My dearly beloved sister is a bit of a conspiracy theorist.  She periodically sends me stuff to research because I am good at that.  This is one she sent me last week that had me laughing when I first watched it and then I spent too much of my time following all the links to this guys site:

Here is what she sent me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI

And here is a little of what I was able to research in my limited time:

http://www.nealadams.com/morescience.html

Mr. Adams seems to putting this information out there in a “I really believe it” way.  He even has an invitation to scientist…I am assuming to rebut him.

As I see that there are many scientist here, I was wondering what you believe about this?

Have fun

Anne

Hi tranquilsea ... this is just too dull to get my way through. But the theory that the earth is growing is just too silly to rebut. Clearly it’s not ingesting anything that would add that kind of mass to it each year, so his theory (by his own admission) involves a revolution of all of science ... just because he can get all the continents to fit very roughly together on a reduced-size globe.

This is crank stuff and not worth the ten minutes to see the YouTube video.

I found it moderately interesting mainly from the point of view that this guy has obviously put a lot of time into this….so why?  Maybe the same reasons that many people post those YouTube videos

My mind tends to pull me down esoteric lines only to debunk them in the end.

Watch or don’t watch   I take the view that you never know where you’ll find a kernel of truth.  Most people did honestly believe we were the centre of the universe at one point and that the earth was flat….

The Earth is smaller than assumed                                      German researchers at the University of Bonn said that the world is smaller than first thought.  Although the discrepancy is not large, it is significant: Geodesists from the University of Bonn have remeasured the size of the Earth in a long lasting international cooperation project. The blue planet is accordingly some millimeters smaller than previously assumed.

TS, I’m not about to waste my time going to his sites, however, the observation that the continents roughly fit together has been around for quite a while.  Additional evidence is that prehistoric artifacts at the apparent junction points are quite similar.  This doesn’t show that the earth is growing, but rather that continental drift exists.  The outer mantle of the earth consists of plates that are “floating” on the underlying magma and are slowly moving apart, together or along one another.  There are about twenty plates that are moving in reference to each other.  I’m not a geologist so I can’t give you much information, but your best bet would be to google “plate tectonics”.  I’m sure you would get a great deal of information to give your sister.

Occam

I actually have followed plate tectonics fairly closely for a lay person.  I have one son who is mini-geologist in the making and we just got through watching a pretty good PBS documentary series called, “Miracle Planet”.  I am a bit of a closet science nut so he comes by his curiosity quite naturally.

Like I said in my first post, watching the video had me laughing with skepticism.  The first thing that came to mind, for me, was that the math doesn’t hold up *if* the earth is hollow.  There would have to be many, many scientists that would have to toss their research out the window if this was true.

I guess the thing that intrigues me the most is how people come to these beliefs, so perhaps I was a little vague in my initial posts.

Is a hollow earth possible?....Probably not, but if you follow String Theory news anything is really possible….according to those theorists

tranquilsea - 20 September 2007 07:30 PM

I guess the thing that intrigues me the most is how people come to these beliefs, so perhaps I was a little vague in my initial posts.

Who knows? I imagine it’s a mix of things. I think a good number of these cranks are actually mentally unstable, perhaps borderline schizophrenic or the like. Others are megalomaniacal obsessive/compulsives. And a few are just out-and-out charlatans trying to make a buck. Depends on the case.

I’m not as concerned with how or why these people come up with these strange ideas as I am with the myriads of gullible people who accept them.  For the former we have mental health professionals.  What can we do about the latter?

Occam

Occam - 21 September 2007 02:00 PM

What can we do about the latter?

Make education fun, entertaining and “cool.” Just like Sagan did it, and nobody since then has been able to repeat it. Why doesn’t Dawkins come up with his “Cosmos” for example?

Occam - 21 September 2007 02:00 PM

I’m not as concerned with how or why these people come up with these strange ideas as I am with the myriads of gullible people who accept them.  For the former we have mental health professionals.  What can we do about the latter?

Occam

I once heard or read an interesting comment by a scientist…probably one who is working on String Theory…that a large portion of what we *know* to be true is later proven to be false if you look at evolution of science.  It is very hard to move someone from a dearly held belief to even accept that something else may be true. (Just look at how frantically Christians hold onto Christianity).  Look at how trivialized Einstein was….Tesla was…Newton was…by the “scientific community” who then later (sometimes much much later) realized that they actually were on to something.  It would be safe to assume that they were all called “lunatics” at one point in their lives and I know that both Newton and Tesla suffered breakdowns at points.  It doesn’t mean that their contributions to science and math are any less.

There are also many scientist that run head long down one path that leads to no where.  I don’t think that that means we should stop looking, asking questions, proving or disproving.

One of the points that this guy that is pounding the “Hollow Earth” theory makes is that there is no subduction on Mars and therefore there can be none of Earth either.  Maybe.  I still believe that math and physics fall more on the side that Earth is solid.

Have we actually been able to drill far enough to verify what Earth is made out of?  No.  I know that science has done the math and the physics to estimate what is in there but it is still in theory, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Remember back a couple of decades ago when we were all taught and told that the universe was shrinking?  They worked the figures and discovered that we are expanding.

The only certainty in life is change…

Anne

Yes, scientists as people are no more immune to error or to holding onto wrong ideas long past their usefulness. It should make us humble. Still, science itself as a process accounts for this, and in the long term leads to progressive improvemnt in understanding, which can’t be said of the major alternative, theology.

Yes, scientists as people are no more immune to error or to holding onto wrong ideas long past their usefulness. It should make us humble. Still, science itself as a process accounts for this, and in the long term leads to progressive improvemnt in understanding, which can’t be said of the major alternative, theology.

True   Which is why I love science.  How one can account for some documents that were written thousands of years ago as “truth” is beyond me.

I actually had one person tell me that the Catholic Church holds all the original letter that make up the bulk of the New Testament.  I asked if she had ever had the chance to read them….

Actually the Vatican is one building that I would completely enter and absorb anything I could if I was invisible It would be interesting to read what they have under lock and key.

I believe the bible has been modified thoughout religious history to conform to the beliefs and standards of the people in power at the time.  When it was put together at or just after the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, the leaders carefully rejected quite a bit of the earlier text because it disagreed with their ideas.  I think part of these were called the apocrypha, but then I’m not a biblical scholar.

Probably a lot of the stuff is in the Vatican’s archives, but never allowed to be seen by anyone below the level of cardinal.

Occam

I wonder… Dan Brown could probably come up with an interesting story about what the Vatican is hiding! I would expect a lot of the outright incriminating stuff to have been burnt long ago, but who knows. DOubt it would shake the faithful much either way, but interesting from a historical poitn of view.

Some years ago a large clay container was found in the desert.  Those scrolls, now dubbed the “Nag Hammadi Scrolls” contained many of the texts that had been condemned by the newly formed Catholic Church.  Scholars have translated them and many of them read like the Book of John…which has an oriental flavour to it.  As the church was accepting *this*” book into the Bible and condemning *that* book to be burned….many monasteries that revered those outlawed books were outraged, rightfully so.

I think that having the Bible translated out of Latin into a common language in 1380s kind of screwed the church at the time because they couldn’t really change that much of it without lay people noticing…if they read well enough to get through the whole thing and, of course, the rest is history as the Protest movement was born.

One of the factors that really puzzled me while I was attending church was how little people knew about why they attended a Protestant church vs. a Catholic one.  Actually, people didn’t question much at all <sigh>