Welcome to GeocentrismDebunked.org

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhvFKq5o5vU

A couple of weeks ago I posted “Elementary Physics Blunders in Sungenis’s Reply to Camille Carlisle” in which Dr. Alec MacAndrew demonstrated, among other things, that Bob Sungenis had botched a simple math problem that a high school physics student should be able to do.  Well, Sungenis has fired back with a reply that, counting footnotes and an appendix, runs to more than 23,000 words.  It would appear that he hopes to make up in word count what he lacks in basic math skills.  (This is a longstanding pattern with Sungenis, who seems to think that the length of an argument is equivalent to the strength of an argument).

The first thing to note amidst this sea of words is that Sungenis never actually acknowledges his basic math blunder.  The figure he asserted in his original piece—1.18 x 10³⁴ Newtons—was wrong, too high by a factor of one million (yes, you read that correctly).  Now, skipping over the initial error, Sungenis runs the numbers again—“so that everyone is on the same page”—using an on-line calculation tool.  This time he comes up with a vastly different figure—1.18 x 10⁶—but doesn’t seem to recognize the discrepancy.  And it gets worse.

His second answer is also wrong—in fact, much more wrong than the first.

Sungenis forgot to include the exponents of the numbers as he plugged them into the on-line calculator.  So the first time he crunched the numbers he got a figure too high by a factor of a million.  The second time he crunched the numbers he got a figure that’s too low by a whopping 22 orders of magnitude.  If you include the exponents in the calculation, you arrive at the correct exponent provided by Dr. MacAndrew, which is 10²⁸.

debunkingalecmcandrew.blogspot.ca/2014/11/alec-in-wonderland-meets-queen-of

Now think about this for a minute.  After being publicly corrected on his initial, elementary blunder, Sungenis presumably placed his full attention on this calculation.  And yet he still could not manage to get it right, even when he already had the correct answer provided to him by Dr. MacAndrew!  Sungenis continues to demonstrate that he is simply unable to reliably perform even basic, high school level physics calculations.

There are some people who are willing to look past the panoply of conspiracy theories that Sungenis has peddled over the years (see “Piling On, Or Holding Back?”).  After all, even a blind nut finds a squirrel sometimes, right?  There are people who are willing to look past his plagiarism of other peoples’ work (see “Top Geocentrists Caught Plagiarizing”.)  But is it really reasonable to take seriously a challenge to the entire world of physics and astrophysics from a man who repeatedly demonstrates that he can’t even get the correct answer to the most basic math problem, even after being corrected and provided with the right answer?  Does one really need to wade through 23,000 words of verbiage once he’s discovered that Sungenis is utterly incompetent in even high school level physics?

www.nasa.gov/solarium/

Physicist Tom Bridgman has written a lot of great material over the years critiquing geocentrism (you can access a summary of his material here.)  Over four years ago Dr. Bridgman issued the “Lagrange point challenge” in response to geocentrist Rick DeLano’s breezy claim that “Geocentrism perfectly accounts for LaGrange points”. Although hardly shrinking violets when it comes to challenges, the geocentrists did not say boo about this for more than four years. Then earlier this year they strutted out with their “answer”, which turned out to be nothing more than a combination of basic math errors (in the part that they actually tried to do themselves) along with a more detailed Lagrange point derivation that was plagiarized wholesale from two other scientists (on the science/math blunders see here and here, on the outright plagiarism see here and here.)

Now, in a new article “Geocentrism: Flunking the Lagrange Point Challenge”, Bridgman weighs in with his own commentary on the failure of the new geocentrists to meet his challenge.

Some excerpts:

I commend Dr. MacAndrew for his analysis.  He exposed the flawed math in the first section, when Bouw tried to remap the physics into a rotating geocentric frame using the standard Newtonian analysis.  Compare Dr. Bouw’s math to that presented at Wikipedia: Centrifugal force (rotating reference frame).  Dr. MacAndrew identified a serious mathematical error in the section.  So far, there is NOTHING in this analysis that makes Earth a preferred frame in any absolute sense.

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If a student had been caught turning this in as part of a physics homework assignment, the instructor would certainly be justified in reporting the student for disciplinary action for plagiarism.

Additionally, there is NOTHING in this equation set that relies on the existence of an absolute fixed location, such as Earth (as the Geocentrists insist).  This analysis works with a ‘center’ as Earth (for the Earth-Moon Lagrange points), or the Sun (for Sun-Earth or Sun-any other planet Lagrange points).

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Sungenis invokes Mach & Einstein to bolster his poor position.  But Mach and Einstein expanded on Newton’s work,  which expanded the concept of no absolute spatial reference frame to include time as well, and that reference frames and ‘centers’ can be chosen for the convenience of solving the problem at hand.  The methodology defines NO absolute position.  I wrote more on Geocentrists invoking Mach at Geocentrism: Mach, ‘Aether Drag’ and Aberration.

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It is difficult to interpret Dr. Bouw’s ‘article’ as anything other than a document created to deceive.  Combined with Sungenis’ defense of it, they appear to document two violations of the Ten Commandments.:

1) Thou shalt not steal
2) Thou shalt not bear false witness

As Jesus noted in Matthew 7:15-23, his followers will be recognized by their actions more than their words.  Such explicit acts of deception are yet another reason I regard the Geocentrists and Young-Earth creationists as the ‘wolves’ which Jesus warned his followers about (see Creationist Junk Debunked).

See the whole article: “Geocentrism: Flunking the Lagrange Point Challenge”

“Elementary Physics Blunders in Sungenis’s Reply to Sky and Telescope’s Camille Carlisle”

www.yourepeat.com/g/Propitiatory

In an attempt to rebut Camille Carlisle, the Science Editor for Sky and Telescope magazine, Robert Sungenis, the leader of the modern geocentrists, demonstrates yet again that he is simply not competent to handle even high school level physics.  In a new article “Elementary Physics Blunders in Sungenis’s Reply to Sky and Telescope’s Camille Carlisle”, Dr. Alec MacAndrew points out still more basic errors in Sungenis’s work.  These are compounded by Sungenis’s replacement of the well-known and perfectly adequate mechanism of gravity with a made-up medium that, “magically [does] just what he needs it to do, while remaining completely undetectable whenever he doesn’t need it.”

This is what passes for “science” in geocentric circles.  As always, you have to ask yourself if you’re really going to exchange a centuries-long scientific consensus for what these fellows have to say.

Here are some excerpts from “Elementary Physics Blunders in Sungenis’s Reply to Sky and Telescope’s Camille Carlisle” to entice the reader for more:

You can explain anything at all, to your own satisfaction, if you make it up as you go along. Let’s look at this train wreck in more detail. . . .

Sungenis mangles not just freshman college physics but high school physics – pure ignorance. . . .

Sungenis tried to calculate the force using the alternative expression F_c=mω²r, as he gets the numeric part correct within rounding errors. But the exponent is wrong by a factor of a million. Yes, that’s right – unbelievably, Sungenis, in a dismal display of incompetence, gets this trivial sum wrong by a factor of a million. . . .

How does Sungenis explain the Sun’s annual revolution around the Earth, which requires a centripetal force not twice, not ten times, not 100 times, but 332,000 times greater than gravity provides? The geocentrists have invented an entity, which they call the “Planck medium”, and Sungenis claims that it “absorbs” the centrifugal force. Needless to say, he doesn’t describe the physical properties of this medium which allow it to “absorb” the centrifugal forces. Does it do so gravitationally, by viscous drag, by electrostatics or magnetics? Who can say? How can it “absorb” these stupendous dynamic forces, and yet be completely undetectable? Only Bob knows. . . .

In order to answer the challenge that the Sun orbiting the Earth is dynamically absurd, Sungenis has to invoke an ad hoc explanation, using a medium for which there is not the slightest shred of evidence, and which, in spite of its supposed mind-boggling density, is completely undetectable, directly or indirectly. He proposes no quantified mechanism by which this medium “absorbs” these vast centrifugal forces while allowing planets and satellites to move freely through it. No-one else performing real, complicated celestial mechanics calculations (like NASA or ESA for example!) has to invoke this fantasy. This made-up medium, this fairy dust has no physical interaction other than magically doing just what he needs it to do while remaining completely undetectable whenever he doesn’t need it – way to go, Bob. . . .

[Sungenis] often criticises cosmologists’ hypotheses of dark matter and dark energy, claiming that they are poorly evidenced ad hoc solutions to the problem of missing mass in galaxies and the accelerating expansion of the Universe. But here he is, proposing a solution to the dynamical problem of a revolving Sun, where he has to explain the problem that the gravitational force is a whopping 332,000 times too small to maintain the Sun in a an annual geocentric orbit, by invoking an entirely arbitrary, undetectable, unquantifiable and, frankly, magical idea. That’s ironic, because although the composition of dark matter is unknown, its presence can be and has been detected and quantified throughout the Universe by its gravitational interaction with other matter and with radiation. It is an entirely reasonable hypothesis that is consistent with other things that we know about the Universe – whereas Sungenis’s Planck medium not only lacks evidence but is incompatible with observations. . . .

the gravitational attraction between the Sun and Earth is equal to the centrifugal force of the Earth’s annual revolution.  Is this an amazing coincidence? Of course it’s not. It’s the simple consequence of Earth’s orbit around the Sun – the force of the Sun’s gravitational attraction is exactly equal to the centripetal force required for the Earth’s annual orbit at its distance of ~150 million kilometres from the sun – no magical media to “absorb” the centrifugal force is required, just straightforward orbital mechanics based on standard Newtonian physics, such as can be applied to all the planets, including the Earth. That’s physics, not geocentric wishful thinking.

For the whole article, see “Elementary Physics Blunders in Sungenis’s Reply to Sky and Telescope’s Camille Carlisle”