Photo: This image provided by NASA Data from six orbits of the Suomi-NPP spacecraft on April 9, 2015. (NASA via AP)
We may be in the year 2022, but the flat Earth vs. round Earth debate still continues and there are some in the hip-hop community who believe the Earth is indeed flat.
Flat-Earth believers feel that the government has been misleading people about the Earth being a sphere– from faking moon landing images to photoshopping satellite photos. There are several people in the hip-hop community who are fervent flat-Earth believers.
Here are five things to know about hip hop and debunking flat Earth fake science.
There are flat-Earth believers all over the world. There’s even an annual Flat Earth International Conference that has taken place in the U.S., Brazil, Britain, and Italy.
Flat-Earthers believe that the Earth is flat, not an orb and that photos of the Earth taken from space have been photoshopped. To account for night and day, most flat-Earthers think the sun moves in circles around the North Pole, with its light acting as a spotlight, according to Physics World.
While flat Earthers’ theories vary, most believe the planet is a circular disk with Antarctica acting as an ice wall barrier around the perimeter so you won’t fall off.
As many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, according to a survey from YouGov, a British international internet-based market research and data analytics firm.
The flat-Earth community has been endorsed by figures including the hip-hop artist B.o.B.
The hip-hop artist B.o.B (real name Bobby Ray Simmons Jr.) is such a staunch flat-Earth believer that in 2017 he started a crowdfunding campaign to launch a satellite in order to prove his theory. He wanted evidence to show that planet Earth is a disc, not a globe. He initially wanted to raise $200,000 before upping the amount to $1 million on GoFundMe.
Known for his hits “Airplanes,” “Nothin’ On You,” and “Strange Clouds,” B.o.B also refers to himself as “Flat Earth Bob.”
In 2016, B.o.B became embroiled in a Twitter back-and-forth with renowned astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
The online spat turned into a rap battle. At first, Tyson explained in a short series of tweets why the Earth was round, CNN reported.
He tweeted:
“Earth’s curve indeed blocks 150 (not 170) ft of Manhattan. But most buildings in midtown are waaay taller than that.”
“Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you’ve never looked up.”
“Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way. No law stops you from regressively basking in it.”
In his last tweet to B.o.B, Tyso tweeted, “Duude — to be clear: Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”
B.o.B came back at Tyson with a song about why the Earth is flat, called “Flatline,” which expanded on the theory, called out Tyson by name. and also name-dropped David Irving, a renowned Holocaust denier.
Hip-hop veteran Lord Jamar said he become a flat-Earther over time. “We are not living on a spinning ball,” he said during an interview with Rah Digga for the RapHitz1.com podcast in 2019.
Lord Jamar said at first he doubted the flat Earth theory and tried to disprove it. “So I started looking at what’s being said, and I started to reflect on my knowledge of what I thought I knew about the globe. I realized I didn’t really know about the globe as I thought I did and that a lot of these concepts were taken at face value,” he said. This was when he said he started to believe flat-Earth doctrine.
The main reason he said he began to doubt that the Earth was round was that “the white man has lied about everything else…so now we are supposed to trust his scientific theories?”
Lord Jamar also had a YouTube discussion with fellow hip-hop artists Reality, Minister Freedom Allah & Tehuti called The Earth Debate which aired on the Killah Priest LIVE channel. They spoke of their belief that the Earth was flat and the theory that the Earth being a globe was part of a conspiracy.
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“Even without the visual confirmation of pictures taken from space, many of the arguments used by flat-Earth proponents can be easily dismissed with trigonometry or basic physical laws,” according to Physics World.
One way to debunk flat-Earth theories is with a Foucault’s pendulum, the device named after the French physicist Léon Foucault. Introduced in 1851, the pendulum was used in the first known experiment to give simple evidence of the Earth’s rotation.
Foucault suspended a 62-pound brass-coated lead bob with a 220-foot wire from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris. A bob is the mass on the end of a pendulum. The pendulum rotated clockwise, along with the Earth’s movements. Still, some flat-Earthers claimed that all Foucault pendulums are fraudulent.
The Coriolis Effect is another phenomenon that proves the Earth is a spinning globe. It makes things like planes or currents of air traveling long distances around the Earth appear to move at a curve and not in a straight line. The Coriolis Effect is named after French mathematician and physicist Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis.
Photo: This image provided by NASA Data from six orbits of the Suomi-NPP spacecraft on April 9, 2015, have been assembled into this perspective composite of Southern Africa and the surrounding oceans. (NASA via AP)
