NBA champion Kyrie Irving shocked a lot of people when he revealed that he believes the Earth is flat on the Road Trippin’ podcast that released on Friday morning. Then, on Friday night at NBA All-Star weekend, Irving doubled down on his comments.

For The Win was able to get in touch with Mark Kruse, who is a physics professor at Duke University, which is Irving’s alma mater (he only played 11 games for the Blue Devils, but it counts). We asked him what he thinks about the Cavs point guard’s beliefs in a phone call on Saturday morning.

Kruse is the perfect person to talk to about this. He has taught at Duke since 2001 and is currently teaching an introduction to astronomy undergraduate course. Additionally, he’s doing research in elementary particle physics at The Large Hadron Collider (a facility in Switzerland), where he spends a great deal of time. He said that he’s “thinking about the fundamental nature of the universe all the time.”

Kruse’s responses have been shortened for length.

Kruse on Irving saying that he won’t be fooled by fake information, like those who say the Earth is round:

Irving said the following to ESPN about his “the Earth is flat” comments:

“I think people should do their own research, man. Then, hopefully, they’ll either back my belief or throw it in the water, but I think it’s interesting for people to find out on their own. I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system said was real and turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts and what I believe.”

To that, Kruse said that he actually thinks it’s good that Irving is questioning things, but that questioning if the Earth is flat isn’t exactly productive.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there. In some things, it’s good that he’s questioning established theories but this is one that is somewhat undeniable, so he probably shouldn’t go there … Things like the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of fundamental particles, and there’s a lot of information more recently that even questions the possible relation of these things to our consciousness, so I think there are deeper things he could question rather than the shape of the Earth…

“If it’s really just a metaphor for questioning established models, then that’s great. People should question established models. Of course, if you come up with an alternative theory, it’s got to be able to explain a lot of the observations that we’ve made that have established the theories we have.”

Kruse on Irving’s reasoning for the Earth being flat:

On the Road Trippin’ podcast, Irving said this:

“For what I’ve known for as many years and what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round, but I mean, if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets and stuff like this … It doesn’t come back. There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us.”

I read that quote to Kruse word-for-word, and after a slight pause and a chuckle, he replied:

“Yeah, there’s a lot in that. It is true that we send space projects to space and they don’t come back, but they’re sending signals back. They send signals back and information about what they’re observing while they are in space. But also our theory of gravity very beautifully explains how planetary systems are formed, how they orbit stars, for example, our own solar system, how our own planets in our solar system orbit our sun, and that theory is well established. There are no observations that contradict that, so maybe he needs to learn a little bit more about basic physics.

“But he’s saying if you just observe the landscape, well, if you go back a couple thousand years ago, people did think the Earth was flat because they looked at their landscape and they saw it was flat. But, of course, since then there’s a lot of evidence now, as scientific knowledge improves over several hundred years, you can’t just dismiss all that other evidence … You can’t dismiss all the experiments that have happened and all the knowledge that has been accrued over the last several hundred years that all point to the fact that the Earth is spherical.”

Lastly, Kruse invites Irving to visit Duke and sit in one of his classes:

Here I’d like to note that toward the beginning of the interview, Kruse said that he’d like to give Irving the benefit of the doubt, saying, “Perhaps he was using it (the Earth is flat) as a metaphor for just generally questioning established models of the universe, which in a sense is great.”

So when Kruse said that he’d like to welcome Irving to his class, he wasn’t saying it in a way to mock the point guard. He was genuine. The professor would actually love to welcome the NBA star to sit in on one of his classes. Kruse said of Irving:

“He should go and really try to understand the theories behind what we really do understand about gravity and the orbits of the planets, and the things like that. He’s obviously asking questions and is curious about these things, and so he should do his own research and come up with his own conclusions.

“If you come up with an alternative model, of course it’s got to be able to explain all the things that we do observe, and a flat Earth theory is not going to be able to do that, so he has to think about it. He should read some astronomy books or take an astronomy course, even online, or come back to Duke, sit in on my class.”

Another option is to have Kruse phone in as a guest on the Road Trippin’ podcast, and he and the NBA champ could simply have a conversation, which I think would be fascinating.

As for us here at FTW, I guess we’ll go call up a Michigan State professor next.

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