Why didn't geocentrism catch on the way flat-earth belief did?
A viewer asks why geocentrism has not caught on the way flat-earth belief has, since it would seem to have much more going for it.
Answer
The flat-earthers tried to make it go that way; as soon as the movie The Principle came out, the flat-earth movement took off again, after being dormant for about thirty years. Around 2001 the WMAP probe data led some secular scientists, such as Lawrence Krauss, and Kate Land and Joao Magueijo of Imperial College London, who first noticed it and gave it the name "axis of evil," to suggest the earth is in the center of the universe. Those were strong suggestions, and that is why we made the movie The Principle, and then the flat-earthers hopped on our leg and walked with us because we were both saying the earth is in the center, even though their view is totally different from ours. What they have that we do not is a mentality that is anti-NASA, anti-JPL, anti-establishment, anti-satellite, anti-moon-landing; they think almost everything is a big conspiracy, and sometimes they are right, but that mentality breeds a certain kind of people who gather together, and there is a lot of money behind them. We do not have a lot of money; I had to raise the $2 million to make The Principle myself, and I could not pay it back and lost most of my own money in it. Six months before the film's October 2014 debut, a group of Catholics, Karl Keating and Mark Shea, called the Anti-Defamation League and told them I was an anti-Semite who had made a movie against Einstein and the Jews. Within about a week there were 150 news outlets across the world disparaging me and The Principle, so we had a hard time getting an audience and could not afford the advertising to fight it. If you do not have money, no matter how good your intentions, it is very hard, and those are probably some of the reasons geocentrism did not become as popular.