going out of my way to prove that you are wrong to make you change your mind. I'm interested in what valid points of conflict there are. The question about the sun's angle with respect to refraction was interesting, and I got a lot out of it. So just a reminder, I'm not on some crusade against you.

That said, this is the point where I can't respond any more. Up until this point, we've been able to go back and forth discussing points. You claimed that modern physics could not explain a phenomena. I explained how it could. You then said my explanation isn't valid because the sun is significantly smaller and closer than what I'm assuming. We can't have a discussion if you make claims without your own proof, especially if we are changing multiple variables at the same time. The process of disproving the known, is to find a case where the known doesn't make sense, and you have to reevaluate what is known. What is the case where the sun being 93 million miles does not make all of the pieces fit together?

Claiming that the sun is 3,000 miles away is pretty far fetched, I'd be incredibly interested to hear what your justification is for that. 3,000 miles isn't even the distance across the Atlantic ocean. Can you imagine if there was a sun sized nuclear reaction going on in Europe, what your perspective from the East Coast US would be? I do know a handful of ways to justify the size and distance of the sun, however I can't do that if once I do we are going to disagree over what a joule or heat is.

Correct, snells law states that the refractions are proportional to the ratios of the angle and the index of refractions of the mediums. Air is ~1.3 and a vaccum is ~1, however the important part is that I cannot calculate any difference in the angles of incidence from the sun with a calculator that only goes to 6 decimal places. The order of magnitudes between the distance from the sun to the earth, and between two different places on earth are too different to make any measurable difference.

Draw a right triangle with one leg as 1.489x10^11m as its length in the vertical direction, and any reasonable distance between two cities. The hypotenuse of the triangle will be nearly identical to 1.489x10^11m, and the angle of incidence will be essentially incalculable.

The angle between those cities 100Km apart is 1.16452x10^-8 degrees by my calculation.

Well, I took a minute, and realized that this is actually a pretty easy example to prove, all of the correction factors that I was saying that I couldn't calculate were so infinitesimally small that they don't matter.

The surface to surface distance of the Sun to Earth is 1.496x10^11m. For my "test" wells to the left and right of the well in the center, I placed them 100Km apart (1x10^5m) or about an hour's drive. As we talked about before, while the sun is perpendicular to the earth, the angle of incident is 90 degrees, thats why there is no refraction by the atmosphere. There is a refraction for the cities to the left and right, however its unmeasurably small. In order to get a 1 degree angle of incidence, we'd have to be measuring a city a distance of 2.596x10^9 meters away from the center well. A distance ~65x the circumference of the earth away.  Because of that, the angle of incidence 100 Kilometers away can be expressed as 0.

I've got a picture I drew out for myself while working the problem, but we were making it way more complicated than it needed to be. I can post it if you'd like, but with a triangle with sides 1.489x10^11m and 1x10^5m, you can see it pretty clearly.

So your point is that Neil DeGrasse Tyson's explanation doesn't include how the light is bent because of the index of refraction of the atmosphere? I'm sure it does play a role, how significant that role is I don't know. Much like I was doing earlier, for the sake of explanation to people who haven't spent 8 years researching a particular topic of physics, or to those who don't have 6 hours to hear a lecture, simplifications are used. There are many terms not explained in the video about what is going on when light passes through the atmosphere and shines down a well. I don't think thats being deceptive, thats for the sake of making the concept understandable. Frankly, light confuses the hell out of me, so I can't provide an in depth analysis of what the results you should expect.

My thoughts on the matter:
Does anyone have exact data collected from when this experiment was done? Has it been replicated. All of the explanations and diagrams I see are so heavily rounded that they aren't good for anything besides theory. If you are getting a whole number as a degree, you are shaving off at least 4 significant figures.

I'm not dodging your question, just answering honestly that I don't know. I don't have enough information available to give you a better answer. If I can find some reliable data collected where someone tried this experiment, I can help draw a simple conclusion. The finer details of light are way beyond my understanding, so I may be able to find an answer with a reasonable margin of error, but I wouldn't be able to account for all of the correction factors needed to give you definitive proof. I'm not saying its not out there, just that I'm not qualified to do so.

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth at a single point. Would you mind linking me to the experiment where this one done at different places? If you compare the shadows cast by three separate sticks in different cities, yes you will have to take into account index of refraction as well as the elevation and distance from the earth to the sun at those individual points. That is if those places are far enough apart to make a calculable difference. ~ 100Km for each parallel.

Is this what you are referring to? http://www.k12science.org/noonday/oldbackuppages/cosmos.html

Well, my post doesn't actually have anything to do with gravity. I kept calling it gravity for lack of a better term, but I tried to establish the term "gravity" as the measurable quantity of force that can be observed whenever you try to leave the ground. Whether the finer details of gravity apply or not, the only assumption I made were that if you are on the ground, something keeps you there unless you put effort into overcoming it. I also claimed that "gravity" decreases as you get higher and higher up, and there is a point where that force is zero. There are no arguable concepts there. You can witness those for yourself, and don't need to take anyone's word for it.


I'm not familiar with Eratosthenes experiment, but after a quick search I just found that shadows were measured when the sun was directly overhead near the tropic of cancer on the summer solstice, at noon. If there is something I'm missing let me know. In this case, the angle of incidence will be 0 degrees to normal. The ratio of Sin(incident angle) / Sin(refraction) = N. Sin(incident) = 0 so there will be no change in the path the light takes.

So I had an idea for a pressure gradient explanation, I'm going to describe a void or vacuum as just a space that doesn't contain matter, namely air. Its a very simplified version so its not technically absolutely correct, but I'd have to write a thesis paper if I included all of the thermodynamics of the atmosphere, factored in.

So whether our gravitational model is correct or not, we can agree that there is some sort of attractive force that pulls everything towards the ground. We also know that as you get further away from the earth, that attractive force decreases. Stand on a scale at sea level versus on a mountain, and your weight which is your mass * that gravitational force however you want to describe it, will be lower on top of the mountain.  With that, I make the statement that gravitational force decreases as you get further away from the surface of the earth.

We can observe that as you continue to go up, the gravitational force will continue to decrease. Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. A gravitational force will be 1/X^2 or 1/4th of its original at a distance 2X away. That is a bit harder to allow you to prove to yourself, but it would be possible with a high quality scale and a large enough range in height. Regardless of whether we agree at the rate it drops off at, I think we can agree that at a certain point away from the earth, this force of gravity will be so close to zero, that for all practical purposes, we can call it zero.

I'm neglecting the force of gravity from the moon, the sun, all of the other planets, etc because they are typically minuscule because of how far away they are and that inverse square relationship described a minute ago.  All of the atmospheric gases, go from the surface of the earth up to this point where the force of gravity is holding them down to the planet. Typically its referred to as the Karman line. about 100KM above the earth's surface, but that detail isn't important. Around this point, the force of gravity is equal to zero, gravity cannot keep the gases accelerating down towards the planet any further, at this point. Because there are no forces on the gases, and they aren't accelerating towards or away from the planet, they will kind of stay where they are at.

I'm going to explain mathematically with simple integer values, these are more for concept and comparison rather than stating that you have thousands of KG of air resting on your head. Starting from the beach, you have 100KM of distance between the top of your head and all the way up where air is contained. Air has mass ~1Kg/m^3 so say that the surface area of your head is 1m^2, that means that you have 100Km^3 of air on top of your head. If you took the space escalator and went up 50Km above the earth, you'd now only have 50Km^3 of air on top of your head. If we talk about pressure as force over an area, the force is the weight of the air. If you were to get all of the way up to the top, you'd no longer have any air above your head, and no pressure from that air on you. A vacuum is a space without matter (air in our case) where pressure is 0. So you could say that outside of that distance, there is no more air, and the pressure would be 0. In reality, there are gases that escape the earth's atmosphere and drift off into space, but we are speaking relatively here.

A really good example of this without requiring you to travel 100Km up in the air, is if instead of walking up into the air from the beach, instead you walk under water. With the exact same reasoning as before, but now we consider the amount of water on top of your head. Water's density is 1000Kg/M^3 so 1 Meter under water your massive 1m^2 head would feel 1000Kg of water on top of it. Go down to 10m and you have 10,000 Kg of water on top of your head. The pressure increases as you keep going down, and decreases as you get up onto the land. Now the reason I used an easy but absurd value of having a square meter as the surface area of your head, is because it keeps the math simple, but it also helps with the comparison I'm about to make. Lets say you start from 100m under water. Thats only ~360 feet, nothing crazy like 100KM in the previous example. At 100m under water, you'd have 100m^3 of water on top of your head which is 100,000 KG of water. The pressure is astronomically higher than that of 100m above you at the surface. As you swim up, you would feel a difference of 100,000Kg of weight off of your head. If having 100,000Kg of water on top of you was your normal, then not having that 100,000 Kg on top of you would feel like a vacuum. A good example of this is deep sea fish, a lot of deep sea fish like the blobfish, which have evolved to be able to survive crazy pressures like that collapse when they come to the surface of the water, the same way that a human would in the vacuum of space.

Honestly, the conclusion I drew was accurate for an explanation of the concept, but I didn't account for a lot of things like that the air density decreases as you go up, the water density increases as you go down. Gravity isn't the only thing that keeps the air up or down in the atmosphere, etc. But the quantities aside, the idea that there is more substance above your head the lower down you go is correct. That substance has mass that is pushing down on you, creating atmosphere pressure.

So my only real problem with discussing this sort of topic is exactly this:


The definitive proof was found hundreds of years ago. All of the physics today that we know builds on itself. Humanity started by observing phenomena, and then tried to find relations between causation and reaction, until we were able to predict what would happen in any given circumstance by formulating physics models. The proof that gravity is partially responsible for how water flows, is that a measurable change in gravity will cause a predictable change in that particular behavior 100% of the time. Asking to prove that gravity is responsible would take us through hundreds of hours of derivations and proofs until we got back to the Apple falling on Newton's head. We find flaws in models when a situation arises that can't be described by what we know. Admittedly, that happens relatively frequently, however the changes that do occur don't require us to dismiss gravity's relationship on water, but rather look for previously unnoticed terms that provide a small correction factor. We are working in the wrong direction here, you or anyone else is trying to find a way to make the things that we can observe working 100% of the time as predicted, don't start with, alright prove all of this to me. Rather, find a case where water is not behaving the way it should, and ask, why is this? Maybe its because the earth is a shape other than what we've been assuming.

For example, when you first start learning physics, you learn how objects move when forces are applied to them. You start with a system without friction, and then next lesson you add that friction in. Adding the friction "correction factor" helps to get a more realistic model of how things really work. Now, you add in air resistance, that is another correction factor that makes the model more true to real life. My proof that gravity works the way it does on liquids is that at the moment, as far as I know there aren't any unexplained situations with fluids with relation to gravity (at least not with Newtonian fluids). The last time there was a sizable amount of correction to physics was when Relativity was introduced. Now its like models give 99.999999999999% accurate results, and we are hunting down the fraction of a percent to figure out, oh yeah the light from the sun is producing a measurable amount of force on this ball I'm throwing, neat so thats why my calculation was off by what I thought was a rounding error.



Calculus was invented for Physics. Nearly every math class that you take is just figuring out how some real object is behaving, but they just don't tell you the reason why you are finding an equation. Can I explain to you practically that G = 6.67x10^-^11 m^3/kgs^2 ? Absolutely. If we had a few weeks, some telescopes, calculators, etc. If you have systems of equations, you can solve for unknown variables. The systems of equations are things like the orbit of satellites around the different planets. They are hard to measure, but not impossible.

As you said, just knowing 2x + 2 = 4 isn't very useful. if X equals 1, it could equal 1!, it could equal 1^2, 1^5, 2/2 etc. Each of those numbers would have implications in a real world scenario. if X is some relationship between planets and a combination of variables is what makes up that X = 1, whether its just 1*1 or 2/2 has very different implications. Knowing how something behaves at a single point X is not proof. It has to behave that way when X is any number from negative to positive infinity, as long as that number makes sense. I can't "prove" physically the quantity 6.67x10^-^11 m^3/kgs^2 but I can prove that if we use that constant, and the variables related to it, we can 100% predict how something is going to behave, and then watch it do that. G is used for a lot of things. Off the top of my head, its used for potential energy of falling objects, orbits, forces, etc. If G wasn't 6.67x10^-^11 m^3/kgs^2 then all of the observable phenomena that we can predict with it fall apart.

Light gets super complicated, so I'm going to steer clear of using light for examples regarding earth's properties. I can tell you that if your twin brother is an astronaut and launches off the planet at a speed near the speed of light, when he returns 6 years later, you will be 4 years older than him, but I don't have the means to give you a demonstration.

What I'd recommend doing is looking at classical physics and seeing who first created theories regarding air pressure, gravity, etc. Back before we had fancy electronics, someone got pretty good proof of how these things work with technology that you should have available to you. I am completely on board with people doing whatever experiments that they'd like to prove to themselves whatever they want. I'll let you know if I can think of a good one for air pressure gradients.

I only use USPS since its my favorite branch of government, and they are the only ones who give a damn if your package goes missing. I have things delivered to people all of the time using names that aren't their's. I've sent packages to about 50 different Chiefs, various animals, and a few very smart babies. The only time that you need to show ID via USPS is if you elect to pick up the package from the post office rather than having it delivered. Maybe with registered mail as well, but first class/priority put whatever name you'd like.