Off Topic > Other Conspiracy Theories

Stationary Earth Claim

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SolusLupus:
Wow, this just cracked me up:

http://www.fixedearth.com/

I can't tell if it's a parody or not.

Anyone familiar with this?

Echnaton:
Apparently it is the work of a right-wing antisemitic crank in Georgia.  See the section "2007 anti-evolution controversy" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bridges

ka9q:
Didn't the Michaelson-Morley experiment prove that the earth doesn't move? :-)

SolusLupus:
Huh, had to look that up.  Didn't know about that.  Interesting.

I think it's a common idea that Luminferous Aether was a preposterously stupid idea that someone much smarter than everyone else (Einstein) figured out and came in to totally change the scientific mindset.  Really, though, they ran experiments on it and that's when we started to accumulate evidence against it.

I'll have to remember that for later.

ka9q:

--- Quote from: SolusLupus on June 25, 2012, 08:44:42 PM ---someone much smarter than everyone else (Einstein) figured out and came in to totally change the scientific mindset.
--- End quote ---
A lot of pseudoscientists, Apollo deniers among them, make the claim that because scientists don't know everything for sure, they know nothing at all. They like to point to past scientific revolutions like the heliocentric model and relativity and compare themselves to great figures like Galileo, Newton and Einstein.

But there's a big difference between then and now. Physics knew it had problems in the late 19th and early 20th century. There were several unresolved paradoxes like the "ultraviolet catastrophe" (blackbody radiation was proportional to bandwidth, so emitted power ought to be infinite over infinite bandwidth) and the null result of the Michaelson-Morley experiment. Einstein and others (eg., Planck) proposed solutions to these already-known problems, in part based on prior work, and they made definite, testable predictions that were quickly found to be correct.

No such serious problems are still open today. We now have a pretty good handle on the basic laws of physics that govern the universe on an everyday, human scale. Physics research is now entirely at the extremes: the universe tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang; in or near black holes; extremely energetic collisions in volumes within that of a subatomic particle; or over distances comparable to the size of the universe.

Scientific research at "human scale" has moved up from basic physical laws to higher levels of abstraction, such as biology. Living things certainly follow the same basic laws of physics as everything else - vitalism was disproved long ago - but they're very difficult to apply directly to every detail of an extremely complicated organism. There are some ongoing attempts to model basic biological processes by first principles but it remains extremely intensive computationally. I sometimes run protein folding models on my Sony PS3, and despite having a very capable IBM Cell number crunching processor, in one day of real time it can only simulate several hundred nanoseconds in the evolution of a single, simple protein molecule. But no one seriously doubts these basic principles of physics, so the chances of somebody coming in from left field and turning all of today's physics upside down seems pretty remote.


 

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