Below is a short video from AndromedasWake refuting some specific claims by a couple of creationists from the UK, Andrew Inns and Malcolm Bowden. It’s nicely done, a good explanation of some basic physics, but what caught my eye is the beginning, when the creationists start explaining that they are going to disprove evolution. How are they going to do it?
Would you believe…by saying that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe, and doesn’t even rotate — everything else spins around it with a 24 hour period? Most of our American creationists aren’t that stupid!
I feel a brief moment of patriotic pride.
As AndromedasWake asks at the end, what the heck does any of that have to do with evolution?
No? Aren’t we the ones with the flat earth society?
Don’t kid yourself, we’re definitely No. 1 in Biblical lunacy. Other lunacy, well, if you don’t get your nonsense from the Bible or some other venerable woo-source, you have to generate it yourself.
Whether it’s better or worse to go for geocentric idiocy depends upon your perspective. OTOH, it’s an even richer vein of stupid. OTOH, it’s also more consistent, less hypocritical in accepting science and rejecting it in an ad hoc vis-a-vis the evidence, that is) manner like your ordinary US cretin does.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
We have our own relativity-deniers I’m sure. Geocentricism just adds some clear lunacy I guess.
We definitely have a higher percentage of adherents to Biblical lunacy. I run into multiple people who believe that the world is 6000 years old every DAY, and I live 20 miles from Capitol Hill. Although that’s probably why – too many lawmakers around here exerting their malign influence…
Is this the same Malcolm Bowden who believes the depression and schizophrenia should only be treated by readings from the bible? I vaguely know this man and I can confirm that he is a grade one thicko.
Modern geocentricism is at least as remarkable an example of blatant cherrypicking as most religious believers in this country. As far as I can tell, their entire case, such as it is, comes down to reinterpreting Michelson-Morley, claiming that the lack of difference of observation in the speed of light means that Einstein… and Kepler… and Galileo… and Copernicus… and Hubble… and, well, pretty much every physical or cosmological observation since the Divina Commedia is wrong. 9/11 truthers look smarter than these people.
20% of the US population thinks the sun orbits the earth, Geocentrism. That is 60 million people. Source, wikipedia.
26% of the fundie xians do so.
The US leads the first world in ignorant morons. The fundies lead the USA.
I don’t know why it is so hard to draw a diagram of the solar system. That was what we learned in the first grade.
Oh dear. That reminds me of the Futurama episode A Clone of My Own: It is revealed the dark matter engines do not move the ship, but instead move the universe, allowing the ship to go faster than the speed of light.
That’s a stretch. Fundies don’t lead the USA. They try, and the GOP caters to them. But last time I checked almost everything the fundies have ever wanted to change about the government hasn’t happened. The creepiest thing though is the number of catholics on the Supreme Court.
In Part 2 we will learn how everything in the Universe is within 6000 light years of the Earth! Thus your whole twisted “theory” of Devilution will collapse upon your ears, atheist swine! Stay tuned for Part 3 when we learn that the people in Australia don’t fall off the bottom of the Earth because they have Velcro on the bottoms of their feet.
And before anyone tries to defend geocentrism with Einstein’s relativity theories, keep in mind virtually all of these nuts reject relativity because they associate it with moral relativism. Yes, they are that stupid.
There is some problem with the equipment that Malcom is using. His brain doesn’t work.
PZ, you are hurting me with this stuff. Ouch.
No, you don’t have a monopoly, not even close. Why just yesterday I was in the Home Despot store in Nanaimo (on lovely Vancouver Island BC, Canada) and spotted a guy wandering about with a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Truth Now!” I assumed he was probably a religionaut and carried on. When I left the store I walked past what was obviously his minivan. Covered in (very well produced) stickers declaiming about ‘New World Order is reading your mind’ and ‘9/11 false flag’ and the mysterious ‘maniggas’ (WTF?) and on and on. For some reason I didn’t stop to take some photos. Perhaps it was the shear reality-warping strangeness that surrounded it.
And lest we forget, the current Canadian government has a young earth creationist in its midst. Probably several come to that.
I know that orbital velocity for the Shuttle and other spacecraft is achieved only by launching Eastward *with* the direction of Earth’s rotation to get a free boost of velocity. If the Earth is stationary, I guess the shuttle should not be reaching orbit, or Newton is wrong about motion, or gravity is broken, or something else. This ain’t rocket science.
When I taught celestial navigation one of the first things I told my students was: “Forget Kepler. We will assume the Earth is stationary in the center of the universe and the sky rotates around the it.” This assumption keeps the math simple.
They lead the USA in ignorance, malevolence, and social problems.
On average fundies are lower socioeconomic class and less educated than the national average.
I’m sure they think this is just fine.
I’m no physicist and I understand the absurdity of the claim that the Earth is the center of the universe, but isn’t it possibly to construct one’s equations so that, from a mathematical perspective, Earth IS the center of the universe?
I remember listening to an interview (either Point of Inquiry or the Infidel Guy) of a guy who investigated the flat earthers. Pretty awesome rationalizing, to be fair. They thought gravity was a product of the flat earth accelerating upwards indefinitely. They do know their physics!
Here is Part 2 of Redsky vs Reality.
Minor editorial improvement.
If the earth was not moving (rotating), there would be no hurricanes.
IIRC, yes. But if you take a no preferred frame of reference point of view, every single other point in the universe is just as much the center. In other words, the universe has no center and everywhere and nowhere is the center.
The worst creationist argument that I have personally encountered came from a YEC Christian I had known for several years on the IRC. When I asked him how he explained our ability to see light from stars hundreds of thousands of light years away if the universe had only existed for about 10,000 years, he told me that stars do not shine with their own light. They only reflect light from the sun. They’re not far away at all; neither are they very large.
I then asked if he thought they were held up in the sky with paste, but he wouldn’t answer that one. He was =– of course — homeschooling his kids.
For the love of reason, PZ! That’s enough Christ-insanity for one day. My eyeballs fell out of their sockets from watching this video; luckily, they were caught in my mouth as my jaw had also hit the ground.
Don’t you have any more videos of animals stealing things from people?
No, not in an Einsteinian universe. General Relativity allows one to identify an inertial frame of referecne from an accelerating frame. If the Earth were stationary it would be inertial and the universe accelerating. GR proves that the Earth is not an inertial frame of reference.
Two words – “Foucault pendulum”.
Somebody tell them that something like that exists and it’s pretty basic.
geocentrism is equivalent to disproving evolution.
Why? Because the essential claim of “evolution is false” is that science is a giant hoax — that carbon-dating is wrong and so on and so forth.
So, if you show that Galileo wasn’t merely wrong — but that the last 500 years are all a hoax, then evolution must be wrong, in all probability.
Of course then, ATM’s shouldn’t work, TV’s probably have spirits living in them, mental disorders are probably caused by evil daemons…
World-views do hold together. These guys are just more honest than the American kooks you’re thinking of.
Sorry, PZ. Gerardus Bouw, a Ph.D. from Case Western appears to be the leading geo-eccentric. His website at http://www.geocentricity.com has all the amazing details. He even cites the Braheian Debater which was the organ of the 60s-70s group, the Defenders of the Geocentric Universe, DOTGU, not to be confused with the Defenders of the Lunar Lenticular Annular Relativistic Space, DOLLARS.
Sorry in advance for not resisting the temptation but…
Q. How many YECs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. They don’t have to screw it in, just hold it still while the universe revolves around them!
*ducks the rotten tomatoes and runs off stage*
#13 timrowledge
No! No! No! The center of the Universe is Nanaimo, BC because they invented Nanaimo Bars there – if the sugar in them doesn’t kill you, the chocolate will.
There is, or at least was, a big pendulum in st Paul’s Cathedral, showing that we do rotate.
at least that’s what I remember as a child visiting London.
How do you get them inside in the first place?
Do they burn up if the light’s turned on?
Do we have to watch?
Worth trying, shit makes me laugh.
spiderxray:
How ironic. That’s also where the Michelson-Morley experiment was performed.
Actually I doubt that from a mathematical perspective it’s even possible to define “center of the universe” in a meaningful way without some pretty strong assumptions on the size and shape of the universe – “point of origin of your system of coordinates” is something else entirely.
#31 I don’t know about St Paul’s, but there was a large pendulum in the entrance to the Science Museum last time I visited, and I assume it’s still there. It’s sort of impressive but the idea of it is more interesting than the actuality, ’cause you can’t actually see it doing much more than swinging back and forth.
Navin:
It’s also why putting things into a polar orbit is more expensive.
Obviously since you’re going the opposite direction to the universe’s spin it just *looks* like you’ve got extra velocity, coz everything else is going the other way.
Duh.
I’ve got to wonder, just how fast does this bowden fellow think the rest of the universe is traveling? I think part way through the second part of this I had a moment of sudden realization that the movement of the stars that are billions of light years away would have to be traveling at incredible speeds to move around the earth in a 24 hr period. It just makes more sense that the earth is the thing that is moving.
I don’t understand how people can think that we (the people on Earth) can be at the center of the universe, when we aren’t even close to the center of the galaxy we’re in!
But if we weren’t rotating we would not have a magnetic field and we would have been fried by the solar wind.
If the rest of the universe is spinning, it’s almost a universal speed and direction… how much energy would that require? I hate morons. People always ask me “Why do you have to debunk them, just stop wasting time and let them be.” But if we don’t attack them, think of the consequences… we can’t just let idiots walk around free of the mockery that comes with the office.
killyosaur,
Even if we take the distance to the furthest star to be 6000 light years making it accurate in biblical terms. The circumference would be roughly 3.3×10^8 light hours which to not break the speed of light would have to be travelled in a 24 hour period. That is 7 orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. I don’t think that the Enterprise ever got that fast.
spiderxray @ 28
And Cleveland rears it’s ugly head yet again. At least Case has a lot going for it otherwise.
I wonder how long that guy has been doing his thing, as I recall a weird rash of flat-earthishness from back in the ’80s, in the Cleveland area.
Don’t know if he was specifically a geocentrist, but there’s a letter in the latest Macleans(the Canadian equivalent of Time) from someone who claims the idea that the speed of light is the same everywhere in the Universe is unscientific. Weirdos are everywhere.
Bwa haw!
Thank you, o spiderxray.
Best. PDF. Ever.
http://www.geocentricity.com/ba1/no015/index.html
killyosaur, your answers:
http://www.geocentricity.com/geocentricity/itf.html
And you might also enjoy Massive
Superstrings and the Firmament
Actually, you CAN assume the Earth is fixed and everything else rotates around it. The resulting gravitational field (spacetime distortion) would account for phenomena such as Foucault’s pendulum, equatorial bulging, etc. Of course, as has been pointed out by Raven, you can do that with any point of the universe; but saying that the Earth is definitely not at the centre of the universe is just as unwarranted as saying it definitely is.
And, the craziness continues: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h7pjHV8-yvgHW_zKQ1lmSIYIT75w
No, no, no. They don’t fall off because they squashed between the bottom of the Earth and the first turtle underneath.
Actually, if Mach’s Principle is right (I suspect it is not, but many physicists disagree), then those two scenarios are equivalent—there is no difference in fact between the Earth spinning and everything but the Earth spinning the other way.
On the related subject of UK creationists, has anyone got material which addresses the set of claims of one Dr Grady McMurtry? (Yes, I know of talk.origins FAQ etc.) A web search has found me little. A local churchgoer tells me he is on one of the Sky satellite TV channels here (which I don’t have, so I can’t see for myself). Apparently the churchgoer thinks it “demolishes ‘science geology’ (sic) and evolution” and “will be taught in UK schools very soon”! What little I’ve seen at YouTube looks just like the same old recycled rubbish, but it’s new to a lot of UK religious types who are seeing US-style creationists for for the first time, on the satellite TV channels arriving in homes previously without it.
I’ve found a very little background on this on the web, but even what there is on YouTube is almost all unchallenged material. Flood water from the plate boundaries, would you believe? He’s also an anthropogenic climate change critic.
@ #43
Thanks for asking the first question that sprung to mind :-D
It’s questionable whether Enterprise reached c x 10^21. According to the warp scale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Trek)#Warp_velocities) Warp 10 is equivalent to being everywhere in the universe simultaneously (and is therefore impossible to reach). Approaching Warp 10 one gets closer and closer to an infinite speed; in one episode Enterprise D was thrown by Q across the universe at a speed infinitely close to Warp 10, which suggests that c x 10^21 was exceeded.
However, given it’s all a story, it could just be poetic licence ;-)
When I first saw this video, I did a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation that showed, if the Earth is stationary and everything else revolves around it, Pluto would have to be breaking the speed of light in order to complete an “orbit” of us once a day. Of course, if these zeebs think they can support geocentrism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they’re hardly going to be swayed by little things like logic, or even basic maths.
I particularly enjoyed AndromedasWake’s hilarious re-edit of Andrew Inns’ video that he put out between parts one and two the debunking:
Of course it is possible to build a theory in which the Earth is the unmovable center of the universe. The drawback is that then you suddenly have a load of very mysterious forces acting on practically everything and you can get lost easily while counting, for example, how many angels does St. Coriolis need to screw artillery shells to one side in the Northern hemisphere and to the other side in the Southern hemisphere.
Whereas, as a Brit, I feel a crushing sense of despondency that such creationist idiocy is loose in the UK.
(snark)
You colonials are not alone when it comes to creationist insanity. Still, at least in the UK it is doubtful that such mania would ever be used as a basis for actual laws, so don’t get too full of yourselves…
(/snark)
These idiots can’t be compared fairly to US creationists. As has been said, the typical US example is ignorant and uneducated. These bozos show every sign of having had education, but having been too stupid to make use of it or understand what they were taught.
The UK leads the world in the stupidity of its creationists! I wipe away a patriotic tear.
When one doesn’t understand what evolution actually is, if they criticise enough things eventually they are bound to hit the right target. It’s like saying “the lord works in mysterious ways” yet at the same time as saying that there’s proof of God’s hand. How can it simultaneously be mysterious and discrete? Exactly the same way geocentrism disproves evolution.
It possible to construct quite a number of amazing theories of the universe mathematically. One of my favs is the idea worked out by Wheeler and Feynman that, because the equations are all symmetric with respect to time, a positron is just a time reversed electron. So, the real reason that all electrons are identical is that they are all one and the same electron/positron ricocheting through time! Rather than create the universe from whole cloth, God just slung a few elementary particles bouncing back and forth like a shuttle on the loom of creation. Its kinda poetic. I wonder what a Bouw-ian particle physicist could do with that?
In response to the last bit – I’m seeing more and more Creationists using the word “evolution” as a stand-in for “anything that disagrees with a literal interpretation of the Bible”.
I had a long, drawn-out argument recently over just what evolution really is. I gave her the basic Bio 101 explanation, and she kept insisting that evolution also included various aspects of cosmology, geology, and physics – basically the “big bang is evolution” fallacy taken several steps further. She wasn’t pro-Bible, or anti-evolution… she was entirely anti-science (the fact that she was arguing this electronically from the opposite side of the country was utterly lost on her).
Andy @ 59;
Why is it that so many people who are hostile to ‘evul book larnin’ science’ fail to appreciate that the very fact that they are debating over an electronic medium is proof that the scientific method has merit in and of itself? Do they think that the strange magic box in their study/living room/bedroom/local cyber-cafe runs on fairy dust?
Equally, given the fact that they:-
1) Are probably wearing clothing made from synthetic fibers
2) Are probably eating food that has been pasteurised or has otherwise been chemically preserved or purged of parasites and pathogens
3) Are probably only alive at all or in possession of their level of health because of modern medical science
4) Most likely regularly travel by means of a vehicle that relies on internal combustion for its motive power
5) Almost certainly flick on the light switch every night
You would think that they would realize the obvious; they are living as a member of a society that is dependent on technologies that function on principles discovered by science. To put it simply, civilisation itself runs on science. I wonder how anyone can be so wilfully blind as to somehow ignore this.
That violates relativity
Hmmm… if that wanker is right, it means that the most distant galaxies (as detected by the Hubble space telescope) are whipping around the earth every day at about 8 * 1014 times the speed of light.
I recall reading that modern inertial guidance systems are so sensitive they can detect your motion as the earth rotates, even if you’re just standing still.
Oh yeah, we got Relativity Deniers.
Yes, in fact this exact argument is made by Nicolaus Copernicus in the first chapter of his book, although I can’t immediately find the relevant quote…
FrankT:
…and atomic physics deniers:
http://www.commonsensescience.org/
I have seen these guys quoted approvingly on the pages of the Twin City Creation Science Association (the ones that run the science fair).
Anti science is anti science. Once you start, there’s no way to stop.
#60 Gregory Greenwood
Ahh, but all those wonderful things and great knowledge are produced by REAL science. REAL science is repeatable; can be put in a testtube and has all the answers. It is just revealing all the stuff that God created. Sort of like using Nature like the Bible – just open it up & figure out what is being said.
Fake ebilutionary type science is just speculation (it’s only a theory, after all); can’t be observed or repeated (bet you never saw a dinosaur evolve, eh?); and doesn’t have all the answers (hah, you admit that you don’t know how the first life evolved!).
The great thing about the “dualing science” scenario is that you can keep your cars,computers and cancer treatments and reject all that nasty science that challenges things you want to believe. And you don’t have to feel like an ignorant, anti-science rube while you are doing it.
Which is the real goal of the CreoID debaters – their REAL scientists tell people that they are wiser and more educated than all those elitist, lying materialist scientists when they reject all the knowledge that has been collected for hundreds of years.
What shocks and scares me is how many so-called “scientists” buy this line – the 700 who signed the “Dissent from Darwinism”; the shills at the DiscoTute…… We seem to be graduating hundreds of professionals who have no grasp what-so-ever of the scientific method.
As Martin Gardner describes this theory in The New Ambidextrous Universe, this was how Wheeler presented the idea to Feynman, who replied, “but that would require the universe to have equal quantities of matter and antimatter, which it doesn’t”. Wheeler then tried to handwave away that objection but was not successful.
That’s the thing about these guys – they’re obscure and powerless and at least have never become head of Government like in other countries I could mention ;)
It’s OK to choose a coordinate system with a stationary Earth at the center. The resulting equations of motion for everything else will be a mess, but no laws of physics are violated. The concern about Pluto and beyond exceeding the speed of light is a non-problem, because c (the constant) is an upper limit only in special relativity, i.e. in “inertial” reference frames.
Of course, this has no implications whatsoever for evolution or creationism. And anyone who wishes to use a geocentric reference frame must then take into account the effects of the odd gravitational field that arises from a universe of stuff whirling around us.
How do these people earn a living in their lives? What kind of jobs could they be good at, if they cant think through the geocentric idea?
On the other hand, if they are intentionally lying, they have such low morals.. I expect them to get into trouble with the law on some aspect or the other, and end up in jail.
From PZ’s article:
Oh dear, PZ, it seems you forgot all about the Fixed Earth website … which was cited in a memo distributed to the Texas House of Representatives as part of a claim that evolutionary biology was “religious”?
Oh look, it seems you told us about it earlier, PZ.
Bit of a slip up there PZ. Not like you to forget your own past reportage …
#72:
but the reportage quotes:
Point taken.
Mind you, it says a lot about the people involved that they didn’t vet the content before using it. Basically, they jsut read the tagline that tickled their ideological erogenous zones, assumed that the content was factual because it tickled their ideological erogenous zones, and made a laughing stock of themselves as far as the intelligent life forms on the planet are concerned.
Actually, when those Texas pols tried pushing that Fixed Earth wankery through the legislature, there were prokaryotes pissing themselves laughing at the resulting spectacle.