The book frames its project as falsification-driven — your own controlled tests, not appeals to authority. This page takes that at face value: a setup, then both predictions, as numbers wherever the linked page has them. The book's own headline test needs rescaling first: at the heights it specifies, curvature cannot hide the light until about 4,271 feet; the baseline it proposes is 410 feet. 410 ft cannot discriminate.
Conceded once: this review has run none of the thirteen as written. Where a linked page reports a measurement the entry says so; the Io date is open until mid-November 2026; the rest are proposals. Tests 8–13 copy their numbers from the pages they link.
"The decisive question isn't whether wall-distance-dependence disappears; it's whether the vehicle moves at all in the condition built to minimize recirculation."
The bottom-up disappearance test — properly scaled
His proposed setup (p.127): flashlight 2.5" above calm water, camera 0.5" above water, 410 feet apart. The horizon-distance formula (d = √(2Rh), R = 3,959 mi) gives a 0.5" camera a horizon of about 1,320 ft and a 2.5" light about 2,951 ft; the light stays geometrically visible to roughly their sum, 4,271 feet (~0.81 miles) — over 10× his baseline. The curvature bulge at 410 ft is about 0.05 inches, smaller than either height. Neither model predicts disappearance at 410 ft, so a result there cannot discriminate.
Structurally this is Samuel Rowbotham's 1838 Old Bedford River test: telescope 8 inches above the water, a boat flag 3 feet above it, 6 miles off; the flag stayed visible where curvature predicted an ~11-foot drop. In 1870 Alfred Russel Wallace raised the sightline to 13 feet — above the layer where warm air over water bends grazing light unpredictably — added a midpoint marker, and the curvature appeared cleanly. The inches-above-water setup is the 1838 geometry, not the 1870 correction.
Rescaled protocol
Four distances (500ft, 1,500ft, 3,000ft, 5,000ft), heights fixed, light and camera a few feet above the water rather than inches, a fixed marker at the midpoint. Then raise the camera to four times its height and repeat: the cutoff should move out by a factor of two. Refraction shifts a cutoff by a modest fraction; it neither removes it nor changes the square-root scaling, and that scaling is the discriminator — "perspective" predicts no cutoff to shift.
Full-moon "no highlight" claim, at his desk
Setup: a rough, matte sphere (a golf ball, a stucco-coated craft ball, a scored orange) and, as a control, a glossy one (a billiard ball), lit by a single point source across the room. Photograph from an angle offset from the lamp, then with the camera beside the lamp — near-zero phase angle (the angle at the ball between light and camera): full-Moon geometry.
Moon-tilt illusion, with a lamp and a ball on a string
Setup: a lamp as the "Sun," a ball hung as the "Moon" at several angles and heights against a fixed horizon reference (a table edge). Photograph the terminator (light/shadow boundary) at each position.
"Local light source" cloud-brightness claim — one setting change
Setup: redo the above-the-clouds sequence with the camera locked to manual exposure/ISO/shutter (every phone has a "Pro" mode) instead of auto-exposure.
Jupiter's moon-shadow "misalignment," as a dated blind prediction
Setup: over 15–17 November 2026, at Jupiter's western quadrature (Jupiter ninety degrees from the Sun as seen from Earth), time one Io shadow transit with a modest telescope and a stopwatch: start when the shadow touches the disc, stop when Io does. The only outside input is a published transit prediction for Io itself (Sky & Telescope prints these in advance).
An advance prediction with a sign: the flip from "after" in April to "before" in November is a direction no fudge factor supplies afterwards. To the standing reply — heliocentric software made the prediction, so a match is circular — the answer is that the book's model must state its own advance interval; with one prediction on the table, only that one is tested.
Cost: a modest telescope, or borrowed time on oneKampf's Law, properly instrumented
Setup: a real vacuum gauge (~$30–50), reporting the pressure reached in torr or mbar (a torr is 1/760 of an atmosphere), not "vacuum on/off." Run the far-wall trial with the wall backed in absorptive material (foam, cloth) to reduce exhaust bounce-back, at the best achievable vacuum.
Even at a good vacuum, a nearby wall lets the vehicle's own exhaust bounce back against it — a distance-dependent push unrelated to ambient pressure. Propulsion labs call these facility effects and size chambers to keep them out of thrust measurements (AIP Physics of Plasmas, "A review of the impact of ground test-related facility effects on gridded ion thruster operation and performance," 2024). So "closer wall → bigger reaction" (the book's p.80 finding) doesn't discriminate — both hypotheses predict it. The decisive question isn't whether wall-distance-dependence disappears; it's whether the vehicle moves at all in the condition built to minimize recirculation.
Kampf's Law — the sharper claim: timing, not magnitude
This is what he pointed to in the Action Lab footage: an apparent delay between gas leaving the nozzle and the vehicle visibly moving, matching the cloud reaching the wall. On rewatch, the syringe's substantial motion is timed with wall contact, but a smaller motion precedes it. And a still-vertical filament just after gas exit is kinematics: an impulse changes velocity at once, but a filament's angle shows displacement — for a small puff, a fraction of a millimeter in the first tens of milliseconds, below what normal-speed video shows.
Instrumented, not just visual
Keep the horizontal-tube/syringe geometry; add force instrumentation to the same rig. An in-line load cell (strain gauge or piezo, ~$20–100, the part hobby-rocketry thrust stands use) between syringe and support, replacing the filament, gives a continuous force-vs-time trace at the source; a pressure-sensitive plate as the target wall gives a second trace of when the gas arrives. Run both together across a few wall distances.
Bonus check: total impulse (area under the source curve) should match the momentum of the ejected gas. Fallback without load cells: 240fps phone video tracking the filament's angle frame by frame, timestamping gas-exit onset, first deflection and wall contact across several distances, including one where gas transit takes a full second or more.
Primary cost: two load cells, ~$40–200 total. Fallback cost: a phone with slow-motion video (already owned) + free motion-tracking softwareKampf's Law — turn the exhaust instead of lengthening the chamber
Why not a longer tube, or a bigger syringe: a tube sends the exhaust straight down the axis and returns whatever comes back along the same axis, so the push from the nozzle and any push from the wall arrive from the same direction and the two hypotheses only differ in when — a difference that sits inside a single video frame at any consumer rate (Test 6B). Changing the syringe does not help either: a larger volume changes how the propellant burns (the confined-burn law on the Action Lab page), so a change in onset with syringe size is the engine's own pressure build-up, which both hypotheses share. The discriminator that survives is where the recoil points.
Setup: a wide chamber rather than a tube — a bell jar or a pressure-cooker-sized vessel is enough — with the syringe hung on two threads so it is free to swing in any horizontal direction, and a phone filming from above. Run A: nozzle aimed square at the nearest wall, at some distance d. Run B: same syringe, same d, but the exhaust is turned through 90° by a smooth plate fixed to the chamber (not to the syringe) a few centimetres past the nozzle, so the gas ends its flight against a side wall and anything that returns comes from the side. Run C, optional: nozzle turned through some angle θ with no plate. Mark the nozzle direction on the floor before each run.
The point is that turning the nozzle by an angle turns the recoil by the same angle under Newton and by something else under the wall mechanism. A direction can be read off a phone video from above; a delay of a few milliseconds cannot. The standing reply — that diffuse scatter off the plate still returns some gas along the axis — is a magnitude claim, and A against B measures it: the Action Lab frames put returning material at 0.05–3% of the outgoing momentum.
Cost: the Test 6 rig, a second thread, a flat plate and a phoneWater-curvature "skinny warehouse" test, scaled to what's accessible
Setup: a laser level plus a calm canal or long pool. At 100–200 meters the predicted drop is under a millimeter — likely below what basic gear can resolve, which is itself informative: it is why casual short-range observation never "sees" the curve. A mile-plus baseline with a surveying-grade level brings the predicted ~8 inches per mile² (a level surface's drop below a straight line, growing with the square of distance) within easy reach.
The tilted glass, and the straight kilometre
Setup: half-fill a glass and tilt it. Then the trough the book proposes at p.89, with one specification: a kilometre of still water over a floor built straight (what light in a vacuum gives) rather than level (what a spirit level gives). Built level, nothing happens in either world; the floor, not the water, is the instrument.
Two filtered photographs of the Sun, an hour apart
Setup: mid-afternoon, the Sun near 45° up, a solar filter on the lens; two frames sixty minutes apart at one focal length; measure the disc's width in pixels. (An arcminute is a sixtieth of a degree, an arcsecond a sixtieth of that; the Sun is about 32 arcminutes, or 1,920 arcseconds, across.) Total refraction at 45° is one arcminute, so the air cannot excuse a sixth.
The Moon against the stars, across one night
Setup: at dusk, note which stars sit beside the Moon; look again before dawn. Naked eye, one night, exactly as the question asks.
Summit to reflected summit, at his lake
Setup: do not measure the reflection's shape; measure the angle from the summit down to its reflection. It is twice the summit's apparent elevation, the camera's height cancels out (to better than 0.2′), and the water supplies the level. The inputs — the peak's height and distance, 64.6 km for Aoraki/Mount Cook from the Pukaki shore — go to both models alike, so an error in them moves both predictions together.
Two phones, two hemispheres, one Jupiter
Setup: two observers, one in each hemisphere, agree a timestamp and each photograph Jupiter with a compass app open; neither needs software to find it. The arrangement of the planets is the same from everywhere on Earth, so every difference between the frames is orientation — where a flat plane and a globe part company.
Which side the bite is on, after totality
Setup: in any partial-phase frames — his from Erie, Pennsylvania on 8 April 2024, or your own at the next eclipse — note which side of the Sun the bite sits on before totality, and after. The direction is a position angle: measured at the Sun from straight up, positive toward increasing azimuth.