Agreement and Disagreement with Robert Sungenis

Karl Keating

cited by Sungenis

[The New Geocentrics]: page 10: “In gratitude, I dedicate this book to the memory of Curtis Wilton.”

From a radio interview, Keating adds: “We had to take certain elective courses, and I took one on the History of Science, taught by Professor Curtis Wilson. He is the top American expert in Johannes Kepler. Kepler was a scientist in the 17th century who formulate the three laws of planetary motion on which all of modern astrophysics is based....The class was actually on geocentrism. And what we did was to take Ptolemy’s ancient writings...and he was the first to come up with a consolidated theory of how the planets and the sun and the stars interacted. And it’s his theory that the Earth is at the center. The planets that could be as far as Saturn...and the sun, rotated in circles around, revolved in circles around the Earth. He had to elaborate this with many accoutrements in order to make his theory seem to accommodate the observations he had at the time....In this course, while I was in school Professor Wilson took us through Ptolemy’s work; through his much later successor Tycho Brahe who died in 1601, who had an alternative theory but with Earth still in the center, and took us through the actual calculations and observations. We did the math. We did the arithmetic and the geometry and worked this through. And we were able to see over the course of the class that as time went on and observations became ever more precise, that the Ptolemaic theory and later the Tychonian theory did not accommodate the appearances. And as time went on they were less and less able to explain why the planets and the stars and the sun were doing what they seemed to be doing...Now I see that decades later, this notion of geocentrism has made a comeback.”

Catholic Answers radio program of February 13, 2015, an interview between Keating and Patrick Coffin, recorded beginning at 13:50 when Coffin asked Keating how he got into the present subject matter.

Robert Sungenis I

The key sentence in his description is:

And we were able to see over the course of the class that as time when on and observations became ever more precise, that the Ptolemaic theory and later the Tychonian theory did not accommodate the appearances.

If that is what Professor Curtis Wilson taught Karl Keating, then Prof. Wilson was wrong. If Prof. Wilson was only dealing with kinematics and not dynamics, then it would be true to say that Ptolemy’s model can be shown to be inadequate, but Tycho Brahe’s model matches both the Copernican and the Keplerian models, orbit for orbit, equation for equation. My suspicion is that Keating probably misunderstood Prof. Wilson, but unfortunately, this means Keating has carried the same fallacious idea with him for the last forty years, namely, that the Tychonic model is inadequate, when it is only the Ptolemaic that has proven to be so. I suggest that Mr. Keating go back and check the notes that Prof. Wilson gave him. I know of no professor in astrophysical kinematics that would ever claim that Tycho Brahe’s model was inadequate to explain the motions in the heavens, and I dare say that I don’t think Prof. Wilson would dare to do so either. ...

Me

I heartily agree on this one.

Robert Sungenis II

... Moreover, if Prof. Wilson taught Keating that only the Keplerian model could explain stellar parallax, he is wrong there also. Although accusing Tycho’s model of being unable to explain parallax was popular a few years ago, it has been discredited, for the simple reason that we now know that if the stars are aligned with the sun instead of the Earth, then both parallax and aberration are produced. As one professor from the University of Illinois put it in his 2004 lecture notes:

It is often said that Tycho’s model implies the absence of parallax, and that Copernicus’ requires parallax. However, it would not be a major conceptual change to have the stars orbit the sun (like the planets) for Tycho, which would give the same yearly shifts in their apparent positions as parallax gives.

University of Illinois, Physics 319, Spring 2004, Lecture 03, p. 8.

Me

I may come off as a conspiracy theorist, but bear with me ... in 2001 to March 2004, I had a precarious stay in an appartment my mother was not fully in control of, and I was eventually kicked out. But while I had it, I was often enough in libraries and internet cafés, and very much the Lund University library especially from early 2003 on, debating, and putting debates onto my then site MSN Groups Antimodernism (all MSN Groups finished in 2009, and I had too little internet time to salvage the big group onto the MSN substitute for the groups, namely "Multiply" (a very ironic term from the genius of a Bill Gates who after all is depopulationist).

The point is, if I had had adequate time on the internet back in 2004, I would have heard of that professor, and I would have answered.

The parallax as discussed by Copernicus, Tycho, Galileo was NOT the parallax we see. Only Bruno and Newton would have predicted that one. To all of Copernicus, Tycho, Galileo, to a man, the fix stars were one shell, the limit between the visible heavens, and the heaven that is God's throne room. Neither Bruno nor Newton were fully Christian, the one a kind of trace amount Gnostic with traces of Mormon poly-universe polytheism (or the reverse is the road, perhaps, it's probably Joseph Smith who had it from Bruno via Freemasonry, rather than the reverse:

The early Nauvoo years were a period of doctrinal innovation. Smith introduced baptism for the dead in 1840, and in 1841 construction began on the Nauvoo Temple as a place for recovering lost ancient knowledge.[122] An 1841 revelation promised the restoration of the "fullness of the priesthood"; and in May 1842, Smith inaugurated a revised endowment or "first anointing".[123] The endowment resembled the rites of Freemasonry that Smith had observed two months earlier when he had been initiated "at sight" into the Nauvoo Masonic lodge.[124] At first, the endowment was open only to men, who were initiated into a special group called the Anointed Quorum. For women, Smith introduced the Relief Society, a service club and sorority within which Smith predicted women would receive "the keys of the kingdom".[125] Smith also elaborated on his plan for a Millennial kingdom; no longer envisioning the building of Zion in Nauvoo, he viewed Zion as encompassing all of North and South America, with Mormon settlements being "stakes" of Zion's metaphorical tent.[126] Zion also became less a refuge from an impending tribulation than a great building project.[127] In the summer of 1842, Smith revealed a plan to establish the millennial Kingdom of God, which would eventually establish theocratic rule over the whole Earth.[128]

The other, Newton, was an Arian, and probably a Magician.

Now, why is this important? You see, the parallax you would predict about stars in a kind of shell would be very different. If instead of Sun moving between Virgo in August~September and Pisces in February~March, it was really Earth that moved between Pisces in August~September and Virgo in February~March, Virgo would as a whole seem bigger in February~March and shrink towards early August or whenever it was being hidden by the Sun, and appearing after the hiding, Virgo would at first be small in late September or whenever she reappaears, and then grow bigger into February. And vice versa for Pisces. This is not what we see.

What we do see can be accounted for in only two ways:

• if Earth is moving, or if they align with the Sun, stars do not form a shell, they are really at very different distances;
• if Earth is not moving, and stars do also not align with the Sun, if they do form a shell, the stars show proper movements within that shell.

In the case of "stellar" or "annual" aberration, the apparent position of a star to an observer on Earth varies periodically over the course of a year as the Earth's velocity changes as it revolves around the Sun, by a maximum angle of approximately 20 arcseconds in right ascension or declination.

So, that part of the movement of each star would instead be a proper movement. Not part of all stars moving around the Sun (in non-orbitting ways) as Sungenis suggested, not orbits around the Sun, but proper movements. With Angelic movers, that is not a problem.

The most important fundamental distance measurements in astronomy come from trigonometric parallax, as applied in the stellar parallax method. As the Earth orbits the Sun, the position of nearby stars will appear to shift slightly against the more distant background. These shifts are angles in an isosceles triangle, with 2 AU (the distance between the extreme positions of Earth's orbit around the Sun) making the base leg of the triangle and the distance to the star being the long equal-length legs.

Well, the thing that stands out here is, that if parallax is a proper movement, done by Angelic movers, we don't have any trigonometry here. The Heliocentrics, and Sungenis aligning with them here and with Bruno and Newton ultimately in saying the stars align with the Sun, will pretend we do have valid trigonometry consisting of one known side and three known angles. I will argue, that as we cannot know that the star (for instance α Centauri or Vega) travels the same distance as the Sun, or the same distance as each other, for that matter, we cannot know that α Centauri is 4 light years or Vega 25 light years from us.

The furthest off object we can measure the distance of without parallax trigonometry are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Both are less than 1 light day up. Both of them are however closer to the stars (if they are 1 light day up) than to us. So, wouldn't their cameras have detected the stars getting significantly bigger to the view? Well, their cameras or not turned on. So, the stars could be preciely one light day up. Let's calculate the real size of Vega if that's the case currently. It's supposed to have a radius medium 2.572 that of the Sun, at 25 light years' distance. Same visible size to us at one light day's distance, what's that? Recall, the equatorial radius of the Sun is 109 earth radii. For diameter, we take twice the radius.

2.572 * 109 * 6 371 000 m * 2 = 3 572 194 216 m
25 * 365 = 9125
3 572 194 216 m / 9125 = 391 473 m

2 * 6 371 000 m / 391 473 m = 32.549 — Vega would be 32.549 times smaller than Earth in each dimension, and 34 484 times smaller than Earth in volume. This is obviously anathema to Atheists, who would argue "if Jupiter which is so much more massive than Earth and has the right gasses didn't ignite fusion from gravity, who would Vega have, supposing it were that small?" ... but Vega is clearly much more massive than anything they have at CERN, where they are presumably studying ways to make fusion work on earth. We as Christians have no allegiance to the idea that stars ignited spontaneously by gravitational compression of gasses. We believe those that are in fusion were "ignited" on day IV.

Robert Sungenis III

Another possibility for the miscue is that Keating, without telling us, believes that Tycho’s model is inadequate because Tycho’s original model did not include elliptical orbits of the planets. Since the elliptical orbits of Kepler’s model made the heliocentric version more accurate, Tycho’s geocentric model would not be able to match it. If this is Keating’s reason, then he is playing a shell game. Every professor of astrophysical kinematics, including the late Christopher Wilson, knows that if elliptical orbits of the planets are included in Tycho’s model, it is just as accurate as Kepler’s model. This was already known in the time of Galileo. In 1665, Giovanni Riccioli, in his book, Astronomia Reformata, added elliptical orbits to Tycho’s model for this very reason, and afterward he remained a devoted geocentrist.

Me

Apart from "devoted" I totally agree. Riccioli was a devoted Christian. Geocentrism would however have been matter of fact. To him as to me.

Hadn't Riccioli added elliptic orbits already in Almagestum Novum? A work where, by the way, he argues for Angelic movers being the theologically most probable mechanism for movements of celestial bodies:

III. Quarta Opinio, eaque communissima, est; cælos & sidera moueri ab Intelligentijs seu ab Angelis, tanquam assistentibus, & immediatis causis effectiuis, non autem tanquam ab animabus informantibus cælum, atq. adeò moueri ab extrinsecò principio, sed creato.

Cited via:
New blog on the kid: What Opinion did Riccioli call the Fourth and Most Common One?
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-opinion-did-riccioli-call-fourth.html

I will not cite more from Sungenis' work, right now at least, but I'm leaving you the link to his refutation of Keating:

A Critical Analysis of Karl Keating and His Book The New Geocentrists
By Robert Sungenis
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzb8s1zUN8qOTHpjWUMzZWsyRVU/view

Meanwhile, don't let urban legends about Geocentrics having neither argument nor explanation sway your view of your Geocentric neighbour. Ideally not even of me.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Wenceslaus, Duke and Martyr
28.IX.2024

Apud Boleslaviam veterem, in Bohemia, sancti Wenceslai, Ducis Bohemorum et Martyris, sanctitate et miraculis gloriosi, qui, dolo fratris sui necatus, victor pervenit ad palmam.

PS, another text by Sungenis which a friend shared from his substack says:

The Sun is the GEOMETRIC Center of the Universe, and the CENTER OF MASS is the 🌎 Earth....

I'd say, whether the Earth is inside the centre of Mass or not, is irrelevant. God keeps the Earth in place anyway. And the Earth is the actual Geometric centre of the visible universe. Not the Sun. The following image is a feature, not a bug: