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Hippie artifact of the day

For What It's Worth

"For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield, 1967. Added to their eponymous first album after initial release.

Written and hastily recorded after troubles between youth and cops on the Sunset Strip.

Genuine Hippie Sez:

Flat earthers were on my teevee

Flat earthers are wrong.

But I sympathize with them. They are supposed to throw out their lived experience-- it sure doesn't feel like we are on a spinning ball hurdling through space!-- and accept a model of the solar system that says we are on a spinning ball hurdling through space!

And they are right that most people believe the earth is a globe because they were told that as children. And I am with them that we shouldn't believe everything we were told as children. Plenty of Hippies had a "Question Authority" bumper sticker.

Still, there is a reason people began to believe that the earth is a globe: the study of astronomy. People watched the movements of the heavens and created models which would explain those movements, and predict future movements. And when we tried out the solar system model, and went with ellipses instead of circles, boom! It all fit.

Here's the rub: I did not personally watch the heavens and create models, and I have not and will never master the (presumably) complicated math required to understand the proof that the model is right. I don't "know" the earth is a globe; I just believe it is, based on authority. Same as you, unless you watch the heavens and create models and do the math.

You: Oh, but I believe it because astronuats have gone into space and proven it!

Me: So do I! But we're still just believing, not knowing.

The flat earthers are wrong not because they're crazy, but because they lack faith in science!

Where is your Reason now?

(For the record: Not all science is equal. There was no profit motive, no null hypothesis, no selective publication strategies, and no motivated data mining in the observations and calculations that brought us the solar system model.)