Au-some!

This past month there have been numerous stories about how all the gold in the universe was created.  Just google "gold neutron star", and you'll see what I mean. So being me, I wanted to read the original research: An R-Process Kilonova Associated with the Short-Hard GRB 130603B, E. Berger, W. Fong, and R. Chornock of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (1)

I first gave it a cursory read. I couldn't find a mention of the creation of gold anywhere, so I took advantage of technology and used the Find command in my browser. Nothing there, but then I realized why. Someone at Harvard must have written a press release, and in order to get the media interested in the research - which is legitimately important - they  made it sexy and what is sexier than gold.

So I sat down to read the kilonova paper carefully. I didn't have to read far before I read the phrase r-process and Justin Huang's graduate level nuclear physics class came to mind. [Although r-process is in the title, my mind didn't click in until later.]

First some background for those of you not nuclear or astrophysicists. After a microsecond, protons and neutrons formed and couple of minutes or so later, the universe had cooled enough for primordial deuterium, and helium nuclei to form.  Many years later, 379,000 actually, electrons combined with these nuclei to form atoms. It wasn't until a hundred or so million years that stars began to shine.

CREDIT: Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA 304)
of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

Fred Hoyle and his colleagues in a classic paper (2) showed how the elements other than hydrogen and the primordial helium were created. I won't go into a long explanation of stellar evolution, but the elements up to iron were created by nuclear fusion. The Sun is fusing two hydrogen nuclei into a helium nucleus and this process releases a lot of energy (we call it sunshine). I'm oversimplifying here, but when the hydrogen in our Sun is depleted in about 5 billion years, it will start to fuse helium. When the helium is gone, our star will be a very hot ball of carbon and oxygen. The Sun will be a white dwarf - basically a very large and very hot diamond in the sky. 

Stars more massive than the Sun will keep fusing and shining up to the point where iron is formed. The process stops there because to fuse iron and elements heavier than it requires an input of energy.

If you now look at a periodic table, you should wonder where did all the other elements like gold come from. There are two processes that are responsible for these heavy elements: the r (rapid) and s (slow) processes. The s-process cannot create elements heavier than lead and this method occurs in old giant stars. 

The Periodic Table of the Elements with hydrogen, helium, iron, and gold highlighted.

Hoyle et al. suggested that the r-process occurred in type II supernovae. This sort of supernova comes about when the thermal motion of the nuclei is not enough to counteract the effect of the star's self-gravity. The core of the star collapses and the outer layers are violently ejected. Depending on the initial mass of the star, the result of the core collapse is either a neutron star or a black hole.

The problem with this hypothesis is that given the abundance of the elements either most supernovae did not expel much matter or that supernovae ejects only a small amount of the material. Given the intensity of a type II supernova, either possibility seems unlikely.

The Crab Nebula, the aftermath of a supernova.
CREDIT: NASA/ESA

One possibility was the collision of neutron stars (3), and here we're back to the kilonova paper. Berger and his co-workers present evidence of "the presence of excess near-IR emission matching the expected brightness and color of an r-process powered transient (a kilonova)" and the inferred mass ejected during the collision "matches the expectations from numerical [neutron star] merger simulations."

My head exploding.
CREDIT: Gil Thorpe

Look at that ring on your finger or the chain around your neck. Then imagine two neutron stars colliding. 

References:

(1) An R-Process Kilonova Associated with the Short-Hard GRB 130603B, E. Berger, W. Fong, and R. Chornock, http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3960v2.

(2) Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, E.M. Burbridge, G.R. Burbidge, W.A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 547 - 650 (1957).

(3) R-Process in Neutron Star Mergers, C. Freiburghaus, S. Rosswog, and F.K. Thielemann, The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 525, No. 2, pp. L121-L124 (1999)

The United States Bullion Depository, Fort Knox, KY, shown here in a scene from the James Bond movie Goldfinger.
CREDIT: United Artists/Eon Productions

Wingnut Thermodynamics

Bryan Fischer, part-time nuclear physicist, now lectures on thermodynamics.*

Remember that the second law of thermodynamics - one of powerful evidences for creation - is that neither energy nor matter can be either created or destroyed.

Um… Bryan? That's the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the conservation of energy. The second law states that the entropy of a closed system never decreases.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZtoVc1gQw

A brief digression. Did you notice how he emphasizes the word law? That is a sure sign that the speaker doesn't understand what a scientific law is or how it differs from a basic principle and from a theory.

Now he makes a claim about the origin of the universe.

There is nothing in inside the observable universe that can explain the origin of matter or energy.

Why is it that people like Bryan Fischer make statements like this as though they are undisputed facts? The origin of energy (mass is just one form of energy) is an open scientific question. Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene are just two physicists who have written popular accounts on the nature of matter and energy.

So what is the logical conclusion? Someone outside the universe put it there.

Logical conclusion? Fischer must never have taken a course in logic. First he assumes the truth of his premise. Then he creates a false dilemma - either there is no one or there is someone. Notice the lack of something. Of course, the someone he has in mind is his version of the christian deity.

The universe is headed toward a heat death.

Now Fischer gets the 2nd law essentially correct. The universe will according to current models keep expanding, increase in entropy, and grow very cold.

This is a scientific law predated by the psalmist back in 900 B.C.

Wait for it.

Of old you laid the foundation of earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain.

Psalm 102, verses 25 and half of 26.  Then he makes a statement as though it were a fact.

Matter and energy are not eternal. It had a beginning and it's got an end. 

Earlier he calls the eventual state of the universe a heat death. I think he does this so his listeners can conjure in their minds the biological meaning of death, but in physics, this term first coined by Lord Kelvin means that the universe has cooled to such a point that the universe's entropy is maximized and the energy in the universe has been uniformly distributed.

My question about Fischer and others like him is 

Are you deliberately misleading your followers about science 

or do you really believe this crap?"

If you'd like to hear Fischer discuss geology and paleontology, chick here. You will be entertained when he claims only eyewitness accounts can be trusted.

*Thanks to Right Wing Watch for "monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement."

Wingnut Nuclear Physics

Before there was any experimental evidence - in fact, before experimental evidence was even possible, the Greek philosophers Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus believed that matter consisted of atoms. It wasn't until the 19th century however that atomic theory had experimental validation. Albert Einstein provided in 1905 a crucial explanation of Brownian motion* that gave atomic theory a firm basis.

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger, and Ernest Marsden showed that the atom had a nucleus which we now understand to consist of protons and neutrons.  This presented a puzzle for scientists though.  A proton has a positive electrical charge while a neutron has none.  Given that the nucleus is extremely tiny, the repulsion of the protons must be huge. What is keeping the nucleus together?

Bryan Fischer:
CREDIT: American Family Radio

It wasn't until the late '60s that physicists began to understand that protons and neutron were themselves made up up of even smaller things called quarks.  The attractive force between the quarks is what was keeping the nucleus from flying apart.

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch, I came across Bryan Fischer's recent video in which he enlightens his listeners on his version of nuclear theory and the force that binds the nucleus, but before we watch the video, let's understand who Bryan Fischer is.

Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association (AFA) and the host of the radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio. AFA is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, and Bryan Fischer's comments on homosexuality were specifically cited.

At the beginning of this clip, Fischer states

One of the age-old questions of science is what keeps the nucleus together.

Later, he says

How does that thing stay together? What hold its together? They've been looking for what scientists call the nuclear glue that keeps them from flying apart.  

Now we know. Now we know what the glue is that holds together the entire universe and keeps it from flying apart.

The answer according to Bryan Fischer?

It is Jesus Christ. In him, all things hold together.

The first question that pops into my head is what happened in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

CREDIT: U.S. Department of Energy

*Brownian motion is the random motion of small particles, like dust grains, suspended in a fluid.  Robert Brown first observed this in 1827.

Baby Pictures

A baby picture of the universe!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/multimedia/pia16873.html

This is a map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover radiation of the Big Bang, made by the Planck mission of the European Space Agency.    This light was emitted when the universe was 380,000 years old. 

There's a number of AWESOME results here.

1. The colors represent small fluctuations in the temperature of the radiation, about 1 part in 100,000 or 0.001%.  Since the average temperature is a mere 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), the fluctuations are roughly 0.00003 K.  To put this in perspective, imagine setting your oven to 350ºF and it never varies by more than 0.008ºF.

2. This light was created just 80,000 years after the universe was cool enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form.

I couldn't find any baby pictures,
but here I am when I'm about
10% of my current age.

3. It provides the best estimate for the age of the universe.  13.82 billion years.

4. The universe is 4.9% normal matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons for the most part.) Dark matter makes up 26.8% and dark energy 68.3%.

5. The universe is amazingly uniform, isotropic in the physicist's lingo. But there is a tiny difference in the size of the fluctuations in one half of the sky as compared to the other half.  Intriguing!

6. This picture represents the universe when it was just 0.00002750 of its present age.  Let's compare this to one of my students who say is 20 years old; this student was only 5 hours at 0.00002750 of 20 years.    

2 Peter 3:8 & Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity

On March 26, Steve Hess posted to The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official) FaceBook page. I have copied the text verbatim.

I guess me merging einstines equations with the bible isn't science enough for you, what do you honestly know about quantum mechanics and cosmology?  And we are the ignorant ones

Followed by Mr. Hess's derivation of something again copied verbatim.

here is something interesting if you take peter 3:8 which mention's a difference in time and plug it into einestines special theory of relitivity you get this. here i will show you

EDIT: I miscopied one number -  7.5060981.

To save you the trouble of running to a Bible, here is the verse Mr. Hess is referring to.

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. (NIV)

Mr. Hess is impressed that the Bible seems to predict the speed of light.  However, he lacks understanding of what the time dilation formula is about.

What this equation deals with is the relative motion of two laboratories (okay - inertial reference frames for the physicists).  If lab A is moving by lab B at a constant velocity then when the observer in lab B looks at a clock in lab A, he measures clock A to be running slow.  That is, if clock B ticks off 60 sec, then clock A will tick off a time less than 60 sec.

So if the lord is in lab B watching us whiz by at 99.9999999996% of the speed of light then he would measure 1000 years go by while we age just one day or if we are watching him hurtle through space with that speed, we would measure 1000 years while he(?) experiences just one day.

Lest one worry about the word theory which has a different meaning to scientists than to the nonspecialist, this is a well documented effect.  One well known experiment* was performed by David H. Fritsch and James H Smith. Smith, by the way, was the professor who taught me special relativity at the University of Illinois. They measured that muons, a component of cosmic rays, survive 8.8 times longer as they pass through the Earth's atmosphere than they do at rest in a physics lab.  The factor 8.8 corresponds to the time dilation factor these muons have by moving at a speed  99.5% of the speed of light.

*David H. Fritsch and James H. Smith, "Measurement of the Relativistic Time Dilation Using μ-Mesons," Am. J. of Phys., 31, 342-355 (1963).

Here's the original image posted by Mr. Hess.

Use the Force, Luke

The United States will not be building a Death Star.

Death Star from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). CREDIT: Lucas Films

On November 14, 2012, John D. from Longmont, CO petitioned the White House to "secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016."  The appeal suggests that "by focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense." 

The White House has responded.  While the Obama administration is supportive of the petitioners desire for job creation and maintaining a strong national defense, the government will not be allocating scarce research and development funds on a Death Star for three reasons.

Reason #1:

The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.

Reason #2:

The Administration does not support blowing up planets.

Reason #3 and the absolute best reason for not building this weapon of mass destruction:

Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

July 4 is Higgsdependence Day

Very early this morning, CERN*, the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherché Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research), announced a major discovery.  A major piece of the universal puzzle is now in place.  Scientists have observed an elementary particle that is consistent with predictions made by the Standard Model.  That elementary particle has been named the Higgs boson after Peter Higgs,** one of the theoretical physicists who predicted its existence.

What is the Higgs boson, and why is it important?

Every interaction (force) in nature is mediated by a gauge boson.  Here's an analogy: Suppose you want to interact with a friend, but you're both blindfolded and gagged.  You both have a large bag of Nerf® balls,  so you both start throwing.  You will know where your friend is when you get hit.  

There are only four fundamental interactions: electromagnetic, gravitational, weak, and strong.  The photon is the EM boson; the graviton is the gravitational boson; W-, W+, and Z0 are the weak bosons, and the gluons are the strong ones.  Where does the Higgs fit in?

The Standard Model, the theory behind the interactions excluding gravity, has been very successful at explaining most of nature.  It lacks the physics of dark matter, dark energy, and gravity, but physicists everywhere are working on expanding it through efforts such as string theory, superstring theory, and M-brane theory.  The model does predict the existence of the Higgs boson that causes all the other particles to have mass.

How does this happen?  Here's another analogy:  Imagine a large cocktail party of physicists.^† I walk into the room, and since I'm not well known, I can get through the room and to the bar rather quickly.  Then Peter Higgs walks in.  Being quite the celebrity, he attracts a large crowd of admirers. The interaction works similarly.  When an electron moves through the Higgs field^§, it attracts some Higgs bosons, but when a up quark moves through the field, it attracts many more, and hence, has more mass.

Some additional notes:

In 1993, Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi wrote the book "The God Particle: If The Universe Is The Answer, What Is The Question?"  Lederman joked that "the publisher wouldn't let us call [the Higgs Boson] the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."

CERN and its American counterpart Fermi Lab can be thought as as time machines; that is, when experiments are being done, scientists are in effect recreating the conditions of the early universe.  Observing the Higgs boson brings us back to within a picosecond or so after the Big Bang. [A picosecond is 10^–12 seconds or one billionth of a second.]

Peter Higgs and the equation
describing the Higgs boson

Peter Higgs once suggested that the Higgs boson be named the ABEGHHK’tH "all the people who discovered it or rediscovered it," those being Phil Anderson, Robert Brout, Francois Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen, Peter Higgs, Tom Kibble, and Gerard ‘t Hooft.

Enjoy your 4th!

If you want to read more, some other discussions you might enjoy are The Higgs Boson, What Can We Do With The Higgs Boson? (courtesy of Matt Koutroulis), Physicists Have Found The Higgs Boson (courtesy of Frank Ybarra), Higgs Found (courtesy of my niece Kate Higgs), and Brian Greene Reacts To Today's CERN Announcement.

*You might be wondering why there is a C in the acronym for the lab.  In 1952, a committee was formed whose charge was to establish a physics research center. The committee's name was Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.  When the institution officially came into being in 1954, the name was changed, but the acronym was not.  Another bit of trivia - the World Wide Web was invented at CERN.

**There is a persistent rumor in my family that the boson is named after my brother-in-law Gene Higgs.

^†I've adapted an analogy that I've seen and heard used by several sources, but with no attribution.

^§My brother-in-law Gene also has a Higgs field next to his house.

Get Small; Get Large

As a physicist, I have developed a sense of scale.  It's takes practice to develop it, but after all, physicists think every day about about the very small (like a atom's nucleus) to the very large (like galactic clusters).

Even then, when I see a clear visual demonstration of the scale of the universe, I am never anything less but awed.

Animation Credit to HTwins.net

The Old Testament Universe

Diagram from James L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 6th ed.,(Harcourt, 1994), p. 512.

I'll just link to the blog that originally posted this figure.  He discusses the relevant biblical passages.

LA Times Does Story on Geocentrism

On July 26, I wrote about the website Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right that is dedicated to showing that the Earth is the center of the universe.

This past Sunday, the Los Angeles Times did a story on the same subject. What's great is that the reporter got a quote from Ken Ham - who we know from Answers in Genesis, the creationist site.

Ham says,"There's a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated," Ham said. "The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system."

Yet Ham is certain that the Bible is a biology book. Interesting.

Where did the universe come from? Part 2

In part 1, I showed that a literal reading of the Bible leads to a litany of contradictions. In support of this position, Dr. John Haught, a theologian from Georgetown University, said during a panel discussion that appeared after the Discovery Channel program Curiousity: Did God Create the Universe that the Bible is not a source of cosmology. (I'll go further and say it's not a chemistry, geology, or biology book either.) His view is that the Bible is a source of hope for Christians.

So maybe someone can explain to me why so many people think that a scientific explanation for the origins of the universe is an attack on Christianity. Particularly in light that the central tenet of Christianity, if I remember my catechism correctly, is that salvation comes through Jesus. No where in the Bible does it demand that you believe that God created the universe.

But I digress from the main point of this post: The Prime Mover or the First Cause. Simply put, God had to create the universe, because how else does it come into existence.

The argument for the First Cause goes like this:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Aristotle is credited for first making the first of this sort of argument, the cosmological argument. Many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers have spent much energy on this.

Sounds like a pretty good argument, doesn't it.

Now if I were a philosophy professor teaching logic, I could spend an entire semester tearing this apart, but I'm a physics professor. So let's examine it with the physical evidence.

Statement #1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. This statement seems to be common sense, but it's physically wrong. All of quantum mechanics is built upon the notion that nature is governed by chance. It's often difficult for many physics students to comprehend this. Even Einstein didn't like this probabilistic nature, but your computer, your cell phone, your TV, the scanner at the grocery store, and the light sensor on lamp poles all work because nature is random, not deterministic.

Let me illustrate with an experiment: The Two-Slit Experiment. Watch this You Tube video for a good explanation of the experiment. The basic set up is the experimenter shoots a beam through two small slits onto some detector; let's just call it a movie screen. It doesn't matter what the beam is. It could be a beam of photons (a laser), a beam of electrons, or a beam of atoms. What we measure on the movie screen is where each photon, electron, or atom lands. We find that where each thing lands is completely random; that is, where it ends up is governed by the laws of chance. The implication is that nothing causes that tiny bit to land where it does.

You don't have to like this result, but you have to realize that every modern device you use works, because nature, at its most basic level, is not caused.

Statement #2: The universe began to exist. Hawking believes that the universe began with the Big Bang out of nothing, and the laws of physics allows for light and matter to be created out of nothing. However, many physicists for good reason hypothesize that this universe is one of many, and at the Big Bang, sprung from the mutiverse, and it's conceivable that the multiverse has been around forever. As with all science, when there are competing hypotheses, experiments decide. We'll have to wait for those results.

So if you're with Hawking, you can accept the second statement, but if you're with physicists like Brian Greene, you don't.

Statement #3: Therefore, the universe has a cause. The argument failed with the first statement. Therefore, the universe was not caused.

I'll leave with this statement from Hawking. "Science does not deny religion. It provides a simpler alternative."

Where did the universe come from? Part 1

Allow me to tell you how I'm approaching this post. In part 1, I thought I was setting up a straw man argument. I will be arguing against a position - the biblical story of creation - that is held by strict creationists like Ken Ham. We encountered Mr. Ham and his Answers in Genesis site in an earlier post - Your Elementary School Teachers Were Right. I don't think I know any people who hold this view. Later, in part 2, I will discuss the notion of the Prime Mover or First Cause, and what roles god may play in the universe.

First I will describe what young Earth creationists - Biblical literalists - say about creation. When I started thinking about writing this, I had hoped that this position is truly a minority opinion among the religious, but I since have found a 2010 Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans believe in this version.

The Book of Genesis (1:3-2:4) says that on the first day, he created the heavens. the Earth, and light.(1) The firmament is created on the second day. This means that the sky is like a tent over the Earth. Land, sea, and plants are created on the third day.(2) God on the fourth day puts lights in the firmament; these would be stars including our Sun plus the Moon.(3) On the last two days, he creates life, first sea life and birds, then land animals, and finally humanity.

Furthermore, through the analysis of Biblical chronology, young Earth creationists arrive at the age of the universe at about 6000 years.

What is the scientific consensus? (N.B. here I am only describing the results of science. I leave a general description of how scientists have arrived at these results for a later post.) The universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years old. About 10-37 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe entered a period of inflation in which it expanded exponentially. This lasted for about 10-32 seconds. The universe then consisted of an extremely hot plasma consisting of quarks, gluons, and electrons. Through a process not yet understood, matter began to dominate over anti-matter.

A billionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe cooled enough so that quarks started to be bound and protons and neutrons were formed. At the one minute mark or there abouts, hydrogen and primordial helium formed. Finally, after a few hundred thousand years, the universe became transparent. The light left over from this time forms the cosmic microwave background.

Galaxies began forming in the first million years. The oldest known galaxy, IOK-1, formed about 750 million years after the Big Bang. Our Milky Way galaxy formed between about 9 billion years ago.

Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago from the accretion disk of the Sun. Life appeared about 3.8 billion years ago; 2 billion years ago is when eukaryotic cells evolved. One billion years later, life became multicellular. Lots of stuff happens, and then around 2 million years ago, our Homo ancestors come onto the scene. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens arise in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Now here's the thing. Science completely conflicts with a literal interpretation of the Bible. I'm not an expert in cosmology or in evolutionary biology, but I can back up everything I wrote with evidence - tons of it.

(1) The image to the right is a T-shirt popular with physics students
(2) In Genesis 2:5, plants came after the creation of man.
(3) Notice the Moon is included as a source of light. Maybe I'm being picky, but the Moon is not a source, but only reflects the Sun's light.

Your Elementary School Teachers Were Right. So were Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein.

We all learned that the that there are there are nine planets sometime in grade school. You may have used the mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas." There are now only eight, because astronomers decided that Pluto along with Ceres, Iris, and perhaps about 50 others are dwarf planets. So maybe we should memorize "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nuts."

We also learned that these planets orbit the Sun. I bet none of us ever questioned how we know this. Why would we? It is established scientific fact, right?

So why would anyone think Galileo Was Wrong; The Church Was Right. This link is to a website that promotes Geocentrism, the idea that the Earth is not only the center of the solar system, but the center of the universe. I've been through this website looking for one thing - an explanation of orbits, because it's a straightforward calculation if you start with Newton's 2nd law and his law of universal gravitation. My students who have had PHY 211 can go back to Unit N of the text book and read chapters 12 and 13, and I can show anyone else who's interested how it works. [In the interest of scientific honesty, Mercury presents a small problem that took Einstein to solve.] So my challenge is that a geocentrist must be able to write a force law and derive a equation of motion for the planets that reproduce the orbits with the Earth as the force center.

Let's illustrate the problem:
Here's a Flash simulation of the heliocentric (Sun-centered) solar system. Only Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are shown. Press play and pay close attention to Mars. You see that Mars follows a nearly circular orbit as explained by Newton.

Now look at the Ptolemaic or geocentric (Earth-centered) solar system. Here Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are shown. Again press play and pay attention to Mars. Press the circle button and the animation will trace out the orbit.

See the problem? [Again in the interest of scientific honesty, many of these geocentrism web sites don't use a purely Ptolemaic system, they use the Tychonic model where the Earth is the center, the Sun and the Moon orbit the Earth and the rest orbit the Sun. But the orbit problem among others remains.]

So why would anyone believe in a theory put to rest 400 years ago? Galileo Was Wrong; The Church Was Right goes to great lengths to couch its arguments in criticizing Einstein's theory of relativity and other physics, but when you examine closely their argument comes down to…

Because the Bible says so.

Here are the verses (from NIV) commonly used by geocentrists:

Joshua 10:12-13
12 On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: “Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.” 13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.

Ecclesiastes 1:5
5 The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.

Psalm 96:10
10 Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.

Psalms 104:5
5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Isaiah 66:1
1 This is what the LORD says: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool…

1 Chronicles 16:30
30 Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.

Amos 8:9
9 “In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.

Micah 3:6
6 Therefore night will come over you, without visions, and darkness, without divination. The sun will set for the prophets, and the day will go dark for them.

Jeremiah 15:9
9 The mother of seven will grow faint and breathe her last. Her sun will set while it is still day; she will be disgraced and humiliated. I will put the survivors to the sword before their enemies,” declares the LORD.

If you read this literally, then I guess it's clear that the Earth is stationary and the Sun moves.

Now for the irony. Answers in Genesis, a creationist site, finds geocentrism embarrassing. The site goes to great lengths to debunk geocentrism. But Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, is the man who built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. The museum has Adam and Eve and says T. Rex ate coconuts. He is also building Ark Encounter near Cincinnati, OH that will also feature dinosaurs.

What do you think is Ken Ham's reason for believing in creation?