This just in:
Topeka, Kansas (Reuters) – In a stunning reversal, NASA scientists announced today that the Earth is, after all, flat and, in fact, infinite in extent. A visibly embarrassed Nasa Earth Observatory spokesperson explained to a befuddled audience that the discovery came from a reevaluation of the work of 19th Century Italian mathematician Eugenio Beltrami in the light of Einstein’s General Relativity and GPS data.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was quick to take credit for the discovery, while his unquestionably uninteresting rival Romano Prodi engaged in a feeble attempt at damage control with the assertion that “il Cavaliere was not even born when signor Beltrami made his contributions to science”.
The International Flat Earth Society is demanding the posthumous rehabilitation of the late Charles K. Johnson, whom they dub “a modern-day Galileo”. Johnson’s widow could not be reached for comments at her Lancaster, California home.
Reading from a teleprompter at an impromptu press conference at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Leader of the Free World™ George “Dubya” Bush said he hoped “those lib’rul tree huggers will stop trying to prevent us from drilling in Alaska or fretting about Peak Oil. The almighty God in his infinite providence has given America an infinite world to exploit, and we intend to do just that. And with an infinite amount of atmosphere, how can any amount of our greenhouse gases make a dent in global climate?”.
Sources at the Union of Concerned Scientist, speaking of condition of anonymity, suggested that the Bush administration has pressured NASA to make this “clearly nonsensical” statement in order to “disarm political opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, kill the Kyoto Protocol and boost the stock prices of the oil majors”. These allegations were called “too ridiculous to grace with a rebuttal” by White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
String theorist Luboš Motl explains via e-mail:
It is quite simple, really. We know from recent astrophysical observations that the Universe has very approximately what is called a hyperbolic geometry. In such a space, lines and planes which “start out parallel” diverge in such a way that an infinite line or plane, seen from a vantage point outside it, will span a finite angle. That is why, seen from space, Earth looks like a finite disk.
Also, in hyperbolic space one needs to accelerate towards a plane in order to follow a trajectory at a constant distance from it, and this easily explains how satellites can orbit the Earth at a constant distance. Obviusly, the word ‘orbit’ here is a misnomer, but it’s going to be hard to abandon the old spherical-Earth terminology. Anyway, in addition to this, in flat space the gravitational attraction from an infinite plane is independent of the distance to it, but in hyperbolic space, precisely because the farther away one is the smaller the infinite plane appears in diameter, the gravitational attraction decreases with distance. NASA has shown that, when Beltrami’s model is applied to the Solar system, it matches not only the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, but also the Voyager anomalous acceleration which has elluded explanation for over a decade. We string theorists are really excited now about the possibility of applying similar ideas to the brane-world models of string cosmology.
Happy April Fool’s Day.
