Expanding Earth and Neal Adams
There are few things in this world that get me genuinely angry. Religion and anti-intellectualism are two of them and pseudo science is another. It is the latter this article concerns.
Neal Adams is a world-famous comic book artist, renowned for his work on the comic books Green Lantern and Batman. He is also a prominent supporter of the expanding earth hypothesis - a hypothesis that was superceded by the theory of plate tectonics more than 40 years ago.
Eccentric artists are fine by me, but when someone comes out and starts making claims that a large portion of science is wrong, offering nothing more than some fancy animations to support such claims, real scientists like me have to step in. Neal Adams not only thinks plate tectonics is wrong, but through our extensive discussions on YouTube (yes, I know, YouTube is the bottom of the barrel), has stated the following beliefs;
- The moon is hollow, rings like a bell
- An Elephant defines the maximum land animal size (tell that to mammoths)
- If elephants walked like other animal with bent legs their bones would snap
- Planets don’t orbit the sun because of gravity, they do so because of the sun’s magnetic field
- The moon is held in orbit by the earth’s magnetic filed
- Mountains have been growing for only the last 50 million years
- The planet increases in size exponentially
- All of Geology supports a growning Earth (none of it does)
- Geology theory says the silicates get DENSER going down (strictly speaking, no)
- A day can’t get longer without Earth getting bigger (the day length relys on the Earth-Moon gravitational system and the angular momentum thereof)
- COLD comes from deep and rises
- Heat does NOT rise
- Earth’s centre of gravity is at the planet’s core
- Magnetic fields travel faster than light
- Rocks that form the Himalayas have always been above the sea
- COMET Schumacher Levi 9 was an asteroid
- Comets don’t fracture.
- Water was and is made in the core of the Earth
- Earth and the other planets did not differentiate
- Elements heavier than iron aren’t made via fusion
- …and many other baseless, stupid claims
To put it lightly, his claims and refusal to accept he’s wrong make my blood boil. So much so that I’ve produced two video replies to him.
These videos are the first of many I hope to make, time and gusto permitting. The first video is Neal’s first expanding earth film and my nit-pick on the details he presented regarding the southern hemisphere.
Neal’s Video:
My response:
There was a very flattering (to me) and damning (to Neal), post over at postpolitical entitled Mud From Space.The article also archives a long discussion series from the YouTube comment thread where I take to task a couple of Neal’s supporters. At times when I post enraged comments directed at some people, I think I’m behaving like a complete dick. But being able to read through a thread as posted previously makes me feel quite a bit better about my angry defence of science.
My second response concerns a second video of Neal’s which claims Pangea couldn’t have existed due to a straw man he built based on an appeal to personal incredulity. I’ve been working on this reply for some time, even before I posted the previous reply. A page summarising my reply can be found here: RE: Neal Adams Pangea
Neal’s Video:
My response:
My efforts will not change Neal’s mind, because from what I can tell, he is unconcerned with evidence counter to his own claims, or listening to people with any experience or expertise. My hope is my efforts will prevent people from subscribing to Neal’s baseless, ridiculous pseudo-science and help encourage scientific enquiry and skepticism in the face of loud, scientific ignorance.
Neal Adams is to geology what Kent Hovind and Ken Ham are to evolution. Completely irrelevant and a good belly laugh for anyone with a clue.
11 Responses to “Expanding Earth and Neal Adams”
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01
by Neal Adams @ 2007-07-08 1435 UTCDear Yorrike,
Were these the upper Continental Plate areas that you were speaking of in your video that I crated out of nothing?
http://www.itslikecool.com/yorrike/TharpMap.jpg
This is the geolog history of New Zealand. Do you agree with it? I borrowed my map from a small map from the United States Geological Survey a couple of years ago. I don’t know if they were indicating New Zealand at a past geologic time, or they just were drawing crudely, and the lines came together. Perhaps being from New Zealand, you took it personally. I apologize to New Zealand in place of the United States Geological Survey.
http://www.itslikecool.com/yorrike (New Zealand pdf.)
Neal
02
by Yorrike @ 2007-07-08 1436 UTCNeal, you invented a huge chunk of land off the coast of the New Zealand continent and raised submerged plateaus hundred or thousands of meters out from the sea. The huge chunk of land off the east coast of NZ doesn’t exist. You made it up.
If you’re going to go out there and tell science it’s wrong, you’re not going to get very far being that sloppy. If you’re trying to suggest that the Chatham rise and other plateaus around NZ twisted, turned and sank, you covered them up with ocean water to hide the mess that’d cause and you still broke your own rules - no sinking or rising of plates.
The map you provided (the pdf) is accurate, but I don’t see how you went from that to the terrible outline you produced on your earth expansion video. Did you even bother looking at Google Earth?
I’m moving these comments to the post I made on my replies so far, to keep the Pangea video info page clean.
03
by Adam @ 2007-08-02 0820 UTCDear Yorrike,
I’ve been following the youtube comments debate between you and Mr. Adams et al., and trying to contribute here and there on a couple points. One of the things that I find most disturbing is the impression many of the posters have that there is little evidence for plate tectonics or subduction. It betrays a certain ignorance and perhaps means that we scientists (I’m a seismologist) haven’t done as good a job as we can in communicating with the general public. Anyways, I’m not sure where I’m going with this but keep up the good fight. I doubt that Mr. Adams will budge from his position but maybe some neutral viewers might be convinced by science rather than fitting shapes on spheres. Great job with your videos, by the way.
Adam (aka Adrock828)
04
by Yorrike @ 2007-08-08 2354 UTCAdam - thanks for the compliments.
You’re perhaps right when it comes to the average person’s views of the state of our respective sciences, but I think it’s symptomatic of an overall misunderstanding of science among the general public. The people who state there’s little, or at least not conclusive evidence for plate tectonics are on parallel with those who say the same about evolution.
The real issue, in my opinion, is that a science as broad and varied as geology/geophysics, can’t be summarised into 60-180 second sound bites. The same is true for all other major natural sciences and I’m not sure this can be overcome unless the person viewing has a desire to learn.
Education through entertainment is so very difficult. Even groups like the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, who try to bring complex science to the masses, are so often guilty of soundbite science and dumbing things down to a too great extent. It’s often impossible to get difficult subject matter, like seismic tomography or back arc volcanic geochemistry, across to an audience without prior expertise.
05
by clinton @ 2007-08-20 0954 UTCKUDOS. I’d watched Mr. Adam’s videos, and thought “Wow! thats neat!” but something bothered me. Eventually, I realized he wasn’t offering a cause for his theorized effect. It bothered me greatly. I went looking for debunkers, and was happy to read your work. YES, YOU SHOULD MAKE MORE FILMS!!
06
by Anon @ 2007-09-24 2244 UTCI want to preface this by saying, I don’t believe the expanding earth theory, but I am trying to convince myself of why it is wrong. I am certainly not a geologist, but I am reasonably well educated.
I would like to hear an explanation of why Pangea formed as a single mass on one (relative) side of the earth. I think the most compelling idea he presents is the idea that the Earth formed in a uniform manner. Then as it expanded (see below) the water filled the gaps and we got the oceans. This is compelling for two reasons. (1) it would make a larger part of the globe a ’shallow sea’ as we were told so many times in Earth science, and (2) it is conceptually more appealing to think that as the earth formed it did so in a uniform manner.
Expanding: Yes, the least compelling part of his explanation is that the Earth expands. Many people have pointed out that it would take a colossal amount of matter to do so, but there is another explanation. There need not be more matter, just more space. There are many theories that the universe is expanding, which might support a theory that everything in the universe is expanding at the same time. I know, this sounds like the God-machine, and it is impossible to prove a negative, but there really are such theories. In any case, simply showing that it would take much more mass than could be expected to accumulate, or laughing off the idea that something could expand is unpersuasive.
Anyway, why would we have a polar land-water wold after formation instead of a more uniform world?
Thanks.
07
by NJo @ 2007-10-02 2011 UTCYorrike, can you also take a look at the papers by Scalera G. ?
what are your thoughts on those?
http://www.earth-prints.org/items-by-author?author=Scalera,+G.
08
by NanonJ @ 2007-10-04 0951 UTCHave you read the papers from Scalera and his essays on an expanding earth?
What are your views on these?
http://www.earth-prints.org/items-by-author?author=Scalera%2C+G.
09
by Yorrike @ 2007-10-04 1100 UTCTo everyone asking me for scientific comment on papers or videos; thank you for bringing these things to my attention. I will make comments on them when I can. I’m extremely busy at the moment (genuine scientific research is extremely time consuming), so it maybe a couple of months before I have the time to respond fully. I will, however, respond, so I apologise in advance and appreciate your patience.
10
by Andrew Moore @ 2008-05-24 0910 UTCDear Yorrike,
In defence of Neil Adams - his theory is based on continental shelfs rifting therefore the area’s which need to fit together may not all be above sea level - they just need not to be deep Ocean sea floor.
I think you need to get past simplistic analysis - Neil seems to be onto something to me though his theory does not have to be 100% at this stage.
If Neil was generating “land” from Deep Ocean floor then you have a point but from what I’ve looked at he was not.
Regards
Andrew
11
by Yorrike @ 2008-05-24 1116 UTC@Andrew:
“I think you need to get past simplistic analysis”
Do you honestly think this is all I have? I’m a post graduate geologist studying the geochemistry of the early solar system. But if I started yacking on about rare earth elements in volcanoes at various distances from subduction trenches and water changing melting temperatures and causing partial melts, who would listen to me?
I’d be committing discussion suicide by beat down via terminology overload. Neal wouldn’t understand any of it, and neither would the public at large. neither party has the scientific training needed to debate this idea on the level it needs to be debated. The level it WAS debated in the late 60s. The debate Plate Tectonics won.
I try to make my retorts accessible, understandable by people with no science training, and simple to grasp. Getting to the high level science that would make Neal look like the absolute fool he is, would require an educated audience. And if the audience were there already, I wouldn’t have to produce any videos, because no one would believe Neal.
Neal does not have an interesting hypothesis, because he has no data backing him up. Nor does he have the adequate background in the required sciences to actually make any sense with what he’s trying to push on the masses.
Let me make this abundantly clear for you (Please understand I’m not putting you down here, I’m just tiring of this debate).
When you look at Neal’s videos and ideas, do the first things that jump to your mind include any of the following:
If none of those questions, or any questions similar in complexity even slightly crossed your mind after you heard Neal’s ideas, you may not have the required scientific knowledge to be debating this issue. Again, I’m not trying to insult you here. If there was a debate on evolutionary biology, I’d never step in because I simply don’t have the knowledge to make a valid point. The same with Physics, Pure Chemistry, or vector calculus. Neal, on the other hand, with no real knowledge of ANY science, claims he has everyone out thought. He has not.
And believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve given him the problems with his theory, and even given him lists of material he absolutely requires to have a full grasp of. Yet, he refuses to even begin with something as simple as green and blue schist metamorphism, which on its own, disproves his idea, and proves plate tectonics as an active, working system.
Geology is not an easy science. It is ALL science wrapped up in a lot of time. You have to be multi-disciplined and onto it to go out and start overturning small things like how a certain rock formed (plus years of actual in-the-lab research).
The expanding earth vs plate tectonics debate is over. It was over in 1970. If you’re actually interested in why, I can point you in the right direction to get an understanding of the topic. It’s absolutely huge and there’s so much supporting evidence it is truly in parallel with the theory of gravity, the theory of heliocentric solar system and the theory of evolution. That is, a scientific theory - as close as science will get to saying something is fact.