{"id":6624,"date":"2014-01-26T19:47:57","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T00:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6624"},"modified":"2019-09-16T11:37:29","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T15:37:29","slug":"the-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6624","title":{"rendered":"The Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just found out about a new film coming out this spring, which appears to exemplify exactly the dangers I was pointing to in my last posting.  It&#8217;s entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theprinciplemovie.com\/\">The Principle<\/a>, and features physicists Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss and Max Tegmark, with Kate Mulgrew (aka Captain Janeway) as narrator.<\/p>\n<p>You can take a look at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=p8cBvMCucTg\">the trailer<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/magisterialfundies.blogspot.com\/\">this blog<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/new.livestream.com\/churchmilitanttv\/events\/2672345\">this interview<\/a> to start to get some idea of what&#8217;s going on.  The person behind this is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Sungenis\">Robert Sungenis<\/a>, a bizarre figure with extreme religious views.  He holds a Ph.D from an institution located in Vanuatu, and is an advocate of the idea of &#8220;geocentrism&#8221;, the idea that the Catholic church was right, and scientists since Galileo have got it all wrong (see his web-site <a href=\"http:\/\/galileowaswrong.com\/\">Galileo Was Wrong<\/a>).  For another Youtube video explaining what this is all about, see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eWpBvP5cu_w\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As near as I can tell from all this, without having yet seen the full film, it appears that what probably happened is the following.  Sungenis decided that the anthropic principle business in cosmology supported his views, so he went and got physicists like Kaku, Krauss and Tegmark to say silly things on camera, then edited this to suit his case. Maybe the trailer is misleading, and these people actually make a cogent case against Sungenis&#8217;s nonsense and for solid science, we&#8217;ll see&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: For a different point of view on this, from someone worried that geocentrists will discredit the Catholic Church, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocentrismdebunked.org\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just found out about a new film coming out this spring, which appears to exemplify exactly the dangers I was pointing to in my last posting. It&#8217;s entitled The Principle, and features physicists Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss and Max &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6624\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6624"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6636,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6624\/revisions\/6636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}