Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
who were ambushed responded in no uncertain terms, according to Colin Lecher in an article in Popular Science:
Along with Krauss, at least two of the mainstream scientists who appear in the film aren’t so happy about it. Max Tegmark, a brilliant MIT cosmologist and science communicator, is spoken of admiringly by DeLano in the radio show. When I asked about his appearance in the film, Tegmark emailed: “They cleverly tricked a whole bunch of us scientists into thinking that they were independent filmmakers doing an ordinary cosmology documentary, without mentioning anything about their hidden agenda or that people like Sungenis were involved.” Ditto for South African mathematician and cosmologist George Ellis, a well-respected professor at the University of Cape Town who wrote The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking. “I was interviewed for it but they did not disclose this agenda, which of course is nonsense,” he wrote me. “I don’t think it’s worth responding to—it just gives them publicity. To ignore is the best policy. But for the record, I totally disavow that silly agenda.”4
This film’s deceptive tactics and the ambush interviews mirror the similar efforts of the “intelligent design” creationists in their 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by the obscure character actor and right-wing celebrity Ben Stein, it ambushed a number of distinguished scientists and skeptics (including my friends Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptic Society, and Eugenie Scott, then director of the National Center for Science Education) with questions that sounded odd to them at the time. Their responses were then edited to sound like there was a giant conspiracy to suppress intelligent-design creationism from discussion in the public arena. Expelled opened to universal bad reviews (except in the evangelical circles, where it was required viewing) and made so little money that eventually its production company went bankrupt in 2011. But it created a lot of fuss before it flopped, which was the whole point.
The same might be said of The Principle. It screened in only a few theaters starting on October 24, 2014, and as of 2015, it had grossed a measly $89,543, much less than it cost to make.5 But the film was expected to lose money; it had a different goal. As Colin Lecher explained,
Despite its absurdity, the mere fact that DeLano, Sungenis, and the rest of their crew were able to fund and execute a slickly produced film, and to cajole famous physicists to sit and chat for it, makes the geocentrist fringe startlingly real: people who believe in these ideas not only exist, but have the wherewithal to make a movie. There’s nothing simple about producing a film, much less one with some of the most technically-minded people on the planet. In DeLano’s case, he is (or at least was) apparently steadily employed, eventually on chummy terms with a respected production company, and seems intimately familiar with science, even though his interpretations of it are a minority view, to put it charitably. If the film is absurd (it surely is), its creation was something clear-eyed, thought through.
Why did the creators bother to make the film if they realized that the respected scientists appearing would immediately denounce it? There’s the chance they didn’t expect the denouncements, but that seems unlikely. Another possibility, suggested by DeLano’s initial eagerness to talk to me, was that the establishment backlash had been part of the plan all along. Surely The Principle, after those countless media reports—including this one—is in a better position than it was before, even if potential viewers check it out only for novelty’s sake. Even if it’s fleeting, being the center of the universe has its perks.6
As they say in show business, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Anything that gets you noticed, no matter how critical or negative, gets you attention you might not otherwise have—and that was the whole point. There’s no sign that the film changed a lot of minds (especially since it was barely seen by anyone) or that geocentrism is a growing movement. For example, there have been no more repeats of the 2010 geocentrism conference, while there are now annual flat-earther meetings, and many organizations that tout creationism meet around the calendar.
Why do these people care so strongly about an issue that was settled over 350 years ago? The answer, as they say in so many of their documents and interviews, is religion. To them, anything that takes humans out of the center of the universe makes humans insignificant and no longer the center of God’s creation. Indeed, that was the reason for much of the resistance to heliocentrism in the early days. The Church was not only wedded to literal interpretations of Scripture; it also felt that humans were the apple of God’s eye and could not possibly be living anywhere but in the center of God’s creation. Many other people have noticed this too. For example, in 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote,
In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition.7
Indeed, we need no more evidence of this than the words of Sungenis himself: “You can’t have the earth at the center of the universe by chance…. The devil is a powerful foe and he will use something like [the model of a sun-centered solar system] to win his battle. If [scientists] have to admit that the earth is in the center of the universe, where does the power shift back to? It shifts back to the church.”8
How Do We Know?
As we have already mentioned in chapter 1, the common sense, intuitive view that humans have held since prehistoric times is that the sun, moon, and planets appear to be moving around us; therefore, the earth is the center of the universe. For us to visualize the system differently and think of ourselves as moving around the sun requires an early education that violates our senses and intuition. Many ideas in science do not agree with common sense; they are nonintuitive and require imagination and a lot of training to understand and accept. Yet that is what the evidence, from Copernicus to today, demonstrates.
As we did in chapter 2, it is worthwhile to briefly describe some of the evidence and observations that support the heliocentric model and falsify geocentrism. Science may not always be easy to understand, but as its methods and results are constantly challenged, tested, and subjected to peer review, they stand the test of time. It is important for any educated human in the twenty-first century to know some of this evidence, so that people understand why science supports heliocentrism. You should not just accept it because you were told to believe it while you were in school.
First, how do we know that the earth is rotating on its axis and that the sunrise and sunset are not caused by the sun going around us but by the earth rotating with respect to the sun?
1. Watch it from space: Obviously, the most straightforward evidence comes from spacecraft, which have repeatedly photographed the movement of the earth in real time. For example, there are videos showing the earth rotating as viewed by the Galileo spacecraft,9 and you can locate many by just searching for “earth rotation Galileo” in your browser. But modern geocentrists are much like flat-earthers and regard all evidence from NASA and all the other international space agencies as part of a big global government conspiracy involving all the world’s astronomers and space scientists, so that won’t convince one of them. This also applies to the extraterrestrial space telescopes like Hubble and Gaia, which are in orbit around the sun, not orbiting the earth, so they can see the earth’s motion from outside our sphere of influence.
2. Foucault’s pendulum: If you have been to some of the modern science museums or public observatories (like Griffith Park Planetarium in Los Angeles or Hayden Planetarium in New York), you might have seen a room where a long pendulum (fig. 3.4) is suspended from