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My lab:
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There's nothing like a little Sunday morning insanity devilmad.png I'm having breakfast while Freya is taking her first nap and while I'm browsing through the morning news, my eyes spot the headline (under the 'science' category no less!): "And yet it does not move" (in German). The article reports about a meeting of geocentrists ("Galileo was wrong") which is to take place next month in Ohio in the US. BoingBoing has been onto these nutcases about a month ago already, somehow I missed it.

Organizer of the event is someone who calls himself Dr. Robert Sungenis, but there is litle reason to believe the title is anything but make-believe and wishful thinking by anti-semite Sungenis: it is in religious studies, which of course makes him an expert in reality-based studies such as physics. Sungenis also seems to be rather fickle in what kind of superstition he's supposed to believe in as he converted to protestantism when he was 19 from being Catholic and then reverted back to Catholicism when he was 37. At least one can't claim he's been overly dogmatic on what is the one true religion From what I can find about him, he has studied so many old books, mostly written by bronze-age goat-herders, that now he is convinced that modern physics got it all wrong and the bronze-age was the true age of enlightenment. To hell with large-hadron colliders, the answers are all in decaying scrolls telling ancient camp-fire stories. Or something like that. I wonder why he even dares using electricty, running water or airplanes at all

Among the speakers are such luminaries as Hugh Miller. Mr. Miller is credited with a "Dr." on the website, but given Mr. Miller's claim to fame, I'll treat that degree with caution for now. Mr. Miller was the genius who actually got a piece of a dinosaur fossil carbon dated and was surprised he got the result back as something between 10-16 thousand years. Now where to begin to describe the stupidity? For one, try to weigh yourself on one of those old-fashioned scales where the needle can go all the way around. If you're too heavy for the scales, it'll show the value of a much lighter person. Similarly take the odometer on a really old car. If it's rolled around once, you will get the reading of a much younger car. If the measuring device is known to not work for what you want to measure, only fools do it anyway. More likely, if the result had been more than a few tens of thousands of years, the lab doing the testing would probably have done the testing again and again, because they wouldn't assume that someone would actually be so foolish to test something out of the usual dating range for carbon 14. Given the error range at trace amounts of carbon 14 (probably due to contamination), one of these tests would probably eventually come up with a date range at the far end of the method, simply by chance.

It goes on: "Robert J. Bennett, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in General Relativity from Stevens Institute of Technology". Interestingly enough, that institute actually exists (see their physics program), but the title is about as laughable as a PhD in Darwinism, Newtonism, synaptic plasticity or some other equally absurdly narrow field. It is still remarkable, though, that every once in a while you find people who can go through seemingly regular education, without it leaving any trace on them. It's what statisticians call 'ouliers' and us neuroscientists call "consistently learning resistant" I'm sure everyone currently in or graduated from Steven's is pretty embarrassed when someone mentions their university in conjunction with Bennett...

After these three, I stopped checking the speakers, Freya woke up

I'd love to conduct a poll aming the attendees of this conference, just to find out how many of them believe the earth is flat, Elvis is alive and the moonlandings were fake (see here).

Obviously, geocentrism was wrong 400 years ago and of course is still wrong today. If you want a very elegant and convincing account, you can go to "Starts with a bang", with lots of pictures and data and explanations.

For this post, I'll just stick with the analogy by award-winning popularizer of astronomy, Jakob Staude from the Max-Planck Institute of Astronomy: "the earth can't keep the sun in an orbit any better than an ant can swing a hammer". 'nuff said tooth.png
Posted on Sunday 03 October 2010 - 13:09:21 comment: 0
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