Will Duffy joins Real Science Radio to discuss the viral “Final Experiment” expedition to Antarctica, where Flat Earth advocates and globe defenders traveled together to test whether Antarctica’s famous 24-hour sun could actually be observed.
The conversation explores why Antarctica became central to the Flat Earth debate, how the expedition was organized, reactions from Flat Earthers who witnessed the midnight sun firsthand, and the broader questions surrounding science, worldview, identity, and Christian apologetics.
00:00:00 Identity and Danger of the Flat Earth Movement
seeing something and experiencing something that goes against your worldview and that goes against something that is like near and dear to your heart. I would say flat earth for most flat earthers is inextricably tied to their identity. I think that’s dangerous by the way, but I think it’s a reality based on how I watch them talk and how they interact with others and how much they talk about it and think about it. And so when you’re faced with this, that’s not easy to see and experience.
SPEAKER 03 :
Keepin’ it real. Keepin’ it real.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams. And today, Doug is on assignment, and we have a special guest, Will Duffy, the organizer behind the final experiment. And this is the Antarctica expedition that brought Flat Earth and Globe Earth advocates together to test one simple question. Can the 24-hour Antarctic sun actually be observed? So I want to welcome you, Will. I’m real excited to hear about what’s going on with this final experiment.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, Fred, thanks so much for having me. I’m also looking forward to talking about this, talking a little bit about Flat Earth for people who are not familiar, and most importantly, talking about our trip to Antarctica, which was simply unbelievable.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and you know, I was talking to Danny Faulkner a couple of weeks ago. He was in town, and I mentioned, you know, I thanked him for being a part of that. I think you had him on one of your shows on YouTube, and And he mentioned, hey, that thing’s actually really gone well, and the aftermath is incredible. And I’m like, oh, wow, we’ve got to have Will Duffy on Real Science Radio to tell us about all this, what’s been going on. Because I kind of lost track after the final experiment. He had mentioned that you’ve got a documentary coming up. And just, again, the aftermath with the people and how they reacted, you know, what’s happened to the Flat Earth Movement. So, Will, can you first start off explaining to the audience, because not everybody has heard about this. We’ll have some new listeners either through radio or on our YouTube channel. Can you explain why would you go to Antarctica? What’s the point of Antarctica and the Flat Earth Movement?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, so before I do that, I need to warn you, you will have flat earthers show up in the comments of this video. And I’m going to make a prediction, which is that they will not address the points that I’m going to bring up. And the reason why is because they don’t have answers for them. So they’ll talk about other things. And so that’s important for your audience to know. So let me just give a little backstory, which is I never knew Flat Earth was what I would call a legitimate movement, meaning I thought it was this kind of – Fringe thing that was more of a joke that people would, you know, talk about just in passing or in fun. I figured the Flat Earth Society was just a fake society set up to make fun of the Flat Earth idea. But then it turns out I had a friend who was a real flat earther and she started posting about it on Facebook. And that’s how I got into this whole thing. And I was shocked that there’s real flat earthers. And the more I spoke with my friend, the more I spoke with her. and she started sending me links to other people and articles and videos, the more I realized there’s actually quite a few flat earthers out there that actually believe the earth is flat.
SPEAKER 01 :
And what was alarming to you was she was a Christian, right?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, definitely. And I started finding that… I would call most of the leaders were not Christians, but most of the flat earthers themselves were Christians. And when you find out that you have a friend or an acquaintance or someone you know that you interact with on occasion, whether it’s in person or on social media, when you find out that they’re actually a flat earther, That’s actually a pivotal point in your life and in your relationship because you have to decide what you’re going to do. Most people probably will just move on and disregard it. I decided not to do that. So I like to… argue. I like a good old fashioned debate. I like to try to convince people that I’m right about something and they’re wrong about something. And so I decided I was going to try to convince her that she was wrong about flat earth. And I figured it would be super easy. Turns out it’s not easy. I actually had to relearn the globe. I had to relearn things that I’m sure I learned in grade school, maybe high school that I had forgotten. And so it’s been an incredible journey for me. I’ve learned a ton. And in that process, I discovered that Antarctica is something that comes up a lot in the flat Earth world and in this debate between flat Earth and globe. And there’s a reason why. And this is important. The flat Earth model puts the North Pole where the globe has the North Pole on. But then when you get to the equator, which doesn’t make any sense on a flat Earth, by the way, the equator on the globe is the widest part of the globe, taking into consideration the rotation of the Earth. So they steal that from us and put it on their maps. But as you head south of the equator on their map… Instead of things getting smaller and smaller and closer together in proximity, like they do on the globe, eventually meeting at a south pole, they get bigger and bigger and wider and wider, and you end up with an ice ring around the entire Earth. So all of the oceans are held in by this ice ring on the flat Earth map. All of the continents are on there. And so Antarctica can’t be any different on a globe than it is on a flat earth. And that’s when I had my light bulb epiphany moment, which is if I’m going to solve this debate, if I’m going to prove to flat earthers internationally that they’re wrong, it’s going to have to involve Antarctica. And that ended up meaning we were going to have to go there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. And so just to be clear, the reason you picked Antarctica, why this makes a lot of sense is because if you believe in the flat earth, you think you have a sunrise and a sunset pretty much anywhere you’re at, right? But it turns out Antarctica has periods during the year where you have a 24 hour sun and they deny that that happens.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes. So this is a really cool phenomenon in the world, which is something known as the 24-hour sun or the midnight sun. And the reason they call it the midnight sun is because there are places on Earth where the sun is still up at midnight, meaning it never sets during the day, hence the name 24-hour sun. Now, people are mostly familiar with this in the Northern Hemisphere. And so we have something called the Arctic Circle, and we have something called the Antarctic Circle. Again, these are things that only exist on the globe, that the flat earthers steal and put on their map, which make no sense on their map. So the Arctic Circle, that’s the one that most people are familiar with, and the reason why is because a vast majority of the population on Earth lives in the Northern Hemisphere. I think it’s 90%. of the world’s population lives north of the equator. So the Arctic Circle represents when you can go far enough north in the northern hemisphere and have this 24-hour sun at certain times of the year. And so based upon the axial tilt of the earth, so the earth is tilted at about 23 degrees on its axis, means that when the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, you get days where the sun never sets because of that tilt. It’s something super easy to demonstrate in like a dark closet with just a plastic globe and a flashlight, but it’s a little bit hard to visualize. But if you shine a flashlight on a tilted globe in a dark closet, it’s actually a really good homeschool experiment that I’ve done with my kids. Half the globe is gonna light up. Now you spin it, And when the earth is tilted toward the light, the flashlight, and you spin it, there’s a top part that’s always lit up. It never gets dark, even when it’s away from the sun because of the tilt. The tilt brings that further part of the earth in line with that light. And so that’s what creates the Arctic Circle, and that’s what creates the 24-hour sun. Now… The opposite happens in the southern summer, which is December. Most of us in the northern hemisphere think of June, July, and August as summer. But in the southern summer, now the southern hemisphere is what’s tilted towards the sun and angled toward the sun. And they have the exact same 24-hour sun in Antarctica. Now on the flat earth map, that’s impossible because they make Antarctica so big and the sun has to travel and not only light up Antarctica each day, but light up every single continent. Because unless you’re in the Arctic Circle or the Antarctic Circle at the right time of year, everybody every day has a sunrise and a sunset. They have a period of day and they have a period of darkness. And so this 24-hour sun in Antarctica ended up being the key thing, that we used with the final experiment to show once and for all that flat earth is completely wrong because they can’t have that on their model. They denied that it existed. There was only a couple videos of it because getting to Antarctica is difficult and expensive. And those videos, unfortunately, were edited. Now that’s fine. You’re gonna edit this video before you put it on YouTube. I edit videos of my children’s birthday parties before I pass them around. Like everything in the world gets edited. Editing is not bad, but they turned that into their conspiracy and said, oh, it’s being edited because they can’t actually film the real thing. So we went down to Antarctica, to film the 24-hour sun unedited, and we took four flat earthers with us so that they could see with their own eyes the sun will never set while we’re there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, yeah. So both sides beforehand agreed that this midnight sun would be a meaningful test, right? I mean, they bought onto that. So they agree that this falsifies the flat earth if there’s this 24-hour sun.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, they definitely did. We have them on record so many times stating this. They would even go as far before I came on the scene and say, if you want to prove the Earth’s a globe, then go prove that there’s a 24-hour sun in Antarctica. So I will say this, which is that the closer we got to our trip, so the trip happened in December of 2024, and I started kind of dripping this out to the public in early 2024. So it was kind of like a year-long thing. And if you want to follow any of that or kind of go relive it if you missed it all, it’s just on our YouTube channel, The Final Experiment. As we got closer and closer, the Flat Earth side started seeing the confidence on the globe side. We were pumped. We were excited. People started crowdfunding on the globe side to go with us. which was so cool because they were just certain that we live on a globe and there’s going to be a 24-hour sun. And so our confidence started to give them pause and make them a bit nervous. And so they all of a sudden weren’t as excited about going on this trip. And when that happened, something really cool happened. People started contacting me and offering to pay for flat earthers to go with us. So they were going to fund out of pocket. This is very expensive for flat earthers to go because they were so confident we were right. They wanted more flat earthers to see the 24-hour sun. And here’s the crazy thing. Almost all of the flat earthers turned down a free trip to Antarctica. Yep.
SPEAKER 01 :
So what does that tell you? Yeah, it tells you a lot. And, you know, remember, uh, Bob and I years ago, we, we had that crowd. I don’t, I don’t know if it was crowdfunding send a flat earther into space. So, but there’s a reason I think that you had told us before when we’ve had you on before that there’s a reason why that one wasn’t as, first of all, it’d be hard to do, you know, that’s even more expensive. I think it was Virgin galactic or one of those things you’d have to get like a hundred thousand dollar ticket. Um, And even then, you might not convince a flat earther if he’s even up in space for some reason. I can’t remember what your logic was behind that, but if you can refresh my memory, why that really wasn’t as good as this whole Antarctic thing. And maybe it’s just because of the cost.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. There’s a lot of issues. One is the cost. Two is if I recall the one that you guys advertised never went to space.
SPEAKER 01 :
No, I think we got to 12,000.
SPEAKER 05 :
I mean, we were, no, what I’m saying is I think the company that you were going to utilize never went to space.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh yeah. Trust me. I know that. Cause my son tried to talk me into that stock and, uh, Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. He actually did really well. He wrote that thing from 20 to 50. I’m like, dude, it’s a resistance. And now you’re probably relating to this. I know you know a lot about finances. I’m like, dude, you got to get out. I’m going to ride this to the end. He only put in like 2,000 bucks. Well, his 2,000 bucks right now is like 100 bucks. So that’s a side story.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, that’s so tough. But anyway, so that actually ends up backfiring. So it’s actually kind of good you probably didn’t raise the funds because had you done it, it wouldn’t go. And then the flat earthers would say, see, you can’t go.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, conspiracy. Exactly.
SPEAKER 05 :
The other issue is, is it’s a single flat earther, right? So flat earthers will eat their own. they will throw a flat earther under the bus no matter how good of friends they are, no matter how long their relationship has been. They will do that to protect the cause at all costs. And so having just one go. The other thing is that they will say anything they can. They’ll make up anything. to try to answer something that they can’t answer. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if in a situation like that, where they would say that the earth looks curved because either the window in the space shuttle is curved, or it was an LED screen and they weren’t actually looking out the window. And if they don’t go outside the spacecraft and do a spacewalk, which is incredibly difficult, um, then that doesn’t prove it. And so it just wouldn’t be as ideal. I hear Neil deGrasse Tyson all the time joke about let’s send a flat Earth or to space. The reality is I don’t think it would have the impact that the final experiment had in going to Antarctica. Because again, we were able to take multiple because it’s much lower cost than going to space. And they were able to see it with their own eyes. There’s no windows. There’s no purported LED screens and all of that.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so I want to get to the part where a couple of things. First of all, the reaction to the flat earthers once they saw a 24-hour sun. I’m going to break the news to everybody on Real Science Radio. The globe is a globe. We’re not on a flat earth. I can’t wait to get to hear your take on their reactions. I also want to mention there’s a listener for Real Science Radio that has written in. Actually, we’ve had a couple over the last… A couple years, it’s still kind of clean. They seem to be maybe still floating around the flat earth idea. But before we get to that, we do have to do our interesting fact of the week. I know Doug isn’t here. So, Will, I’m going to have to challenge you, and I might make an exception since you’re a friend of mine. I’m going to buzz you if you don’t get it right, okay? I usually don’t do that to a guest.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s fine.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so here is the interesting fact of the week. And by the way, this is sponsored by Jim in Connecticut, and we’d like to thank him for sponsoring his second show. Okay, so here we go. Here’s the interesting fact of the week. What Antarctic creature is only a few millimeters long, has no wings, survives freezing and dehydration, spends most of its life as a larva, and is considered the largest purely land-dwelling animal native to Antarctica?
SPEAKER 05 :
Wow. I’m a bit embarrassed that I have no idea. I should know this. One of the things that stood out to me, because we went pretty far south, we went to 80 degrees south, we took a plane. Most people that go to Antarctica take boats and just go to the coast. We took a plane, and there’s no concrete in Antarctica, so we landed on the ice. And that was fun. But anyway, I noticed the lack of life, the lack of fauna, the lack of flora. And I just don’t know the answer.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s actually an insect. But, you know, it’s called, well, I have to do this. Well, I can’t help myself.
SPEAKER 05 :
I failed. I failed. I deserve it.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s the Antarctic midge. And it’s a species of flightless midge endemic to the continent of Antarctica. It has a length of two to six millimeters. This thing’s tiny. It is the largest purely terrestrial animal native to the continent. It also has the smallest known insect genome, at least as of 2014, with only 99 million base pairs. Wow. Only 99 million. I mean, that’s still a lot of base pairs. That’s the smallest. Complicated creature. But yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wow, thank you for sharing that. That is really cool. I am glad I know that now.
SPEAKER 01 :
The Antarctic midge. Okay, so back to the Antarctic experiment, the final experiment. Can you walk us through, I know there’s a lot of setup and itinerary, and I think you’ve covered that on your other shows. I want to get right to the reaction of the flat earthers who were with you. And you said there was four of them. And so can you tell us about that?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, let me give a little backstory too, which is important. We had to go to the southern tip of South America first. So you pretty much go to as far south as you can get to kind of start from there and make sure you have all the right equipment, all the right gear, and then you wait for the weather to cooperate, and then you go to Antarctica. So you’re either talking the southern tip of Africa, the southern tip of South America, or the southern part of New Zealand. Those are really the three closest places to Antarctica. So for our trip, we went to the southern tip of South America. We went to Chile and we went to a town called Punta Arenas, which if you look, you are as far south as you can be in the entire, all the land masses in the world other than Antarctica is right there. So we started there, and you go there four days in advance. And the reason you go four days in advance is because if you end up having a delayed flight getting there, they need to make sure you don’t miss your trip to Antarctica. Once you get there, if they find out you don’t have everything that you need to survive and live in Antarctica… with the extreme weather and the extremely cold temperatures, you have to have time to go get those things or have them shipped to you. So we spent a few days in the southern tip of South America, and that was fascinating to the flat earthers right then. And here’s why. In their model, the sun should have risen in the northeast and set in the northwest, right? And we knew it was not, that was not gonna happen. It was always going to be to the south. And so we have on video them looking at the sun and being like, this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. It appears to be staying south. So I actually think whether they wanna admit this or not, they don’t have to. I think they started to have seeds of doubt before we even got there, just observing what the sun was doing. Cause it was doing what the globe models states. When we got to Antarctica, we got there at probably 4 o’clock, I think, around 4 p.m. Now, time zones in Antarctica are a little weird, especially as you get to the South Pole. So we used a company called Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, ALE. They’re headquartered in South America. So for their base, which is Union Glacier in Antarctica, they use – the time zone of Chile, which just makes the most sense because that’s where their workers are for communicating. So we landed at about four and the sun is out. It was a perfect time for us to land. The sun is out and it’s like, okay, we’re going to know a lot here in the next eight hours. In the next eight hours, we’re pretty much going to know everything because remember, if the sun is up at midnight, then that proves we are on a glow. It’s the midnight sun. So we had to get orientated. We had to get a tour of where everything is, how to go to the bathroom, where to eat, where to sleep, where to put your stuff, because they protect Antarctica, and I’m glad they do. They protect it because it’s really the last place on Earth – That has not been really messed up by man. And so they actually don’t just allow you to just go to the bathroom and leave it. So they actually fly your waist out when you leave. So that’s why these trips are so expensive. There’s a lot that goes into it.
SPEAKER 01 :
So how long is this process of getting you set up? A couple hours. A couple hours, okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
A couple hours, yeah. So after that, all I wanted to do was to start filming the sun. We brought 360 degree cameras so that they could see all 360 degrees around us. No funny business, no green screens, no studios, no sets. And all I wanted to do was to set up the cameras. Well, their base camp Union Glacier is right next to a mountain, a big mountain called Mount Rossman. And the purpose of that is to help with the extreme winds, which can cause extreme cold. And so they were worried that the sun might go behind that mountain and And so they were like, Will, if you want to do this right, we have to take you and set up your own camp outside of our area. So I was like, can we go right now? And they were like, no, you can’t. You have to have dinner first. And I was like, please, can we skip dinner? And they said, no. They said, there’s no hospitals in Antarctica. We have to keep you as healthy as can be in the past. doctors that would go to Antarctica would have to have their appendix removed before they could go because no one could remove their appendix if it burst, but they could remove someone else’s appendix if it burst. So there’s a lot you have to think about, right? So they told me, they’re like, Will, before you can set up your cameras, you have to have dinner. And I was like, great, feed us and let’s go. So we didn’t make it out to set up our cameras until 9 p.m. But guess what? The sun is still up at 9 p.m., right? Yeah. So that’s cool. So we set up our cameras. We got everything rolling. There was almost a dozen different cameras because everybody brought their own setup. There were equatorial mounts. There were 360-degree cameras. We tried to livestream the 24-hour sun, which was very difficult. It’s tough to do a 24-hour livestream, especially in Antarctica, right? We were trying to monitor our batteries. There was a guy who had a solar filter on his camera. So he was looking at the sunspots for 24 hours. And so we set up our cameras and I was like, you know what? We need to go live at midnight. We need to do a midnight live stream. The whole world will be watching and show people what is happening. Did the sun set or is it still in the sky? And so we did a midnight live stream. We had over 4,000 people watching live. which was our biggest live stream ever by far. So I’m really proud of that. And that live stream now has well over 100,000 views. And so the sun never set, obviously, which we knew. Now, we had a really gracious attitude toward the Flat Earthers. We weren’t making fun of them. We weren’t rubbing it in their faces or anything like that. The reality was we knew what was going to happen. And so we were able to know they’re going to struggle with this. And so we did the live stream and we just let them say whatever they wanted to say. One of the flat earthers, Jaron Campanella, he just went up to the camera and said, sometimes you’re wrong in life. And he’s like, I thought for sure that there was no 24-hour sun, but there is. I’m looking at it right now with my own eyes. It’s not setting. It’s doing exactly what they said. And you got to do with that what you want to do with it. But it is real. Wow. So that was the best admission. Another flat earther, Austin Witsit, came up and said, you know, it’s doing exactly what they said it would do. And so we have to kind of figure out what to do with this. Maybe we need a new model or something. Another flat earther, Lee Speth, got up there and talked about God’s creation, which I love. She’s a Christian. But they all just kind of saw it. And Seeing something and experiencing something that goes against your worldview and that goes against something that is near and dear to your heart, I would say Flat Earth, for most Flat Earthers, is inextricably tied to their identity. I think that’s dangerous, by the way, but I think it’s a reality based on how I watch them talk and how they interact with others and how much they talk about it and think about it. Mm-hmm. And so when you’re faced with this, that’s not easy to see and experience. And so I’ll tell you, after that live stream, pretty much all of us went to bed. We had been up for a very long time. And I can imagine wanting to just escape if I was them for a little bit and just like not have to think about this for a while and not have to process it. And so the next day, we left all of the cameras on. We did rounds through the night. It was light, but we needed to make sure we kept changing the batteries because we didn’t want to have a cut in our footage because they’d say, oh, that’s fake. So we actually took… 24-hour straight HD video, not a time-lapse, of the 24-hour sun using a 360-degree camera. And here’s the cool thing. It was the first time that was ever done in history.
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