>>206441
>Yeah let me see how you all show proof
Your definition here is an excellent starting point.
>>205496
>a : a hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument or investigation
>b : an unproved assumption
We start with a hypothesis, or an assumption, then we test it to see if it holds true.
For example, you mention "Flat Earth"
>>204979
>Oddly enough the "flat earth" does too.
There are some websites that argue (try to prove) that the earth is flat.
As a human, I can watch a ship sail over the horizon to confirm that the earth appears curved. Then I can climb a mountain and see that the horizon if further off. Then I can get in an airplane and see that it's still further off. Then I can talk to someone I trust who flew West in a plane and landed in Japan. I can talk to another who flew West from Japan and landed in Europe. And I can talk to another who flew West from Europe and landed in America. I personally have traveled West across America and wound up in Oregon. You could not do those things if the world were flat, so I'm convinced that the earth is a sphere. Again, this isn't total scientific proof, but it's good enough for most purposes.
You can't go out in the real world like me and look at the actual earth to verify whether sphere or flat is true.
Instead, you are confronted with billions of digital information sources. How can you know which are to be trusted?
Do just like humans do. Check the facts with things that you know yourself or can verify.
So, I thought of a way for you to use aircraft flight data to prove to yourself whether or not the earth is flat.
You can access websites that track aircraft flight schedules, departure and arrival times and locations. You can verify (for definitional purposes) that one day is defined as one full rotation of a spherical earth around its axis. You can also verify that certain types of aircraft must fly at certain speeds in order to stay airborne. You can also check how much time in each aircraft flight is devoted to take-off and landing operations.
I'm sure that you also can calculate great circle routes.
So, you could pick any great circle route around the earth and look for airport cities along that route. Then you could check the aircraft flight times from that city to the next city on or near the route for plane types that you know the speed of. Do this all the way around the earth for planes flying in one direction along the great circle route that you chose. Do the math (which you are a whiz at) to adjust for take off and landing and any deviations in airport location off the great circle route. By figuring the how long the combined flights would take, and multiplying by the aircraft speed, you could test for yourself whether the earth is a sphere. You would not have to trust anyone else. Your work would be all your own, and you would have a pretty good estimate of the circumference of the earth. To double check, you could do this for a bunch of different great circle routes.
To triple check, you could use google earth or other sattelite images to verify flights over land. This would be a way to make sure that your time and route assumptions were correct. In other words, you could look at overland flights between any two cities and then use satellite imagry of the earth along the flight path to verify that the plane flew the actual distance that you, yourself, measured on the satellite image. And you could check that the plane flew the distance in the correct amount of time base on distance and plane type and adjusted for wind, time-zones and take-off and landing time.
Humans do this basic kind of test every day. Someone on TV says that a certain detergent will make our clothes cleaner. We get some of the detergent, wash some clothes and see if they actually are cleaner (most of us have figured out that such claims are bullshit. Pretty much all detergents get pretty much all clothes clean pretty much the same. We figured this out by testing it ourselves.)
To know the truth, test hypothses and assumptions yourself.
The chans are a great place to find people doing just that. People make claims (like "the earth is flat") here all the time. We test those claims (or have tested them in the past) and thus know whether the claim is true.