Guy Uses Photo Of Basketball To Prove The Earth Is Not Flat

Sadly, although we apparently live in scientifically advanced times, there are still far too many people who refuse to believe the earth is round.

Science and logic are inadequate tools when calming the suspicious minds of flat earthers, who apparently exist in a Tudor England realm of sci-fi conspiracy.

But maybe – just maybe – they can be convinced by the educational powers of a simple basketball?

Find out more about the views of flat-earthers below:

This was the worthy mission undertaken by a 36-year-old software engineer called Jeff, who cleverly used a basketball and a macro lens to simulate the Earth’s curvature.

The smart cookie then snapped some photographs in order to calculate.

Sharing his findings on imgur, Jeff gave the following details of his set-up:

The general setup:
* Basketball.
* Plenty of light.
* Camera on tripod with macro lens (more details next photo).
* IR shutter remote to take pictures without shaking the camera.

Method:
* Used full manual mode on the camera for manual focus control and consistent exposure.
* Tediously positioned the camera and the ball to get the “horizon” in focus at the maximum range of manual focus with the camera at full optical zoom with the macro lens adapter.
* Wait for all shaking to stop, take picture with remote, adjust manual focus, repeat many times to get several images covering the full focus range available.
* Load all images into “Helicon Focus” software for “focus stacking” to produce a final image with a greater range of depth in focus.

Equipment Details:
* Nikon P900 “superzoom” camera. 83x optical zoom, 2000mm focal length equivalent.
* Raynox DCR-150 macro lens. 1.5x magnification, allows camera to focus only on things around 12 cm away, even at full zoom.
* Stack of step down rings to securely/precisely mount the DCR-150 to the camera. 67mm-62mm, 62mm-55mm, 55mm-52mm, 52mm-43mm. The 52-43 ring is “backwards” – mounted inside/under the rest of the stack so that the DCR-150 does not sit very far away from the camera’s lens.
* 49mm lens hood.

The debunker continued to explain:

I used the zetetic method to examine whether a basketball is really a ball, or is it actually flat.

Upon taking a closer look with a macro lens on my Nikon P900, I can only conclude that the surface of a basketball, while bumpy, does not appear to have any curvature.

Therefore, basketballs are flat. Their roundness must be some kind of illusion caused by perspective and mirages.

Check out the image he captured below:

Speaking with Bored Panda, Jeff said:

Looking at my photos, it’s easy to imagine being an incredibly small creature living on the surface of the basketball,

From the perspective of that tiny creature, the ‘horizon’ of the basketball would always look ‘flat’. Using the appearance of the horizon as primary evidence, this creature would likely assume that they are living on a flat surface.

I don’t expect this to change the minds of any entrenched flat earth believers, but I hope that it could help someone that may be susceptible to persuasion by the flat earth arguments.

The few flat earth believers I have interacted with seem to rely heavily on memes as their preferred method of communication, so I wanted to be able to respond with a meme, using their own logic, that points out the absurdity of their logic.

He added:

I would like to clarify, that my photo does not prove the Earth is round,

It only proves in an easy-to-understand way that the surface of a sphere can appear flat.

It proves that the basis of all flat-earthers’ beliefs (the horizon appears flat) is insufficient evidence to determine the shape of the earth.

Will flat earth theorists listen to Jeff’s intelligent explanation? I mean, probably not but this is still an interesting demonstration for the rest of us.

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