Larry Krauss has been tweeting about clips of him being inserted into a “documentary” about geocentrism, and as a result has posted a robust rebuttal on the Future Tense blog at The Slate.
Obviously (as an atheist), I’m interested in this because I’ve quoted Krauss before remarking on a surprising apparent geocentrism in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) correlating with earth’s orbit around the sun. (Hat tip to Island / Rick Ryals linked multiple times in the link above.) On a cosmic scale that’s a kind of geocentrism – an anthropocentrism – we, our earth, our solar system, our milky way, our local group …. “we” seem to occupy a “special” place in our “observed” universe. One to which you can react (at least) two ways. Both start with – that’s mad, there’s something wrong here. The question is what might be wrong; either the very idea of geocentrism is wrong (mad, ridiculous, worthy only of scorn), or maybe the underlying (standard) cosmology against which we’re judging the CMB correlation is itself flawed. The first is political prejudice, the second is science. Unless of course the correlation has already been explained away by valid follow-up analysis of the “apparent” observations. A question I’ve asked Larry a few times in the blogo-twitter-sphere, to no avail.
Of course if you’re a faith-based literal-nut-case theist (the third option), as per the makers of the film I’ve not actually seen, then you cite a respected, famous, authoritative scientist on the side of your geo-anthropo-centrist-creationist agenda. And you get the obvious reactionary knee-jerk response – shooting creationist fish in a barrel. Oh what sport. Whatever turns you on Larry.
Don’t be a jerk just because creationist nut-cases are jerks – why play their game – instead, why not try some science Larry. Answer the question (ATFQ).
Why might CMB observations correlate with the place of “our” planet in the cosmos ?
[Hint – there are plenty of serious scientists out there with suspected candidates for the flaw in our accepted “standard” model.]