Quote:
Originally Posted by P A N
ships going over the horizon is a broad topic. a whole thread could be devoted to it. but pertaining to what you're talking about it, your argument falls apart when you pull a telescope out after the ship has disappeared to your naked eye, and it magically comes back into view. this is a replicable experiment. the reason it appears to shrink as it moves away is because we see things in perspective. all things shrink as they move away from the observer. hold your finger an inch from your eye and then move it to arm's length.
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What you describe is not what happens when viewing ships. The ship disappears from the bottom up - with a large ship and calm sea you can see this with the naked eye. Use binoculars and you will see the ship as if it were closer, but the same amount of the bottom of the ship will be out of view. I strongly encourage you to try this yourself if you live close enough to a port - this is science from first principles, and all science is ultimately based on common sense and first principles.
The issue of atmosphere shouldn't be hard to understand - even if you don't like the term gravity you will notice that you don't float off into space, and neither does your car, nor the air that surrounds us. These things have mass. We can see that things with mass don't float off into space, and we call that gravity, but if you don't like that term you can call it Fred.