Atlanta rapper B.o.B got into a Twitter beef with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson after B.o.B. tried to argue that the Earth was flat. After their back and forth, B.o.B. responded by dropping a diss track that features Tyson.
It all started with this tweet from B.o.B on Sunday night:
https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/691411463051804676?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
From then, it carried over into Monday when Tyson chimed in to give B.o.B some information about the curvature of Earth, because that’s what Tyson does – he will tell you when you’re wrong if it’s pointed out to him. And even if it’s not pointed out to him, but that’s neither here nor there.
@bobatl Earth's curve indeed blocks 150 (not 170) ft of Manhattan. But most buildings in midtown are waaay taller than that.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
@bobatl Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you've never looked up.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
All of this led to B.o.B ultimately releasing a diss track called Flatline, and it’s safe to assume it’s called that because he believes the Earth is flat.
In the first verse, B.o.B wastes no time diving into his beliefs that the world is flat, saying that globalists (what the hell is a globalist?) see him as a threat, and questioning why NASA is a part of the Department of Defense. He also tells Tyson to “loosen up his vest.”
It also includes the following interlude from Tyson, according to Genius.com:
So you want to find farthest point from that center. And it turns out sea level from the equator is farther away from the center of the Earth than sea level at the poles. It has nothing to do with global warming and melting of the ice caps
(Why is that?)
Because we…Earth we know it spins, once uh…a day. Yes thank you. Three people know, uh, how long a day lasts here
(Good for row number two, they’re off to a great start)
So you, you know when you spin pizza dough it kind of flattens out. It gets wider in the middle…so Earth throughout it’s life, Earth, even when it formed, it was spinning. And it got a little wider at the equator that it does at the poles. So it’s not actually a sphere, it’s oblate, it’s officially an oblate spheroid
But not only that, it’s slightly wider below the equator than above the equator
(A little chubbier?)
Little chubbier, chubby’s a good word, it’s like pear-shaped. It turns out the pear-shapedness is a bigger than the height of mount Everest above sea level
To me, while Tyson’s explanation in the diss track might somehow sound suspicious to some, it still explains that the Earth isn’t flat…because it’s not.
Now, the only way this feud could get any better is if Tyson releases his own diss track, or collabs with Future on a mixtape with a series of tracks explaining why the Earth is round. Please give us that, magical Internet gods.
It’s also safe to say B.o.B won’t be winning a Grammy for this one, but stranger things have happened…like a rapper arguing that the Earth is flat in the year 2016.
