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12th April 2023
09:40am BST
A man who believes the world is flat has gone viral for trying to prove it, sinking $20,000 (£16,000) into the experiment that ultimately proved he was wrong.
The Flat Earther, Bob Knodel, hosts a YouTube channel dedicated to the conspiracy theory that the Earth is flat.
A 2019 survey revealed three per cent of Brits believe the Earth is flat. According to a Scientific America article form 2018, 66 per cent of millennials believe the Earth is round.
There is no evidence to suggest the Earth is flat, but in an attempt to prove it, Knodel spent $20,000 on a laser gyroscope which he hoped would help prove the Earth does not rotate.
Knodel was featured in the 2018 Netflix documentary Behind the Curve where the experiment, unfortunately for Knodel, disproved the hypothesis he was hoping to prove.
In it, he said: “What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15-degree per hour drift.
“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that's kind of a problem.’
“We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”
Knodel continued, telling another Flat Earther: “We don't want to blow this, you know? When you've got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.
“If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential.”
Knodel went viral when the documentary came out, but thanks to the internet, the clip, much like the Earth, keeps spinning, going viral over and again.
The documentary also showed a Flat Earther conducting an experiment in which torch light was shined through holes which once again accidentally proved that our planet is round.
In one Instagram post about the story, one commenter wrote: "My all-time favourite about this is when the Flat Earth Society posted a comment that, 'The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe'."
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