1 · Two teams, one activity
The chapter’s first move is to divide the room: Team A, the helio-skeptics, who question; Team B, the heliocentrists, who claim. That division is the frame everything else sits in, and it does not survive contact with either list.
Team A is not defined by a shape. Its members are described as sceptics, and scepticism is not a side — it is what both sides are supposed to be doing. The three Team A claims are positive claims in their own right: that objects vanish across flat water with nothing in the way, that gas cannot push in a vacuum, that four celestial observations show the Sun is not the illuminator. Each states something about the world and each carries the burden the chapter assigns to Team B. “Falsification is independent of replacement” is true, and it does not exempt a falsification claim from evidence; it only says the claimant need not supply a replacement model.
Team B is not a team either. Nobody signed up to defend a hundred and three propositions, and the list was written by the other side. A heliocentrist is someone who accepts the Sun-centred arrangement on the evidence for it; what that evidence is, and how much of the list it touches, is the question the map below answers.
This site belongs to neither. It questions the book’s claims with the same instruments it would use on anyone’s: state the claim as made, find the measurement, show the working, say where it could be wrong. Where the book is right it says so, on the landing page and here. Both sides of this argument are trying to find out what is true; the teams are the chapter’s invention, and the map that follows keeps the questions and drops the jerseys. The list the globe actually rests on — fourteen structural claims, each with a number, a test and a falsifier — is on its own page, so the two sides of the ledger can be read against each other.
2 · The scoring rule, and what it rewards
The chapter’s rule is a ratio: claims made against claims backed by sufficient evidence. Two things about it are worth saying before the map, one in his favour and one not.
In his favour: the burden is placed correctly. A positive claim owes evidence, and a review that only demanded evidence of the other side would be doing what the book’s own Extraordinary Evidence chapter complains of. This site accepts that and works the same way — every claim graded individually, the arithmetic shown, a “where this could be wrong” section on each page.
Against it: a ratio rewards making few claims, and both lists were written by the same side. Team A’s three claims are the three the book leads with. Team B’s hundred and three were assembled for the heliocentrists by their opponent, and most are not about the shape of the Earth at all: whether Bennu is a rubble pile, whether the ISS smells, whether the Milky Way is warped. A side can be right or wrong about every one of those and the shape of the ground is untouched. So the first thing the map does is sort the list by what each item bears on, and the second is to mark which items are structural — the model stands or falls with them — and which are particular, a fact about one object that no model rests on, however well attested. On that sorting, eight of the hundred and two items concern the Earth, twenty-one the heliocentric arrangement, and the rest are planetary science, cosmology and the space programme.
One more thing the rule leaves out: the sufficiency of the evidence is not the same question as whether a reader can get at it. Much of Team B’s list is instrument-only — spacecraft, radio telescopes, gravitational-wave detectors — and a reader who will not take an agency’s word for it is left with nothing to do. The right-hand column of the tables below is written for that reader: where a claim can be checked from a garden with a clock, a tide table or a small telescope, it says how, and gives a reference with enough in it to act on.
3 · The two photographs on page 209
The chapter opens with a pair of pictures and a fair point: both sides invoke optical distortion where it suits them. The heliocentrist, it says, claims little distortion in a star-trail sky so that Polaris’s descent with latitude can be curvature; the helio-skeptic claims little distortion at Rampion so that visible turbine bases can be a flat sea. Which is right?
Neither, as posed, because “minimal” is not a measurement. Both cases have been measured on this site. For Polaris, Celestial Globes Exposed grants the flat model’s “linear perspective” and asks what distortion field it would take to reproduce the measured altitudes; the field it needs would also move the Sun and Moon in ways that are not seen. For Rampion, The Black Swan, Answered reads the video’s own six-turbine slide in pixels and finds a refraction coefficient of about 0.7 — a strong inversion, on a day the film-maker chose for its stillness — with two metres of the near base and five of the far one below the sea. The distortion at Rampion is not minimal; it is large, it is of the sign the day’s weather predicts, and it is quantified. That is the answer to “which one is right”: the one that measured.
4 · Team A, mapped
The three claims are the book’s opening three and are answered in full elsewhere on this site; the chapter adds the Rampion observation as a fourth leg, a debate card at p. 232, and the Antarctica midnight-sun footage as a conditional last.
| His claim | What it says | Answered on | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claim #1 | Objects can disappear completely across a flat surface with nothing in the way; long-distance visual limits are under-studied. Granted as stated: over 540 ft a globe hides nothing and something did vanish, by perspective and resolution. The book’s own long-path photographs are the cases where those limits are exceeded, and each is measured on its page. | Bottom Up Observations, Flat-Surface Test, Chicago & Pontchartrain, The Black Swan (Rampion) | Standard physics |
| Claim #2 | Gas propulsion needs something to push off; in a vacuum there is nothing, so mainstream physics is wrong about rockets. Engines have been measured firing in vacuum several unrelated ways; the Action Lab footage he cites is read frame by frame and does not show what the chapter says it shows; and the sounding-rocket video he links at p. 237 burns its second stage from 4 km to 43 km, through air thinning to a five-hundredth of sea level, to the speed its 253-km arc needs. | Rockets Don't Push Against Air, Thrust, Measured in Flight, Action Lab Footage, The Curve at 118,000 Feet | Refuted |
| Claim #3 | Four celestial red flags: uniform full-moon lighting, the moon-tilt illusion, Jupiter’s moon shadows, the eclipse trajectory. Together they say the Sun is not the illuminator. Run as a cumulative case, and all four limbs are answered: two are real observations the standard model already predicts, two are measured and found not to be there. | Full-Moon Lighting, The Moon-Tilt Illusion, Jupiter's Shadows, The Eclipse Trajectory, The Selenelion, Where's the Moon's Silhouette?, Self-Test Protocol | Refuted |
| The Rampion observation | The Black Swan video: turbine bases and ships visible at 8–21 miles from Worthing Beach, presented as impossible on a globe. The video’s own six-turbine slide, measured, records k ≈ 0.7 with about 2 m of the near base and 5 m of the far one below the sea; the bases do not meet the water, and a flat plane would need air past its overturning limit. | The Black Swan (Rampion) | Refuted |
| The debate card, p. 232 | Is extraordinary evidence provided that objects cannot disappear bottom-up, that gas-propelled vehicles work in a vacuum, and that Jupiter’s black circles are shadows? Three questions, three pages. The first is granted as standard physics — objects can vanish bottom-up over flat water, and his own pond run shows it; the second and third are measured: thrust in flight where the pressure is zero, and shadow-transit timings met from back gardens. | Bottom Up Observations, Flat-Surface Test, Rockets Don't Push Against Air, Thrust, Measured in Flight, Jupiter's Shadows | Answered |
| The Antarctica 360° Sun | If the midnight-sun footage from the December 2024 expedition is shown fake, “the game will be over.” Whether that footage is authentic is one of the two things the landing page declares this review does not touch: it turns on the good faith of named people, not on a measurement a reader can repeat. | — | Not assessed |
Verdicts are those of the linked pages and use the landing page’s rubric. “Standard physics” means the observation is real and the mainstream model already predicts it, so it does not discriminate between the models.
5 · Team B, sorted
A hundred and two items (the numbering runs 1 to 103 and skips 88 in both the book and the PDF; see Mislabels). Each is paraphrased in a few words — the originals are his — and sorted into five groups by what it is about. The “where this site answers it” column links the page and shows the verdict that page reached on the book’s claim — so a Refuted chip beside a Team B item means the book’s objection to it was refuted, not the item. Items with no page are, almost without exception, not claims about the shape of the Earth. The last column says what the evidence is and whether a reader can test it.
| Group | Items | Structural | Answered on a page here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earth: shape, curvature and gravity | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Heliocentrism: the Sun, the Moon, the orbits and the spin | 21 | 13 | 4 |
| Other bodies: planets, asteroids and Pluto | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| The galaxy and the cosmos | 21 | 20 | 0 |
| The space programme: Apollo, the ISS, the probes | 37 | 5 | 1 |
| All | 102 | 46 | 13 |
Earth: shape, curvature and gravity 8 of 102
The items that are about the thing the debate is named for.
| # | His claim, in short | Type | Where this site answers it | What a reader can check, and where the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Team A is wrong about objects disappearing on flat surfaces and about gas propulsion in a vacuum; “we are still waiting for Team B to conduct these experiments properly.” | structural | Standard physicsFlat-Surface Test RefutedChicago & Pontchartrain RefutedRockets Don't Push Against Air RefutedThrust, Measured in Flight | The two experiments have been done, on this site and elsewhere: his own 540-ft pond run is granted and rescaled, the long-path cases are measured with the day’s weather attached, and vacuum thrust is measured in flight. Self-Test Protocol on this site gives the rescaled pond run and a vacuum-thrust run a reader can perform. |
| #3 | Earth’s curvature hides 32.7 ft at 10 miles and 1,473 ft at 50 miles for a 6-ft observer. | structural | RefutedChicago & Pontchartrain Standard physicsBottom Up Observations | Both figures are correct for an airless globe (re-derived here: 32.7 and 1,473 ft). They are the starting point, not the prediction; the prediction is geometry plus the day’s refraction, which the Reverse Refraction Solver prices on both surfaces. Bowditch, The American Practical Navigator (NGA), Table 12 “Distance of the Horizon” and Table 13 “Geographic Range”, which fold standard refraction into exactly these numbers; and the Reverse Refraction Solver. |
| #12 | Planets are spheres with specific radii. | structural | Not demonstratedStacked & Sharpened Is the Moon a Ball? | Checkable with a small telescope: Jupiter’s disc is visibly flattened (about 1 part in 15), Saturn’s more so, and the phases of Venus run through a full crescent-to-gibbous cycle that only a sphere lit from one side produces. Jupiter’s equatorial and polar radii 71,492 and 66,854 km, NASA planetary fact sheet; Venus phase cycle in any planetarium program, and Galileo, Letters on Sunspots (1613) for the original observation. |
| #13 | The Sun is a sphere and its rays arrive parallel. | structural | RefutedSunlight & Shadows RefutedThe Sun Does Not Shrink | Measured on this site: the divergence of shadows across a long baseline is 7.5 arcseconds against a signal of 25,596 for a nearby Sun, and the Sun’s angular size does not change across the day. Sunlight and Shadows on this site, with the shadow measurement and its working. |
| #14 | The Moon’s light is the Sun’s, so a full Moon should not be uniformly lit. | structural | Standard physicsFull-Moon Lighting Is the Moon a Ball? | The uniform full Moon is the opposition surge of a rough, retro-reflecting surface, and it is reproducible at a desk with a lamp and a ball of the right roughness; the page gives the setup. Hapke, Nelson & Smythe, “The opposition effect of the Moon: the contribution of coherent backscatter,” Science 260 (1993) 509–511; the desk demonstration in Self-Test Protocol. |
| #45 | Gravity is what keeps the atmosphere from flying off into space. | structural | RefutedHydrostatics | The book’s own Q2 asks this; the page answers it with the barometric formula against measured pressure, and a reader can check the 12 hPa fall per 100 m with a phone barometer and a hill. U.S. Standard Atmosphere 1976 (NOAA/NASA/USAF), Table 1, pressure against geometric altitude. |
| #46 | The atmosphere is in hydrostatic equilibrium: pressure gradient against gravity. | structural | RefutedHydrostatics | Same page. The equilibrium is not an assumption but a measurement: any radiosonde profile shows dp/dz = −ρg to within instrument error all the way up. University of Wyoming upper-air archive: pick any station and date; the pressure–height columns are the test. |
| #48 | Gravity maintains the tropopause as a lid that keeps water vapour low. | structural | RefutedHydrostatics | Partly right as stated: the tropopause is a temperature structure (a lapse-rate minimum) that gravity and radiation set together, not a lid gravity holds down. Checkable from the same soundings, where the temperature turns over near 10–16 km. WMO definition of the tropopause (lapse rate falling below 2 K/km); any Wyoming sounding shows it. |
Heliocentrism: the Sun, the Moon, the orbits and the spin 21 of 102
Items about the arrangement of the solar system. Most are checkable with a clock, a small telescope or a tide table.
| # | His claim, in short | Type | Where this site answers it | What a reader can check, and where the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #2 | Planet rotation speeds at the equator and distances from the Sun, tabulated. | structural | Not demonstratedThe Eight-Planet Photograph Standard physicsThe Sky Turns at One Rate | The rotations are checkable: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot transits every 9 h 56 min in a 100-mm telescope; the Sun’s spots cross the disc in about two weeks. The distances follow from Kepler’s third law once one baseline is measured (radar to Venus, since 1961). ALPO Jupiter Section transit timings; Kepler’s third law with the astronomical unit from Venus radar ranging, Muhleman, “Radar results as constraints on the models of Venus,” Astronomical Journal 67 (1962) 277. |
| #10 | The Sun holds 99.86 % of the solar system’s mass and its gravity binds the planets. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | The mass ratio is a consequence of the orbital periods and distances (Kepler’s third law gives the Sun’s mass from any planet’s orbit); Jupiter’s moons give Jupiter’s mass the same way, in a backyard telescope, over a fortnight. Timing Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto with a small telescope reproduces GM for Jupiter to a few per cent: see the “Jupiter’s moons” lab in Hoff, Kelsey & Neff, Activities in Astronomy, or the CLEA “Revolution of the Moons of Jupiter” exercise. |
| #11 | Solar eclipses are the Moon’s shadow; lunar eclipses are the Earth’s. | structural | Standard physicsThe Selenelion RefutedThe Eclipse Trajectory Standard physicsWhere's the Moon's Silhouette? | Checkable at the next lunar eclipse: the edge of the shadow on the Moon is always an arc of a circle about 2.7 times the Moon’s diameter, whatever the Moon’s altitude, which only a sphere casts. The eclipse pages on this site measure the geometry of two recent events. Espenak & Meeus, Five Millennium Canon of Lunar Eclipses (NASA TP-2009-214172), umbral radius and the geometry behind it. |
| #15 | Stars are made of the same stuff as the Sun, just far away. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Checkable with a diffraction grating on a small telescope: the hydrogen Balmer lines and the sodium and calcium lines that Fraunhofer mapped in sunlight appear in the spectra of bright stars at the same wavelengths. Star Analyser 100 grating (Paton Hawksley) on any DSLR or small scope; Kaler, Stars and Their Spectra (CUP, 2nd ed. 2011), ch. 3–4 for the lines to look for. |
| #16 | Jupiter shields the inner planets from comets and asteroids. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Contested in the literature itself: the simulations show Jupiter removes some impactors and delivers others, and the net effect depends on the population assumed. Not checkable from the ground, and not a shape claim. Horner & Jones, “Jupiter – friend or foe? I,” International Journal of Astrobiology 7 (2008) 251, and parts II–IV through 2012. |
| #18 | Gravity weakens with distance; the difference across a body makes tides. Io is volcanic for that reason. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | The Earth half is checkable with a tide table and a calendar: spring tides fall at new and full Moon, neap tides at the quarters, month after month. Io’s volcanism is spacecraft evidence (Voyager 1, 1979). NOAA Tides & Currents or UKHO EasyTide for any port, read against the lunar phase; Morabito et al., “Discovery of currently active extraterrestrial volcanism,” Science 204 (1979) 972. |
| #19 | Gravity propagates at the speed of light. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument-only evidence, and strong: the gravitational wave GW170817 and the gamma-ray burst from the same merger arrived 1.7 s apart after 130 million years in transit. Abbott et al., “Gravitational waves and gamma-rays from a binary neutron star merger,” ApJ Letters 848 (2017) L13. |
| #20 | Lagrange points exist and are used to park the James Webb telescope. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Not a cancellation: the two bodies’ gravity together supplies exactly the centripetal acceleration a small object needs to orbit with their period, so it keeps station with them; “balances the centrifugal force” is the same fact stated in the rotating frame. JWST at L2 has been imaged by amateurs at about magnitude 17 at the position JPL Horizons predicts. JPL Horizons ephemeris for “JWST” (body id −170); Szebehely, Theory of Orbits (1967) for the points themselves. |
| #30 | The Moon is tidally locked: one rotation per orbit, so we see one face. | structural | Is the Moon a Ball? | Checkable by eye over a month: the same maria face us throughout, and the slow rocking at the limb (libration) exposes 59 % of the surface over time, which a locked sphere on an eccentric, inclined orbit predicts to the degree. Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (2nd ed. 1998), ch. 53, optical libration, or the daily libration figures on NASA SVS Moon Phase and Libration; compare the predicted libration in longitude and latitude with the position of Mare Crisium near the limb on successive nights. |
| #31 | Both sides of the Moon get sunlight; the far side has day and night too. | structural | Is the Moon a Ball? Standard physicsFull-Moon Lighting | The near side is seen to run through a full day–night cycle every lunation; the far side’s cycle is inferred from the same geometry and confirmed only by spacecraft imagery. LRO Wide Angle Camera global mosaic, Speyerer et al., “Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera global morphological map of the Moon,” LPSC 42 (2011) 2387. |
| #32 | The Moon has moonquakes from tidal stress and cooling. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument-only: the Apollo seismometers ran from 1969 to 1977. Not a shape claim. Nakamura, Latham & Dorman, “Apollo lunar seismic experiment – final summary,” JGR 87 (1982) A117. |
| #33 | Lunar surface temperatures swing from 127 °C to −173 °C. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument-only: the numbers are the Diviner radiometer’s. Not a shape claim. Williams et al., “The global surface temperatures of the Moon as measured by the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment,” Icarus 283 (2017) 300. |
| #34 | The Moon’s gravity raises ocean tides and flexes the crust by centimetres. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | The ocean half is the same tide-table check as #18. The solid-Earth tide is measured by GNSS and gravimeters, not by eye. Agnew, “Earth tides,” in Treatise on Geophysics vol. 3 (Elsevier, 2nd ed. 2015). |
| #35 | The Moon stabilises Earth’s axial tilt at about 23.5°. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | A model result, not an observation; the chaotic-obliquity paper it comes from is the reference. Not checkable, not a shape claim. Laskar, Joutel & Robutel, “Stabilization of the Earth’s obliquity by the Moon,” Nature 361 (1993) 615. |
| #37 | The Sun is an average G-type main-sequence star, about 4.6 billion years old. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | The classification is spectroscopy (see #15); the age comes from meteorite radiometric dating. Not a shape claim. Bouvier & Wadhwa, “The age of the Solar System redefined by the oldest Pb–Pb age of a meteoritic inclusion,” Nature Geoscience 3 (2010) 637. |
| #38 | The corona is far hotter than the photosphere. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument evidence since 1939 (coronal emission lines identified as highly ionised iron); a total eclipse shows the corona to the eye but not its temperature. Not a shape claim. Edlén, “Die Deutung der Emissionslinien im Spektrum der Sonnenkorona,” Zeitschrift für Astrophysik 22 (1943) 30. |
| #39 | The Sun is powered by fusion in its core. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument evidence: solar neutrinos detected at the rate fusion predicts, once neutrino oscillation is included. Not a shape claim. SNO Collaboration, “Direct evidence for neutrino flavor transformation from neutral-current interactions,” PRL 89 (2002) 011301. |
| #41 | Light takes 8 min 20 s from the Sun. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Checkable over a season with a small telescope: time the eclipses of Io by Jupiter for several months and the timings drift by up to about 16½ minutes between the near and far sides of Earth’s orbit, which is the light-time across two astronomical units. Half of it is the 499 s claimed. Rømer’s 1676 method; predicted timings for any date are in Sky & Telescope’s Jupiter’s Moons tool and the Astronomical Almanac section on Jupiter’s satellites. |
| #42 | Photons take thousands of years to escape the Sun’s interior. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | A model result from radiative transfer; the commonly quoted range is 10,000 to 170,000 years depending on the assumptions. Not checkable, not a shape claim. Mitalas & Sills, “On the photon diffusion time scale for the Sun,” ApJ 401 (1992) 759. |
| #43 | The Sun rotates differentially: about 25 days at the equator, 36 at the poles. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Checkable by projection: sketch sunspots daily for two weeks; spots near the equator cross in about 13 days, spots at high latitude take longer. This was Carrington’s measurement. Carrington, Observations of the Spots on the Sun (1863); the Stanford Solar Center “Sunspot rotation” activity gives a worked modern version with SOHO/SDO images. |
| #44 | The solar wind and the heliosphere. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Instrument evidence (Mariner 2 onward); the aurora is the ground-visible consequence. Not a shape claim. Neugebauer & Snyder, “Solar plasma experiment,” Science 138 (1962) 1095. |
Other bodies: planets, asteroids and Pluto 15 of 102
Planetary science. None of it bears on the shape of the Earth, and most of it needs a spacecraft or a large telescope to check.
| # | His claim, in short | Type | Where this site answers it | What a reader can check, and where the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #17 | Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia is convecting nitrogen ice. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | New Horizons imagery and modelling. Not checkable from the ground, not a shape claim. McKinnon et al., “Convection in a volatile nitrogen-ice-rich layer drives Pluto’s geological vigour,” Nature 534 (2016) 82. |
| #49 | Asteroids are leftovers from planet formation. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Meteorite chemistry and sample return. Not a shape claim. |
| #50 | The asteroid belt is mostly empty space. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Spacecraft have crossed it without incident since Pioneer 10 (1972). Not a shape claim. |
| #51 | A 710-m asteroid spinning every 1.88 minutes must be solid rock. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | A single-object result reported in 2026; the spin-barrier argument is standard. Not checkable from the ground, not a shape claim. |
| #52 | Bennu is a loosely packed rubble pile. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | OSIRIS-REx touchdown data. Not a shape claim. Lauretta et al., “Spacecraft sample collection and subsurface excavation of asteroid (101955) Bennu,” Science 377 (2022) 285. |
| #53 | Some asteroids have moons and rings. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Ida–Dactyl from Galileo (1993); Chariklo’s rings from a stellar occultation, which amateurs contributed timings to. Not a shape claim. Braga-Ribas et al., “A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo,” Nature 508 (2014) 72. |
| #54 | Ceres is a dwarf planet and a third of the belt’s mass. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Dawn mission. Ceres itself is a binocular object at opposition. Not a shape claim. |
| #55 | Asteroids are rich in metals; Psyche will investigate. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Spectroscopic inference plus a mission in flight. Not a shape claim. |
| #56 | Carbon-rich asteroids delivered much of Earth’s water. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Isotope ratios from Ryugu and Bennu samples. An active research question, not a settled fact. Not a shape claim. |
| #57 | DART moved an asteroid; Hera will inspect the result in 2026. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | The orbital-period change of Dimorphos (33 minutes) was measured from the ground by timing mutual eclipses, including by amateurs. Not a shape claim. Thomas et al., “Orbital period change of Dimorphos due to the DART kinetic impact,” Nature 616 (2023) 448. |
| #75 | Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital imagery and altimetry. Not a shape claim. |
| #76 | Valles Marineris is a 2,500-mile canyon. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital imagery. Not a shape claim. |
| #78 | Martian soil is rich in perchlorates. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Phoenix lander wet chemistry (2008). Not a shape claim. |
| #79 | Mars has dust devils and global dust storms. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Global storms are visible in amateur telescopes: the 2018 storm hid the surface markings for weeks. Not a shape claim. |
| #80 | Mars has 38 % of Earth’s surface gravity. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Follows from its mass (from its moons’ orbits) and radius. Not a shape claim. |
The galaxy and the cosmos 21 of 102
Galactic dynamics, dark matter, dark energy, black holes. Real science, all of it outside anything a shape debate can settle, and outside anything this review assesses.
| # | His claim, in short | Type | Where this site answers it | What a reader can check, and where the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #4 | The solar system orbits the galactic centre at about 515,000 mph. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Radio astrometry of the galactic centre. Not a shape claim. Reid & Brunthaler, “The proper motion of Sagittarius A*. II,” ApJ 616 (2004) 872. |
| #5 | A galactic year is 225–250 million years. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Follows from #4 and the distance to the centre (#22). Not a shape claim. |
| #6 | The Sun bobs through the galactic plane. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Stellar dynamics. Not a shape claim. |
| #7 | The ecliptic is tilted about 60° to the galactic plane. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Checkable by eye on a dark night: the Milky Way crosses the zodiac at a steep angle. Not a shape claim. |
| #8 | The Sun orbits the solar system’s barycentre. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | A consequence of Newtonian gravity with Jupiter’s mass; seen directly in pulsar timing. Not a shape claim. |
| #9 | The Milky Way moves toward the Great Attractor and will merge with Andromeda. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Proper-motion measurements of M31 with Hubble. Not a shape claim. van der Marel et al., “The M31 velocity vector. III. Future Milky Way–M31–M33 orbital evolution, merging, and fate of the Sun,” ApJ 753 (2012) 9. |
| #21 | The Milky Way is a barred spiral. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Infrared star counts. Not a shape claim. |
| #22 | We are 26,000 light-years from the centre, in the Orion Spur. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Radio parallax of masers. Not a shape claim. Reid et al., “Trigonometric parallaxes of high-mass star-forming regions,” ApJ 885 (2019) 131. |
| #23 | Sagittarius A* is a four-million-solar-mass black hole. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Stellar orbits at the galactic centre, 2020 Nobel Prize. Not a shape claim. GRAVITY Collaboration, “Detection of the Schwarzschild precession in the orbit of the star S2,” A&A 636 (2020) L5. |
| #24 | The universe is 13.8 billion years old, the Milky Way 13.6. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Cosmic microwave background fits and stellar ages. Not a shape claim. |
| #25 | The Milky Way grew by consuming dwarf galaxies. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Gaia stellar streams. Not a shape claim. |
| #26 | Ninety per cent of the galaxy’s mass is dark matter. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Rotation curves. An inference about missing mass, and the subject of live debate about its nature. Not a shape claim. |
| #27 | The galactic disc is warped. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Gaia and HI surveys. Not a shape claim. |
| #28 | 100–400 billion stars, most with planets. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Star counts and Kepler statistics. Not a shape claim. |
| #29 | The Milky Way moves at 1.3 million mph relative to the microwave background. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | The CMB dipole, measured by COBE, WMAP and Planck. Not a shape claim. Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2018 results. I,” A&A 641 (2020) A1, §3 on the dipole. |
| #47 | Dark energy’s fate for the universe: heat death, Big Rip or Big Crunch. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Explicitly conditional in the claim itself. Not a shape claim. |
| #60 | Dark matter is 27 % of the universe, ordinary matter 5 %. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Planck cosmological parameters. Not a shape claim. |
| #62 | Dark matter outweighs visible matter six to one. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Same source as #60. Not a shape claim. |
| #77 | Black holes: event horizons and time dilation. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Event Horizon Telescope imagery and gravitational-wave ringdowns. Not a shape claim. |
| #95 | Supermassive black holes power quasars and jets. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Radio and X-ray astronomy. Not a shape claim. |
| #99 | Dark energy is 68–70 % of the universe’s energy. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Supernova distances and the CMB. Not a shape claim. |
The space programme: Apollo, the ISS, the probes 37 of 102
The class the landing page declares untouched: whether space-agency material is authentic turns on the good faith of named people, not on a measurement. Three items are the exception, because the station itself can be watched from a garden.
| # | His claim, in short | Type | Where this site answers it | What a reader can check, and where the evidence is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #40 | Parker Solar Probe is the fastest human-made object, at 430,000 mph. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Mission telemetry. Not assessed here. |
| #58 | NEOWISE catalogued 44,000 objects and 3,000 near-Earth asteroids. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Mission data; the catalogue itself is public through the Minor Planet Center. Not assessed here. |
| #59 | Voyager 1 reaches one light-day from Earth in 2026. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | One light-day is 25.9 billion km (re-derived); the milestone is a matter of JPL’s tracking. Not assessed here. |
| #61 | Deep-space probes use gravity assists. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital mechanics; the manoeuvre is standard. Not assessed here. |
| #63 | Aldrin used a pen to close a broken circuit-breaker. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Apollo 11 mission transcript and crew accounts. Not assessed here. |
| #64 | Lunar dust smelled of gunpowder. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew accounts. Not assessed here. |
| #65 | Ninety-six bags of waste were left on the Moon. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Mission records. Not assessed here. |
| #66 | The Moon’s sphere of influence. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital mechanics; a definition more than a claim. Not assessed here. |
| #67 | The lunar module landed on a throttleable engine. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Engineering record. Not assessed here. |
| #68 | Lunar gravity meant only about 3,000 lb of thrust to hover. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Engineering record; the figure as stated is low for the landed mass. Not assessed here. |
| #69 | South Pole–Aitken is the largest lunar basin. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital altimetry. Not assessed here. |
| #70 | Mons Huygens is the tallest lunar mountain. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Orbital altimetry; the Apennines are a fine sight near first quarter in any telescope. Not assessed here. |
| #71 | Permanently shadowed craters reach −246 °C. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Diviner radiometer. Not assessed here. |
| #72 | Polar craters hold water ice. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | LCROSS impact plume and neutron spectroscopy. Not assessed here. |
| #73 | Impact gardening turns over the regolith. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Sample analysis. Not assessed here. |
| #74 | The Moon has a tenuous exosphere. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | LADEE and ground-based sodium-tail imaging. Not assessed here. |
| #36 | Lunar regolith is jagged, abrasive glass and rock. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Returned-sample analysis. Not assessed here. |
| #81 | Over 200 spacewalks built the ISS. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #82 | Canadarm2 walks along the station. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #83 | The truss is 357 ft and the arrays add drag. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #84 | Modules were added through 2021. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #85 | ECLSS recycles 93 % of water. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #86 | The ISS has a distinct smell. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew accounts. Not assessed here. |
| #87 | Fluid shift and dulled taste in microgravity. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew medicine. Not assessed here. |
| #89 | The ISS is a microbial living lab. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme science. Not assessed here. |
| #90 | Astronauts see cosmic-ray flashes. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew accounts since Apollo. Not assessed here. |
| #91 | Skin flakes float in microgravity. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew accounts. Not assessed here. |
| #92 | No laundry in space. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #93 | The space toilet is a vacuum system. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme records. Not assessed here. |
| #94 | Astronauts exercise 2.5 hours a day. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Crew medicine. Not assessed here. |
| #96 | The ISS orbits at about 17,500 mph, once every 90 minutes, giving 16 sunrises a day. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Checkable from a garden: a visible pass crosses the sky in about six minutes, and near the zenith the station moves about one degree per second, which at 400 km altitude is 7.7 km/s (re-derived: 7.67 km/s, 92-minute period). Successive passes come about 90–95 minutes apart. NASA “Spot the Station” or heavens-above.com for pass predictions to the minute; time a pass against a stopwatch and compare. |
| #97 | Gravity at ISS altitude is 90 % of the surface value; the station is in free fall. | structural | RefutedThe Curve at 118,000 Feet | The 90 % follows from the inverse-square law at 6,771 km radius (re-derived: 88.5 %). Free fall is what the timed pass in #96 measures: the observed speed is the circular-orbit speed for that gravity. The book’s own QR 72 shows six minutes of it on a sounding rocket, and its coast time fits the inverse square. Same pass timing as #96; the circular-orbit speed √(GM/r) with GM = 3.986 × 1014 m³/s² from JPL’s astrodynamic parameters. |
| #98 | Atmospheric drag slows the ISS; it needs periodic reboosts. | structural | no page: not a shape claim | Visible in the public orbital elements: the station’s altitude decays by tens of metres a day between reboosts, and the reboosts show as steps. Anyone can plot it. Two-line elements from CelesTrak (NORAD 25544); the mean-motion history over a year shows the decay and the steps. |
| #100 | Tissue chips are tested on the ISS. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme science. Not assessed here. |
| #101 | MISSE exposes materials outside the station. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme science. Not assessed here. |
| #102 | The Cold Atom Lab makes Bose–Einstein condensates in orbit. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme science. Not assessed here. |
| #103 | The AMS has recorded 235 billion cosmic-ray events. | particular | no page: not a shape claim | Programme science. Not assessed here. |
6 · What the map shows
Of the hundred and two, eight are about the Earth and every one of those has a page here. Twenty-one are about the heliocentric arrangement; four of those have a page, and most of the rest can be checked from the ground — tidal locking with a month of looking, the tides against a lunar calendar, light-time from Io’s eclipses, the Sun’s rotation by projection. Forty-six of the hundred and two are structural; the other fifty-six are particular, and the ratio a particular fact contributes to is a ratio about the reliability of a catalogue, not about the shape of anything.
Thirty-seven items are the space programme, which the landing page declares this review does not assess, and it still does not: whether a pen closed a circuit on Apollo 11 is a question about people, not a measurement. Three of the thirty-seven are the exception, because they concern the station’s orbit rather than what happens inside it, and the orbit is visible from a back garden: a timed pass gives the speed, the pass interval gives the period, and the public orbital elements show the drag and the reboosts. Those three are marked structural, and checkable.
So the scorecard, taken on its own terms, comes out like this. Team A’s claims are answered: one granted as standard physics, three refuted by measurement, the debate card answered on three pages, one item not assessed. Team B’s list is mostly not about the debate it is scoring; where it is, the evidence is on this site, and where a reader can check it themselves, the table says how. A ratio of claims to evidence is a fine rule. It needs both lists written by someone with no stake in the quotient — and the globe’s list, written here, is fourteen claims long, each with the observation that would end it.
Where this page could be wrong
- The sorting is ours. A reader could argue that the ISS orbit items belong under heliocentrism, or that the atmosphere items (#45, #46, #48) are not about shape; the counts would move by a few either way, and the shape of the conclusion would not.
- The structural/particular line is a judgement. Jupiter’s shielding (#16) and the Moon’s stabilising of the tilt (#35) could be called structural; the Sun’s differential rotation (#43) could be called either. Each is marked once and the reasoning is in the row.
- The paraphrases are short by design, and a reader should check them against the PDF, which is linked; nothing in a paraphrase is meant to sharpen or soften a claim.
- The reader-check column names instruments and references but has not run every check itself. The ones this site has run are the ones with a page link. The others are given with enough detail to be attempted, and a reader who finds one that fails should say so.
- The standalone PDF and the printed chapter differ in one line: the book states the stake as a taxpayer sum; the PDF states it as the credibility of governments and the truth for future generations. Neither affects the map.
Sources & further reading
- Levi Miller, Globe Deconstruction? (prerelease draft, 2026), “An optimized approach to the shape debate,” pp. 208–231; the standalone PDF is linked from shapedebate.com/social-proof.
- The claim pages linked in the tables, and the landing page’s catalogue for the verdict rubric.
- What the Globe Actually Claims — the fourteen structural claims, the other side of this ledger; and Extraordinary Evidence, and Who Owes It, the chapter this scorecard sits in.
- The Reverse Refraction Solver, for the curvature figures in #3 priced on both surfaces.
- The tables are generated from build_optimized_map.py, which holds every item, its group, its type and its reference in one place.
- Per-item references are given in the tables; the ones most worth having to hand are Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (Willmann-Bell, 2nd ed. 1998) for the Moon and Jupiter’s satellites, Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator for the horizon tables, and the U.S. Standard Atmosphere 1976 for the pressure profile.