Documentary “The Principle”
Makes Shock Claim:
Earth at Center of Universe?
This headline might seem like something you’d find on the satirical “The Onion,” but this is no joke.
In the last few years, cosmology — i.e. the scientific study of the origin of the universe (and its fate) — has found itself in a serious crisis. And those aren’t my words.
Those are the words of some of the most prominent physicists and cosmologists in the world: George Ellis, Michio Kaku, Julian Barbour, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark.
So what’s the crisis?
In recent years new data from space has come in — thanks to state-of-the-art space observatories that have gone into orbit — and this data shows something shocking: the Earth and our solar system are at the center — yes, the center — of the universe.
It turns out we’re not so insignificant after all.
This new data contradicts an important element of the Copernicus Principle — which states that the Earth is not in the center of the universe and is in a random, insignificant corner of the galaxy — a principle that has been used for several hundred years.
However, a new documentary called The Principle interviews all of the physicists listed above, as well as many other physicists, and it explains everything: the new data, how it shows the Earth’s location and orientation with the rest of the universe, and how physicists are responding to all of it.
The film examines startling observations gathered from new technology (i.e. the Planck space observatory, which was launched in 2009 and had its CMB data released in 2013), such as: 1) the galaxies in the universe are arranged in concentric shells around the location of the Earth; 2) the axis of the universe, as detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), is oriented to the Earth; and 3) the carefully calibrated fine tuning across all of the cosmos seem to be designed to sustain life on Earth.
(Note: I encourage you to read the comments below after reading this article. The executive producer of the film left an extensive, detailed comment that explains how this new development in cosmology relates to the expansion model of the universe.)
I wrote a very in-depth review of the documentary and explained everything above in detail (though even my review doesn’t do it all justice). The documentary isn’t widely released in theaters yet, but it is playing in Los Angeles this weekend (weekend of 1/23/15) at the AMC theater in Burbank inside of the Town Center mall at 201 East Magnolia Blvd. (park in the free mall parking, go inside to 3rd floor.); 770 N. 1st St; or 125 East Palm Ave. It is also showing in Orange County at the AMC on 20 City Blvd. West Orange.
You can also enter a contest to win tickets to one of these upcoming premiers.
The film is also having a premier this weekend in Spokane, Washington, Friday, January 23, 2015. It will be having another premier in Dallas, Texas, next week on February 5, 2015, and it’s possible it will see a wider release into theaters this year. To keep up with the latest, go to the film’s official website or Facebook page.
So why haven’t you heard about of all this yet?
Well, as it turns out, the science community (and other communities too, actually) have a lot invested — money, careers, reputations — in the Copernicus model and its assumption that the Earth is in a random, insignificant location of the universe. There is a tremendous amount of resistance to the idea that the Earth is special — that we are significant — especially from those who have a staunch atheistic, naturalist worldview.
After all, it was people of faith in centuries past who insisted that the Earth is significant because God created it. The Word paints a portrait of a loving, intelligent God who created the universe for the express purpose of creating the Earth and humanity. We, in other words, were at the center of His plan from the beginning. It was only natural then for Christians to conclude that the Earth must be at the center of the universe.
But, apparently, according to a statement that the producer Rick DeLano made to RockinGodsHouse.com recently, atheistic scientists (particularly Lawrence Krauss, who has opposed the film aggressively) in addition to Christian groups have shown resistance to the film. Here is what Rick wrote:
Our film has been the subject, first, of an extraordinary — perhaps unprecedented — worldwide media campaign intended to discredit it, and secondly, of a subsequent, openly stated and imposed direction that it be ignored [both by atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss]…We have been ignored by the media, ignored — or in some cases viciously opposed — by the evangelical community, experienced drastic opposition from within Catholic circles.
Think about that.
“The Principle” is perhaps the only thing on earth that could cause the child molesting pimp Jeffrey Epstein’s close pal atheist Lawrence Krauss, anti-Christian blogs like RawStory and Slate, evangelicals, and Catholics, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder on *anything*.
Whoa.
But we shouldn’t be discouraged. Not everyone is ignoring the film (USA Today had a glowing review of it). And, most importantly, there are prominent physicists who are not ignoring these revolutionary implications about the Earth’s significance.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that these physicists are suddenly converting to the Christian faith. But scientists are looking at the universe with brand new eyes. Think about the huge implications of this: for centuries scientists have assumed that Earth had no significance in the galaxy, that we didn’t have any significance.
But, as MIT physicist Max Tegmark says in the documentary, “we are very significant”; and, as Martin Selbrede, Vice President of the Chalcedon Foundation, said:
“We need to get away from the Copernican Principle and the notion that man means nothing — from us being just a molecule to a human being that’s in a special location for presumably a special purpose…Men are driven by their purpose, and they can [now] see themselves in a very different light.”
We are not, as he says, “simply chaotic blobs.”
So, next time you look up and see the stars, remember that you’re looking out on the universe from a very special vantage point: the center.
Under the long held expansion model of the universe – that it curves back in on itself, and space is expanding – ANY point you observe it from is the center of the universe. This is because every point is travelling away from every other point, so wherever you view from, the universe is expanding away from you.
This means that while to us the Earth is the center of the universe, to anyone on a distant planet, THEY would be at the center. This in no way nullifies the Copernican Principle.
It’s interesting you mention the expansion model. That was definitely addressed by some of the physicists in the documentary, including the ones (i.e. Dr. George Ellis) who felt the Copernican Principle has indeed been nullified. They had specific replies to the very argument you explained, but I didn’t cover that in my initial review (and frankly I don’t remember what they said). If I ever get a chance to watch it again I’ll look for that section on the expansion model and explore that specific argument in more detail.
Dear Kevin,
Greetings. I am the executive producer of The Principle, Robert Sungenis. My assistant forwarded me your request to answer the issue of the “expanding universe” that you put on “debunkingdavidpalm.” Allow me to do so. In brief, the “expanding universe” was invented in 1929 by Edwin Hubble in order to get away from the clear evidence showing the Earth was in the center of the universe.
Prior to the Big Bang, everyone in secular cosmology believed in the Steady State model – that the universe was infinite in time and distance. This eliminated having to deal with a Creator, and it also answered the “implosion and/or collapse” problem. That is, if the universe contracted or expanded, it would have done so at some time in the infinite past and thus we would not have a universe today, ergo we would not be here.
The Steady State model was doing fine until 1929 when Edwin Hubble discovered that 99% of the galaxies were redshifted. He had two choices to explain what he saw:
(a) the galaxies were at fixed linear distances from Earth but their light lost energy as it traveled through space. The farther away the galaxy, the more energy its light would lose, and thus the more redshifted it would appear to us on Earth;
(b) the galaxies were at not fixed but moving away from us; and as they moved away, it stretched the wave length of the light and it would thus appear redshifted to us on Earth. The farther away the galaxy, the faster it was moving away from us, and thus the greater its redshift.
Hubble had a big problem, however. He knew that either (a) or (b) put the Earth in the center of the universe, since if we only see redshift and no blueshifts, the Earth must be in the center of the dispersion. Interestingly enough, choice (a) did not, under any circumstances, allow an alternate explanation to an Earth in the center, but choice (b) did give at least some hope for an alternative, albeit a very tenuous one.
To make (b) work, Hubble first needed to dispense with three-dimensional Euclidean geometry and use only two-dimensional Riemannian geometry. If so, he could make the universe into a balloon with just a surface and no center. Obviously, if the center is taken away, the Earth could not be in the center. There was no evidence for such a Riemannian universe, however. As Hawking says in “A Brief History of Time,” science chose it to be “modest.” Apparently, keeping the Earth out of the center would make them less proud, or so they claimed.
Second, Hubble could then say that the redshifts were caused by all the galaxies being on the surface of the balloon universe, and as the balloon expanded, all the galaxies would move apart from each other at proportional speeds, and thus all observers on these galaxies would see a redshift from any other galaxy they observed. In this way, Hubble could explain why we see redshifts wherever we look from on Earth, but not be forced to accept a central Earth.
Third, in order to have this kind of mutual expansion among the galaxies, the universe would need to be homogeneous, otherwise one side would expand faster and more random than the other and we would see a mixture of blueshifts and redshifts. Since Hubble saw only redshifts, the expansion had to be uniform and thus the universe had to be homogeneous. (But recent evidence shows that the universe is not all homogeneous, hence the problem persists).
The real problem came in, of course, when science realized that if they accepted an expanding universe and rejected the non-expanding and infinite Steady State model, it meant that the universe must have been at one compact point and non-expanding in the distant past. If so, it required the universe to have a beginning, even though secular scientists were very reluctant to accept a beginning to the universe due to their philosophical prejudices. But scientifically, they couldn’t reject it due to the redshift problem, which only allowed two solutions, (a) or (b), and no others.
As noted, (b) was chosen so they could at least keep Earth out of the center. Choice (a) could have given them an infinite universe, but it would put Earth in the center with no options. So they chose (b), the better of two evils. For them it was better to have an infinite universe than one with the Earth in the center. That shows how deeply significant they regard a central Earth and how deeply committed they are to the Copernican Principle as their foundational belief.
Since secular science had no answer to how the universe could have a beginning, Lemaitre proposed what seemed to be the only sensible solution, that is, God made a “cosmic egg” at the beginning of creation that He allowed to explode to give our present (b-type) universe. It was the perfect hybrid between a stogy literal reading of Genesis and the godless excesses of the theory of Evolution. Today, of course, secular scientists have abandoned Lemaitre’s “cosmic egg” and have opted for the Multiverse, so, in a sense, Lematire still has egg on his face.
Lemaitre also has egg on his face because secular science has found, much to their dismay, that the Big Bang model simply doesn’t work as planned. First, they found that the universe is not all homogeneous, and therefore there could not be a uniform expansion to account for the redshift.
Second, they found that the expansion went too fast for the limitations Einstein gave it in the Special Theory of Relativity, which they solved by temporarily abandoning Einstein and replaced it with a very rapid “inflation” that can somehow circumvent Einstein without discrediting him.
Third, the present speed of the expansion requires much more matter and energy to drive it than what is presently in the universe. At last count, the universe is missing 96% of the needed matter and energy, which has been solved by secular science declaring that the needed matter and energy is really there, but we simply cannot detect it yet.
Fourth, the speed of the expansion requires yet another violation of Einstein’s Special Relativity theory, so once again, they circumvent Einstein by saying that although nothing can move faster than light, “spacetime” has the ability to do so. But Einstein said that “nothing” (including spacetime) can go faster than light.
In essence, the Big Bang “expanding universe” is full of Big contradictions. It all started with Edwin Hubble. He created the Big Bang to get away from clear evidence that Earth was in the center of the universe. He didn’t realize, however, the inordinate amount of problems he would create by running away from the truth.
Robert: thanks so much for taking the time and effort to write all of that down. Our readers and I greatly appreciate it — what a fascinating and incredibly in-depth response to the topic of the expansion model, redshifts, Hubble, and the truth that philosophical prejudices play a much bigger role in the field of cosmology than scientists care to admit. The whole narrative of cosmology reminds me of this quote by Dr. George Ellis:
“I can construct [for] you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations. You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
[from “Scientific American” 1995 October and as quoted in this article]
Kevin, I also want to inform you that The Principle is playing in Los Angeles this weekend at the AMC theater in Burbank inside of the Town Center mall at 201 East Magnolia Blvd. (park in the free mall parking, go inside to 3rd floor.); 770 N. 1st St; or 125 East Palm Ave. It is also showing in Orange County at the AMC on 20 City Blvd. West Orange.
Thanks, Robert, I updated the article with that new information. Fantastic that it’s in LA!
The great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, is often criticized for claiming 500 years ago in the early 1500’s, that the Earth was the center of the universe. Wouldn’t it be funny it it turned out he was correct?
Of course, to be fair, he was actually claiming the the Earth was also the center of our solar system, and that the planets and even the sun, all revolved around the Earth… which we know to be incorrect. Oh well, Luther was a great reformer and theologian… and he probably should have stuck to theology, and not amateur astronomy.
John L. Jeffcoat
The Bible Museum
Greatsite.com
Thanks, John, for the great comment. I didn’t know that about Luther — really interesting!
It’s interesting that you mention the sun and planets revolving around the earth issue. One of the physicists in the documentary actually makes a surprising case for something I never expected to hear: he claims that the long-held idea of the earth revolving around the sun might not be the open-and-shut case that we think it is (as wild as that sounds). According to him, physicists and mathematicians can actually create a model for the solar system where the sun and planets revolve around the earth, and the math still works. Of course, that is a very crude summary of a segment/interview in the documentary that was much more in-depth and complicated, but just thought you’d get a kick out of that — some scientists (though in the minority, for sure) are now even questioning THAT long-held idea of our solar system. All of that might sound wildly impossible, but when you hear the reasons that have led them to ask such drastic questions, the whole debate becomes very compelling.
Though, to be clear, the film “The Principle” is more about our earth’s position in relation to the entire universe and the question “Are we significant?” — not the sun-revolving-around-the-earth question, though that is mentioned and explored as more of an aside (if I’m remembering correctly), which shows how cosmology is really entering some wild, unexpected territory.
The bottom-line: cosmology is experiencing some very intense internal debates right now, and many of them are asking some very big questions that challenge centuries-old beliefs. Some folks scoff at it, I suppose, but I find it fascinating.
Thanks again for your comment!