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 a high ceiling; its base is a big circular platform with a series of pegs or other markers around the edges. (There are many good video demonstrations online if you search for “Foucault pendulum.”) If you watch the pendulum for a while, you will see it slowly knock down one peg after another. When you first see it, if you note which peg has been knocked over, go spend some time looking at other exhibits, and return before you leave. You will probably see that the pendulum has knocked down another peg. (More modern versions have lights that are triggered when the pendulum passes over them.)
Figure 3.4. A. Foucault’s pendulum. (Photo by the author.) B. Diagram showing how Foucault pendulum over the North Pole would swing in one plane but on earth would appear to move in a circle. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
This experiment is known as Foucault’s pendulum, first demonstrated by French physicist Léon Foucault in 1851. If you set the pendulum in motion on a motionless earth, it would continue to swing back and forth in a single plane, as long as enough energy is supplied to keep the pendulum from slowing down and stopping. But the earth is rotating beneath the pendulum, so as soon as the pendulum starts, the earth moves a certain number of degrees beneath it every hour. This makes the pendulum appear to move around in a circle, but what is really happening is that the pendulum is moving in the same plane and the earth is turning beneath it. Modern geocentrists have no good explanation for this except vague references to Mach’s principle, which concerns the difficulty of describing anything in an absolute reference frame.
3. Coriolis effect: Another even larger result of the earth’s rotation is the Coriolis effect, something I have to explain early in every class I teach about oceanography, meteorology, and climate change, since it is fundamental to the way oceanic and atmospheric currents move around the globe. You can demonstrate it on a kid’s playground merry-go-round (fig. 3.5). If you are on one side of the spinning merry-go-round and try to throw a ball to your friend on the opposite side, the ball will appear to curve away from your friend (to the right if it’s spinning counterclockwise; to the left if it’s spinning clockwise). In simplest terms, this is because your friend is a moving target, so as soon as you release the ball thrown straight at him, he moves away from the point you targeted where he used to be, and the ball will miss him. It appears to curve sideways from your rotating perspective, but it’s actually moving in a straight path; you and your friend are doing the
