Empirical Earth · Test It Yourself

The laser across the water — what the beam can and cannot settle

The claim

“We shone a laser across miles of open water and it hit the target at the same height it left, with none of the drop a globe requires. The water is flat.”

What is measured

At ten kilometers a handheld laser beam is wider than the curvature drop it is meant to measure, so hitting the target proves nothing either way. The same experiment done with survey instruments, many targets and refraction solved from the data returns a sphere of about 6,371 km.

What would show this is wrong

Falsifiable by a laser test that reports its beam divergence, its launch and target heights, the distance, and the height of the beam center on arrival, and finds the drop absent with a residual smaller than the predicted curvature. The published tests that report those numbers find the drop.

Sources

  1. Terrestrial refraction & looming (long-distance sightings). Over water only a tall object’s top clears the horizon while its base is hidden by curvature; dramatic full-skyline views (e.g. Ch link
  2. Power lines over Lake Pontchartrain. A ~16-mile straight line of identical, evenly spaced transmission towers; photographed end-on with a telephoto, the bases of distant towers drop behind t link
  3. Lake Pontchartrain power-line geometry. A ~16-mile straight run of equal-height transmission towers ~287 m apart; photographed by “Soundly” (from June 2017) with a ~480 mm-equivalent telepho link
The full entry, with the working →

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