Only because it's the holidays. I got you bro.
Happy Thanksgiving Lumi!
1) How come water insists on remaining flat no matter what and always follows the path of least resistance to achieve this equilibrium?
First of all, water will only remain flat when it is completely undisturbed. In a lake or the ocean, the wind creates waves on the surface. In a river, the water is flowing downhill, and the surface of the water is certainly not flat.
However, generally we think of water as being flat. That's not really true either. The oceans are certainly not flat -- they are curved! The oceans are on the surface of the Earth, which is a very big sphere. So while the ocean looks flat to us, it is simply because we don't have enough perspective to see that they are curved... but they are! Think about a globe and you can easily see that the oceans are very curved.
However, all this aside, if you have a glass of water, and let it sit undisturbed, the water level is flat. This is because the pull of gravity is equal across the face of the water. The water molecules are free to move throughout the liquid, and the gravity affects each water molecule equally, pulling them all down the same. That is why the water level stays flat in a glass.
The reason the oceans are curved is in fact the same reason. The pull of gravity can be approximated as coming from the center of the Earth. So if you are on one side of the Earth, the pull of gravity is in exactly the opposite direction as if you were on the other side (some people like to think of Australians as being upside down, which is of course ridiculous, but that's that same idea). Because gravity is pulling the water molecules equally towards the center of the Earth, the surface of the water is the surface of a sphere, which is of course, curved.
Water can't bend? Stick your finger into a water glass, and the water bends out of the way of your finger. It's a fluid, it has almost no rigidity.
In everyday life and also often in physics, we make simplifications to get rid of overly complex facts that only have an extremely small effect on what we're doing or calculating.
So, on our human scale, water's surface is flat, which is more of a short hand for "water's surface is perpendicular to gravity's pull", and gravity pulls down, so it's perpendicular to down, which is horizontal.
But if you want to be a stickler, if you move even slightly to the side, gravity will still pull you towards the same point, but you've moved, so you have to shift your concept of "horizontal", so if you have a large pool of water, like an ocean, "horizontal" is right, perpendicular to the pull of gravity, but since gravity pulls you towards one point, "horizontal" is actually round and not straight.
I learned this back in grade 3 dude.
In fuckin Canada.
Disproving humanities major achievment of using the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of the phenomena to better our understanding of the universe, or as Flat-Earthers say "mumbo-jumbo", that we have developed for thousands of years not as a culture, but as a fucking species, to prove how shit works to within 0.01% of a degree in some rare cases doesn't seem possible but I digress.
2) How can space be a vacuum when a physical barrier is required to create one?
Gravity.
You can think of planets like wells or deep holes in the ground (gravity wells). Denser things fall to the bottom (rocks), less dense things rest on top of that (water), even less dense things on top of that (air), and finally the least dense thing on top of everything (vacuum).
The air, for the most part, isn't leaving the planet for the same reason the water isn't flying out of the ocean, gravity is holding it down.
It's important to remember that space doesn't suck. It's not that kind of vacuum. There is not a force pulling things into space in the same way there is not a force pulling air out of a hole in a balloon.
3) No measurement of Earths rotation or movement at all for that matter has ever been detected or recorded.
Negative. Source:
First Direct Measurement of Earth's Rotation - Astrobiology Magazine
Original Source:
TUM - Rotation der Erde erstmals unmittelbar gemessen
Please dude, go back to school. Or read a book. Fuck, if your close enough, I'll tutor you.
