The three arguments most often raised against a fixed Earth, stated at full strength and answered from the books of Robert Sungenis.
The geocentrism defended here is the model worked out in Galileo Was Wrong: the Earth fixed at the centre, the universe turning around it once a day, and the Sun, carrying the planets and the stars with it, circling the Earth once a year. It is the arrangement Tycho Brahe proposed in the sixteenth century, with one change the observations later required.
Each objection below is set out the way its best advocates put it, then answered. The diagrams are live: switch the frame, drag the latitude, move out through the universe, and check the claims for yourself.
“We can see the Earth move”
The objection, at full strength
Hold a finger at arm's length and close one eye, then the other. The finger jumps against the background because your two eyes see it from two different places. If the Earth really circles the sun, the same thing should happen to the stars. Look at a nearby star in January and again in July, from opposite sides of an orbit 186 million miles across, and it should shift slightly against the far more distant stars behind it.
Astronomers looked for this shift for two centuries and could not find it. Then in 1838 Friedrich Bessel measured it for the star 61 Cygni: a parallax of 0.314 arcseconds, which put the star about 3 parsecs, or 10 light years, away. Since then tens of thousands of stars have had their parallax measured. The shift is real, it repeats every year, and it is exactly what a moving Earth predicts. As one critic of geocentrism put it, if the Earth stands still, why would the stars shift back and forth each year in step with the sun? For many historians and scientists, this was the moment the Earth's motion was finally shown by observation.
What the telescope sees
0.0° centred
The same in both pictures, month by month.
The shift is real. The question is what causes it. Parallax tells you that the angle between you and a near star has changed relative to a far star. It does not tell you which one moved. Your finger appears to jump whether you move your head or someone moves the finger. To read parallax as proof of a moving Earth, you have to assume at the start that the sun is the fixed point. That assumes the very thing that was supposed to be proved.
In the geocentric model the Earth is fixed, and the sun circles it once a year. The star field is centred on the sun, just as it is in the heliocentric model. So as the sun makes its yearly circuit, the whole star field goes with it, turning on a point 1 astronomical unit (about 93 million miles) from the Earth. The sun is not dragging the stars along. Sun and stars move together, with the sun as the geometric centre of the star field. Look at the same two stars in January and again in July, and the near star has shifted against the far one by exactly the same angle the heliocentric model gives. The two models are mirror images of each other. The only difference is which body moves.
Tycho Brahe's original geocentric model centred the stars on the Earth, so it predicted no parallax at all. In his day none had been seen, and he used that as an argument against Copernicus. When Bessel found parallax in 1838, it looked like a knockout blow. But the fix is small: move the centre of the star field from the Earth to the sun. This is the neo-Tychonic model. A University of Illinois physics lecture makes the same point, and physicist L. Popov of the University of Zagreb has worked out the dynamics, calculating the parallax of Proxima Centauri in a fixed-Earth frame at 0.76 arcseconds, in line with the observed value.
Stellar aberration is the older argument, and it gets the same answer. In 1725 James Bradley, while hunting for parallax, found that every star traces a tiny yearly path about 20.5 arcseconds across: a circle near the pole, an ellipse at mid latitudes, a line near the equator. The usual explanation is that the moving Earth forces us to tilt our telescopes, like tilting an umbrella when you walk through rain. In the geocentric model the cause is the same as for parallax. The star field, centred on the sun, revolves around the fixed Earth each year, and every star traces that small path. This also explains why the sun and planets show the same 20.5 arcseconds while the moon, held by the Earth, does not.
Then there is Airy's test. In 1871 George Airy, a heliocentrist and Astronomer Royal, filled a telescope with water. Light travels more slowly in water, so if the Earth were moving, the water-filled telescope should have needed extra tilt to catch the starlight. It needed none. The starlight arrived at the same angle in both telescopes, which is what a fixed Earth predicts. The result became known as "Airy's failure", and Einstein later told an interviewer that aberration, especially Airy's water-filled telescope, had influenced him more than the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Parallax cannot say what moved
It measures a change in viewing angle. Whether the Earth moved or the stars moved, the angle changes by the same amount.
Centre the stars on the sun
With the star field centred on the sun and the sun circling a fixed Earth each year, the neo-Tychonic model gives the same yearly shift at the same angle.
Tycho's gap has been closed
The original Tychonic model predicted no parallax. Moving the star field's centre from the Earth to the sun is the only change needed.
Aberration has the same cause
The yearly 20.5 arcsecond paths of the stars come from the star field revolving with the sun. That also explains why the sun and planets share the effect and the moon does not.
Airy's water telescope needed no tilt
In 1871 a water-filled telescope caught starlight at the same angle as an air-filled one, as expected if the Earth is at rest.
“It is often said that Tycho’s model implies the absence of parallax, and that Copernicus’ requires parallax. However, it would not be a major conceptual change to have the stars orbit the sun (like the planets) for Tycho, which would give the same yearly shifts in their apparent positions as parallax gives. Thus if parallax were observed, a flexible Tychonean could adjust the theory to account for it, without undue complexity.”
“The observation of the aberration shows us, therefore, not the movement of the earth, but the variation of this movement; they cannot, therefore, give us information about the absolute motion of the earth.”
“Briefly, everything occurs as if the Earth were at rest, and the relative rays were the absolute rays.”
Drawn from 27 passages in Robert Sungenis's books. The full treatment: Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, Vol. 1 (Chapter 2, Objections #2 and #3: stellar parallax and stellar aberration).
“We can feel the Earth spin”
The objection, at full strength
In 1851 Foucault hung a heavy bob on a long wire and let it swing. Over the hours, the line of its swing turned slowly across the floor. At the North Pole the plane of the swing turns a full 360 degrees every 24 hours, about 15 degrees an hour. In Washington DC it turns about 9 degrees an hour. At the equator it does not turn at all, and below the equator it turns the other way. Foucault said his experiment "gives a sensible proof of the diurnal motion of the terrestrial globe." Science museums repeat the claim on their plaques. The one at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia reads that the pendulum is proof the Earth rotates on its axis every day.
The case does not rest on the pendulum alone. The same inertial forces, Coriolis and centrifugal, seem to explain a whole family of effects: hurricanes that turn one way in the north and the other way in the south, the east to west drift of projectiles and winds, an Earth slightly flattened at the poles (230 to 231 across), weaker gravity at the equator, the precession of gyrocompasses, and the Sagnac effect used in laser gyroscopes. On this view the Earth's rotation causes these forces, and without the spin they would not exist.
At 49° north, the swing turns against the floor
11.3° an hour
A full circle every 31.8 hours, clockwise.
Hours shown: 0.0
The floor turns under the swing. The swing holds steady against the stars.
Swing against floor: the same either way.
Robert starts with one question. If the pendulum's swing stays fixed while the Earth turns beneath it, fixed with respect to what? The only candidate left is the rest of the universe: the stars. That brings the argument straight back to the problem modern physics faced with Relativity: is the Earth turning under fixed stars, or are the stars turning around a fixed Earth? Einstein wrote that "the sun is at rest and the Earth moves" and "the sun moves and the Earth is at rest" are simply two conventions for two coordinate systems. Mach said the same about Foucault's pendulum and the Earth's flattening. So the pendulum shows that the Earth and the stars are turning relative to each other. It does not show which one is moving.
Next comes the force itself. Physicists name three inertial forces in a rotating system: centrifugal, Coriolis and Euler. Newton treated them as "fictitious," side effects of a rotating frame. Robert argues that when the universe turns around a fixed Earth, they become real forces produced by the turning mass of the universe. In 1913 Einstein wrote to Mach that if a heavy shell of matter is rotated, a Coriolis force arises inside it and "the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around." Robert reads the universe as that shell. Thirring and Lense worked out this dragging within Einstein's theory, and Misner, Thorne and Wheeler describe the distant stars setting the pendulum's plane in the same way.
The physicist André Assis wrote the relational equations for both pictures. With the galaxies at rest and the Earth turning, you get one set of forces. With the Earth at rest and the galaxies turning once a day, you get a real Coriolis force that turns the pendulum and a real centrifugal force that flattens the Earth at the poles. Both, he says, yield the same effects. Robert adds that in the geocentric picture the pendulum's turning is not an illusion. It really turns, pulled "like a leaf in a whirlpool" by the daily rotation of the heavens.
The same reasoning covers the other effects. Robert holds that the universe's Coriolis force is split by the Earth's equator: counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. That, he says, is why hurricanes and the pendulum turn opposite ways in each hemisphere, and why the Sagnac effect shows opposite motions in each. For the bulge he cites Eddington: it "may be attributed indifferently to the Earth's rotation or to the outward pull of the centrifugal force introduced when the Earth is regarded as non-rotating." He also offers a second physical account for those who reject Einstein and Mach: the same rotating ether that gave the 1925 Michelson-Gale experiment its 24-hour result makes a circular force at the pole and only a sideways force at the equator.
Robert also points to a test. In 1904 August Föppl built a better version of the pendulum using a suspended gyroscope, hoping to find a difference between rotation relative to the Earth and rotation relative to the stars. He found none within the accuracy of his experiment. For Robert, the pendulum proves there is a force causing the effect. It does not prove the Earth's rotation is causing the force.
Fixed relative to the stars
The pendulum's swing holds steady only relative to the distant universe. That shows relative motion between Earth and stars, not which one moves.
Three inertial forces, two sources
Centrifugal, Coriolis and Euler forces arise whether the Earth turns inside the universe or the universe turns around the Earth. Robert says a turning universe makes them real forces rather than fictitious ones.
Einstein's rotating shell
In his 1913 letter to Mach, Einstein said a rotating shell of matter drags the plane of a Foucault pendulum around. Robert takes the universe to be that shell.
Hurricanes and the bulge too
Robert holds that the universe's Coriolis force, divided at the equator, turns hurricanes and pendulums opposite ways in each hemisphere. Its centrifugal force makes the 230:231 bulge.
Föppl found no difference
Föppl's 1904 gyroscope version of the experiment detected no gap between the Earth frame and the star frame within its accuracy.
“If one rotates the shell relative to the fixed stars about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell, that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around.”
“Relatively, not considering the unknown and neglected medium of space, the motions of the universe are the same whether we adopt the Ptolemaic or the Copernican mode of view.”
“The flattened figure of the Earth or Foucault’s pendulum can no longer be utilized as proofs of the earth’s real rotation.”
Drawn from 37 passages in Robert Sungenis's books. The full treatment: Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (Answering Common Objections to Geocentrism), the sections on the Foucault pendulum and the equatorial bulge..
“The stars would outrun light”
The objection, at full strength
If the Earth does not turn, then the whole sky must turn around it once every day. The farther out an object sits, the larger the circle it has to cover in those 24 hours, so its speed grows in step with its distance. The critics have done the arithmetic. One writer Robert answers puts the limit at about 4 billion kilometres, out near the orbit of Neptune: past that point, anything carried around the Earth once a day would be moving faster than light. The popular science writer Martin Gardner put it more sharply: a star only ten light-years away would be circling the Earth at twenty thousand times the speed of light.
Relativity is usually taught with one firm rule: nothing can go faster than light. The stars lie light-years away and the galaxies millions of light-years beyond them, so a sky that turns daily would break that rule by enormous margins. The critic concludes that the Earth cannot be the still centre of a turning universe. It must be the Earth that spins.
Distance from the Earth
10.0 light-years
Speed to go round once a day
23,012×
the speed of light
6,898,859,296 km per second
Measured against the Earth, the fixed centre.
Robert's first reply is that the rule belongs to Special Relativity, and Special Relativity does not deal with gravity. Einstein said so himself. In his popular book on relativity he wrote that the constancy of the speed of light "cannot claim any unlimited validity" and that the special theory holds only so long as the influence of gravitational fields can be set aside. Once gravity enters, General Relativity takes over, and there the speed of light is no longer a fixed ceiling.
The physics textbooks, Robert points out, work this out for exactly the case in question. William Rosser, senior lecturer in physics at Exeter, took a rotating roundabout, treated it as being at rest, and noted that the distant stars would then circle it faster than light. He called this a contradiction only "at first sight." In a rotating frame the centrifugal field acts as a gravitational field, it grows enormous at great distances, and under those conditions General Relativity allows distant bodies to exceed light speed. Gardner, the same writer who gave the figure of twenty thousand times light speed, also said relativity permits us to treat the Earth as a nonrotating frame. Thirring, Møller and others showed that a universe turning around a fixed Earth produces the same centrifugal and Coriolis forces as an Earth spinning under fixed stars. By Einstein's own theory, the two pictures cannot be told apart.
Robert's second reply goes further. Geocentrism, he says, does not actually claim that the stars fly through space faster than light. The universe itself turns around the Earth once a day, and it carries the stars with it. Measured against the medium they sit in, the stars are hardly moving at all, apart from their small proper motions. That medium is the Planck ether, which Robert describes as a substance at the Planck scale, far denser than ordinary matter. Because of that density, he argues, the universe could spin thousands of times faster than it does now and still hold together. The same rotation also creates the centrifugal force that keeps the stars from collapsing inward under gravity.
Robert ties this to light itself. In the Planck ether, the speed of light depends on the tension between the Planck particles. The centrifugal force of a turning universe grows with distance from the Earth, so the tension grows, and light can travel faster far out than it does near us. Near the Earth, which sits at the balance point of those forces, light slows to the familiar 300,000 kilometres per second. That is the value we measure here.
Finally, Robert notes that modern cosmology already allows faster-than-light motion when it suits the Big Bang. Inflation is said to have expanded the universe by a factor of 10 to the 30th power in a tiny fraction of a second. Galaxies at high redshift are said to be receding faster than light today. W. M. Stuckey computed one quasar receding at 2.8 times light speed, and Davis and Lineweaver plotted recessions of 3c and above. The explanation given is that space itself is stretching and carrying the galaxies along. Robert asks: if space can expand faster than light and carry objects with it, why can it not rotate faster than light and do the same? Both appeal to a property of the space the objects sit in. The only difference, he says, is that one path is straight and the other is curved.
The light limit is Special Relativity's
Einstein wrote that the constancy of light speed holds only where gravitational fields can be ignored. In General Relativity it is not a universal ceiling.
Rotating frames allow any speed
Rosser showed that if a rotating roundabout is treated as at rest, the centrifugal field becomes enormous far out. General Relativity then permits distant bodies to exceed light speed.
The stars ride the medium
The universe turns and carries the stars with it. Relative to the medium they sit in, the stars are barely moving.
Light speeds up far out
In the Planck ether, light's speed depends on tension, and tension rises with distance from the Earth. Light slows to its familiar value only near the Earth.
Big Bang cosmology already does it
Expanding space is said to carry galaxies away faster than light. Robert asks why rotating space cannot do the same.
“If gravitational fields are present the velocities of either material bodies or of light can assume any numerical value depending on the strength of the gravitational field.”
“We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g., of light).”
“A star only ten light-years away has a relative velocity around the Earth of twenty thousand times the speed of light.”
Drawn from 28 passages in Robert Sungenis's books. The full treatment: Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, Volume 1, Chapter 2, Objection #18: "Isn't it Impossible for the Stars to Travel so Fast Around the Earth?".
None of the three answers denies the evidence. The yearly shift of the stars is real, and so is the turning of the pendulum's swing. But each measures the motion of one thing relative to another, the Earth against a star, a floor against the stars, and neither can say which of the two is moving, the point Mach and Einstein both conceded. The third objection is different in kind: it takes a speed limit written for motion through space and applies it to a universe that carries its stars with it. In each case the observation holds; the dispute is over what it shows.
Galileo Was Wrong, Volume 1
Chapter 2 answers these three and many more, objection by objection.
The Principle
The 2014 documentary on the Copernican principle, and the answer to Dan Olson.
Answering Cool Hard Logic
Aberration, the three inertial forces and the microwave background, point by point.
Geocentrism questions and answers
Readers' questions, answered by Robert on his live show.
Also: Young Earth or Old Earth?, the case for a young creation, chapter by chapter.