Flattening Flat Earth by Solving Two/Three Body Systems

Although there is a lot of evidence that 'Flat Earth' is not true, this simulation further shows how the Flat Earth model does not fit into our current knowledge of physics and planetary motion.

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Inspiration

We got our inspiration from the Flat Earth Society website.

What it does

We have two main models:

  • The first is a model of the normal sun-earth-moon system.
  • The second is a model of the Flat Earth Society's geocentric vision of our solar system: where flat earth is in the center and the sun and moon are about 3000 miles away. We apply the same laws of physics as in our first model and watch the second model collapse. -The others are cool models of three body motion with different initial conditions.

How we built it

We used Python, scipy, and matplotlib for the visualizations.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant challenge was transitioning from the gravitational two body system to the three body system. We went through multiple iterations of using numerical solutions such a euler's method, runge kutta method, and eventually settled to use an ode solved to allow a higher precision of the solution.

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