The strength of the Internet is also its weakness. The good: It is unfiltered, giving people an unprecedented access to ideas that may have been previously unavailable. The bad: It is unfiltered, meaning every crackpot idea and theory has equal opportunity to proliferate without analysis or rebuttal.
An old Youtube pseudoscience classic is making the rounds again via Facebook. This is Neal Adams' "Expanding Earth" (EE) hypothesis.
Adams is a former comic book artist who worked on some of the most iconic superheroes of the latter half of the 20th century, both for DC and Marvel Comics. This is not an ad hominem attack-i.e., an attack on the person rather than his bad science-it is merely a biographical footnote. There is nothing saying a great comic book artist can't also be a brilliant scientist.
Sadly, this is not the case with Adams.
The crux of the EE hypothesis is that Earth (and all the other objects in the universe) is a matter factory. The breakup of the super-continent Pangaea and the current configuration of the continents is a function, therefore, not of the well-proven and (nearly) universally accepted theory of plate tectonics, but of being forced apart by the growing bulk of the planet.
Adams should have left this as a plot for one of his comics.
First of all, Earth is a closed system. Anybody who knows the first thing about thermodynamics knows that no input means no output. A planet can't simply randomly generate new matter.
Could another mechanism be causing the planet to expand? Possibly, but there is absolutely no evidence that it is or ever has been since the solar system formed. Furthermore, a 2011 NASA study using high-precision space geodesy tools allowed scientists to estimate the change (plus or minus) in Earth's radius at about the thickness of a human hair per year. That is not statistically significant or even outside its own margin of error.
Secondly, Adams appears to be working off a skewed understanding of Occam's razor-the principle that among competing hypotheses, the simplest is usually the most plausible. While Adams' hypothesis is indeed simpler, and perhaps even more elegant, it simply does not compete with plate tectonics. You can't just invent some magical mechanism that breaks the known physical laws of the universe to overturn overwhelming evidence of a theory that has been backed up time and again by observation, experimentation and peer acceptance.
Of course, like most crackpots, Adams suffers from what I call "the Galileo delusion." It is true that many great scientific breakthroughs started out on the fringe, mostly because they ran astray of the true powerbrokers of their day whose authority stood to be undermined. The delusion is that simply because you are on the fringe that history will eventually prove you right.
Finally, Adams invokes an argument from credulity, a logical fallacy that merely reveals his ignorance. Because he simply can't personally fathom how tectonics works-as he repeatedly says in interviews, "that just doesn't make sense to me"-it must be wrong and everybody who does understand it is involved in a massive conspiracy for some unspecified reason.
"They [scientists] know, but are not telling you, that the upper tectonic plates of Earth, also join in the Pacific, not partially, they join totally," the narrator says at the beginning of the video. "You are asked to believe that the continents swim or drift about willy nilly bumping and crashing as if they were on a greased skillet."
Of course, that description of tectonics is a complete misrepresentation and the idea that hundreds of thousands of legitimate scientists have banded together to pull the wool over our eyes is simply ludicrous.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people are willing to accept a crackpot idea just because some clueless conspiracy theorist had the artistic ability to put together a slick video. So far, the video has garnered more than 6,500 'likes' compared to only 4,800 'dislikes.' That's a sad statistic for critical thinking.
