Debunking Sky Scholar: Why Pierre-Marie Robitaille's Astrophysics Claims Are Wrong

Pierre-Marie Robitaille's astrophysics claims are demonstrably false and lack scientific basis.

### Debunking Sky Scholar: Pierre-Marie Robitaille's Misconceptions in Astrophysics
* 🪐 **Professor Dave Explains** debunks Pierre-Marie Robitaille, a radiologist promoting unfounded astrophysical claims, often cited in comments.
* 👨‍⚕️ Robitaille, despite a successful radiology career, lacks astrophysics training and presents inaccurate views on cosmology, including claiming the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is ocean reflections and the sun is liquid metallic hydrogen.
* 📰  He spent ~$130,000 on a New York Times ad promoting his views, rather than using free platforms like arXiv.org.  He publishes in "Progress in Physics," a journal considered potentially predatory.
* 💥 Robitaille incorrectly portrays the CMB as the afterglow of the initial singularity at 10^-36 seconds, not the recombination era (~400,000 years later). This fundamental misunderstanding alone discredits his claims.
* 🔭 He ignores the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, and gravitational lensing—all phenomena demonstrating the CMB's cosmological origin and refuting his "ocean reflection" theory.  The CMB's near-perfect Planckian distribution at 2.72548 ± 0.00057 Kelvin further supports the Big Bang model.
* ☀️ Robitaille also incorrectly states the sun is a gas, not plasma, misunderstanding the phases of matter and comparing the emission spectrum of molecular hydrogen to the sun's blackbody spectrum.  He also falsely claims pressure requires a solid surface, showing a lack of understanding of basic physics.
* 🌌 He wrongly equates the behavior of a small gas sample with a massive star, ignoring the role of gravity in stellar structure and fusion processes.  His "liquid metallic hydrogen" hypothesis for the sun is unfounded and contradicts observed data.
* 🕳️ Finally, he dismisses the first image of a black hole as fraudulent, accusing scientists of conspiracy, rather than engaging with the scientific process to present his objections.  This highlights his lack of understanding and willingness to accept established scientific findings.

Hey everyone, so as of late I've been debunking a variety of pseudoscience in the realm of astrophysics.

This comes in the form of cranks and con men who gain traction with a select audience of laypeople who exhibit a bias towards anti-establishment narratives.

Given what I've debunked so far, whether it's the Velikovskian nonsense of the Thunderbolts Project,

the cold fusion investment scam that is the SAFIRE Project, or the doomsday cult of Suspicious Observers, the flavors may vary,

but the central theme is always the same.

All of the "mainstream" physicists in the world are wrong, blind, and dogmatic, while this brave,

spectacularly unqualified non-physicist is right.

This type of narrative exists in other areas of science as well, but it is oddly prevalent in astrophysics and cosmology,

attracting those who simply like the idea that all of physics is wrong, and will therefore implicitly

trust anyone who tells them so, provided that they use enough technical jargon so as to appear

as though they know what they're talking about.

Today I'd like to add one more person to this list of unqualified hacks, due to the frequency with which his channel is cited in the comments section

of my debunks. That is Pierre-Marie Robitaille, whose channel is named Sky Scholar. Who is this

guy? What does he say? And why is all of it so painfully wrong? Let's take a closer look now.

First, a bit of background. Again, everyone who falls for these narratives seems to believe that

Authorities on astrophysics should somehow include engineers, computer scientists, or even lawyers.

And true to form, Pierre also is not an astrophysicist. He is a radiologist.

To give him the only credit he will receive in this video, he was actually a good radiologist,

and was involved in major advancements in magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, conducting research at Ohio State University until the year 2000. But then he suddenly went

off the deep end and started publicly promoting indefensible views on cosmology and astrophysics,

in which he has zero training. For just a taste of how ridiculous these views are, which will be

dissected at great length in a moment, he thinks that the cosmic microwave background radiation is

not a remnant of the recombination era, which is part of the Big Bang cosmological model,

but rather is just radiation reflecting off Earth's oceans, and he thinks that the sun is

made of liquid metallic hydrogen. Some of you may instantly see how dumb that all sounds,

but if not, rest assured, we will dig into those claims and others in a moment.

Now, with Pierre's adventures in quackery reflecting poorly on Ohio State,

he was asked to step down from his position, and no legitimate scientific publication has

ever accepted any of his ramblings on this subject because they do not constitute legitimate science.

But with the resolve of any delusional narcissist, Pierre wanted his views heard, and so in 2002

he spent something around $130,000 to take out a full-page spread in the New York Times,

blissfully unaware that he could have published for free on arXiv.org, as many astrophysicists do.

In the ad, he outlined some of the classic rants that he has become known for, predictably claiming

that the world of legitimate peer-reviewed physics just couldn't possibly understand his ideas. You know, with their collective thousands of PhDs and millions of hours of research in the field

paling in comparison to Pierre's none whatsoever of either. Since then, he's published exclusively

in "Progress in Physics," a pseudojournal that is on a list of potential predatory journals,

and acts as a haven for a variety of physics cranks. He then started a YouTube channel in 2017.

His YouTube videos will be the best way to demonstrate that he is clueless, so let's get into dissecting those now. The first of his favorite claims we will

be looking at is his insistence that the Big Bang cosmological model is wrong. His attempt

to discredit the model focuses primarily on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Right away, with this single statement, we can conclude that Pierre has absolutely no

idea what he's talking about. He is acting as though the CMB is thought of as the afterglow

of the initial singularity itself, and he even specifies the time frame of 10^-36 seconds after

the Big Bang. Anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the Big Bang cosmological model knows that this radiation is a remnant of the recombination event that occurred nearly 400,000

years after the initial singularity. This was the moment that the universe was finally cool enough

that protons and electrons could be coupled to form neutral atoms, and when electrons relaxed to the ground state for the first time, simultaneously everywhere in the universe,

they emitted electromagnetic radiation, making the universe newly transparent, and which has since cooled and stretched out with the expansion of the universe.

to arrive at the 2.7 Kelvin it's at today. This is trivial knowledge. I learned this in Astronomy 101

as a freshman undergrad, and I've summarized this basic information in a tutorial on cosmology in

my astronomy series. Pierre is trying to discuss something without even understanding the first thing about what it is. This single monumental blunder is enough to dismiss him point-blank,

which is indeed what all astrophysicists do, when Pierre cold-emails them by the hundreds to promote

his nonsense. But just for fun, let's listen to some more of his ignorance towards this model.

Cosmology is a branch of astronomy, which is a science. Saying that astronomy isn't science

is something that flat-earthers do, while pretending they know how science is done. There are thousands of cosmologists who do science every day,

Pierre just doesn't understand any of it. This is the most unscientific statement anyone could ever make. Pierre is not just making

the claim that what is said to be known is not actually known, he is saying that it can never

be known. That it is unknowable. In saying this, he is renouncing his former status as a scientist,

and accepting the title of a preacher. There is no physical phenomenon that is fundamentally outside of the domain of science, whether or not we will one day understand it.

But Pierre doesn't stop at playing the dumb card. He has a lot more to say,

since he needs to deal with the mountain of firm evidence associated with the CMB. We can start with its discovery, the Nobel Prize-winning work of Penzias and Wilson in the 1960s.

As one would expect, he offers nothing more than word salad and baseless claims about physicists

not observing the laws of thermodynamics. This, again, is reminiscent of clueless flat-earthers,

Who complain about Earth's atmosphere being adjacent to the vacuum of space somehow violating the laws of thermodynamics,

because they don't know that gravity exists, nor do they know what those laws say. And here we get to Pierre's single dumbest idea. He thinks every measurement of the CMB that has

ever been recorded is actually just measurements of microwaves reflecting off the ocean. Earth's oceans. Turbulent, flowing water. This idea is like an onion of stupidity that gets

dumber with every layer you peel away. First of all, water would not give a blackbody curve

if microwaves were reflected upon it because of absorption bands in water at that range, as well

as with the atmosphere, so there is precisely zero chance of this even remotely resembling the data that he is referencing. But it gets much worse. He says this not just about the results of

Penzias and Wilson, who took measurements down here on the ground and relatively near a coast,

but also for the data gathered by satellites millions of miles away from the Earth, pointed

away from the Earth, which give very impressive, smooth blackbody distributions, and the exact same

value for the CMB, with much greater precision. You may be stunned and confused, so allow me to

restate for emphasis. Pierre believes that the source of the CMB, which just happens to have a

near-perfect Planckian distribution of frequencies with a temperature of 2.72548 Kelvin plus or minus

0.00057 K, is the Earth's oceans. That's right, a bunch of water molecules apparently conspire

to impossibly produce an immaculate blackbody spectrum at the precise temperature of 2.7 K along

with the nearly scale-invariant perturbations that agree magnificently with the predictions of inflationary cosmology down to a thousandth of a percent. Vegas has never seen odds so low.

Yep. You're hearing him correctly. Pierre is actually bold enough to claim that all the astrophysicists on Earth believe that data associated with deep space

is actually data associated with the ocean, as though him graciously informing them of this fact

should be enough to prompt them to say, "Duhhh... whoopsie! We don't know how telescopes work! Uh oh!" He

is essentially calling all astrophysicists complete morons to their face. As insulting as this is, coming from

someone with zero experience in the field or even rudimentary comprehension of its principles,

it's actually not even the most insulting thing he says, so stay tuned for that later.

Again, by pretending that the CMB is supposed to be the remnant of a primordial explosion,

Pierre demonstrates that he does not know what the CMB is, or honestly what the Big Bang is in

general, as it was not an explosion. This is the intellectual equivalent of a creationist saying

that evolution is false because there are still monkeys. Once again, the CMB is the most perfect

natural blackbody curve that has ever been observed, many orders of magnitude more flawless than that of any physical substance like

graphite. There is no doubt whatsoever amongst

anyone who has a clue about these phenomena that this radiation arose from a near-perfect

thermal equilibrium, and it is at the precise temperature that is predicted by the Big Bang cosmological model. Pierre therefore had to invent

something out of thin air to explain away the CMB,

but what he settled on is so mind-numbingly idiotic that it is astounding that a single

human person takes him seriously, educated or not. In fact, we can go far beyond just demonstrating

that his claim is totally unfounded. It's quite trivial to prove that his claim of the CMB as

a local effect instead of a cosmological one is objectively false. Although a bit esoteric,

this can be done in three ways by anyone with a moderate knowledge of astrophysics. First,

there is something called the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, an example of a phenomenon called inverse

Compton scattering. In short, the photons from the CMB are given a boost in energy when they

encounter relativistic electrons. This happens when interacting with the hot ionized gas in dense

regions, such as around massive galaxy clusters. These electrons impart some energy to the photons,

Pierre-Marie Robitaille Is Clueless (Sky Scholar Debunked)

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Professor Dave Explains

Introduction: Debunking Pseudoscience in Astrophysics

Professor Dave Explains regularly debunks pseudoscience in astrophysics.

These pseudoscientific claims often gain traction among those with anti-establishment biases.

Examples include the Thunderbolts Project, SAFIRE Project, and Suspicious Observers.

A common theme is the assertion that mainstream physicists are wrong.

This video focuses on debunking Pierre-Marie Robitaille's claims.

Pierre-Marie Robitaille's Background and Claims

Robitaille is a radiologist, not an astrophysicist.

He promotes unsubstantiated views on cosmology and astrophysics.

His claims include the CMB being reflections off Earth's oceans and the sun being liquid metallic hydrogen.

He was asked to step down from his position at Ohio State University.

He paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times to promote his views.

Debunking Robitaille's Claims about the CMB

Robitaille incorrectly believes the CMB is a remnant of the initial singularity.

The CMB is actually a remnant of the recombination event, 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

Robitaille's misunderstanding of the CMB is enough to dismiss his claims.

Robitaille makes baseless claims about physicists not observing the laws of thermodynamics.

He claims all CMB measurements are reflections off Earth's oceans.

Robitaille denies the accepted understanding of the sun's composition and processes.

He incorrectly states that the sun is gas, not plasma.

He misinterprets the emission spectrum of molecular hydrogen gas.

He misunderstands the processes of nuclear fusion in stars.

He incorrectly states that pressure requires a solid surface.

The video concludes by discussing why people are drawn to Robitaille's claims.

The appeal lies in the narrative of a lone individual challenging established science.

Robitaille's claims often involve accusations of conspiracies and misrepresentation of scientific funding.

Robitaille's response to the first image of a black hole is to accuse researchers of fraud.

The video emphasizes the importance of trusting the scientific community's expertise over unsubstantiated claims.