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)

Welcome! I have a knack for explaining stuff and I want to share some knowledge with you.

I received a BA in chemistry from Carleton College, and performed graduate studies in both synthetic organic chemistry and science education at Cal State Northridge, receiving an MA in the latter. Prior to this I taught for about a decade in various high school and undergraduate settings, specializing in organic chemistry but also teaching general chemistry, physics, and biology.

This channel is for students at the high school and undergraduate level, but it is also for members of the general public who just want to know more about the world and how things work. My goal is to increase science literacy in our society, so please share these tutorials with anyone that you think might enjoy them. Happy learning!

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Professor Dave Explains

소개 천체 물리학의 사이비 과학 폭로하기

데이브 교수는 천체 물리학의 사이비 과학을 정기적으로 폭로합니다.

이러한 사이비 과학적 주장은 반기독교적 편견을 가진 사람들 사이에서 종종 주목을 받습니다.

썬더볼츠 프로젝트, SAFIRE 프로젝트, 수상한 관찰자 등이 그 예입니다.

공통적인 주제는 주류 물리학자들이 틀렸다는 주장입니다.

이 동영상은 피에르 마리 로비테일의 주장을 반박하는 데 초점을 맞춥니다.

피에르 마리 로비테일의 배경과 주장

로비테일은 천체 물리학자가 아닌 방사선 전문의입니다.

그는 우주론과 천체 물리학에 대한 근거 없는 견해를 조장합니다.

그의 주장에 따르면 CMB는 지구의 바다에서 반사된 것이고 태양은 액체 금속 수소입니다.

그는 오하이오 주립대 교수직에서 물러나라는 요청을 받았습니다.

그는 자신의 견해를 홍보하기 위해 뉴욕 타임즈에 전면 광고를 게재했습니다.

CMB에 대한 로비테일의 주장 반박하기

로비테일은 CMB가 초기 특이점의 잔재라고 잘못 생각하고 있습니다.

CMB는 사실 빅뱅 이후 40만 년이 지난 재결합 사건의 잔재입니다.

로비테일의 CMB에 대한 오해는 그의 주장을 기각하기에 충분합니다.

로비테일은 물리학자들이 열역학 법칙을 준수하지 않는다는 근거 없는 주장을 펼칩니다.

그는 모든 CMB 측정값은 지구의 해양에서 반사된 것이라고 주장합니다.

로비테일의 태양 물리학에 대한 부정

로비테일은 태양의 구성과 과정에 대한 기존의 이해를 부정합니다.

그는 태양이 플라즈마가 아니라 기체라고 잘못 말합니다.

그는 분자 수소 가스의 방출 스펙트럼을 잘못 해석합니다.

그는 별에서 핵융합이 일어나는 과정을 잘못 이해하고 있습니다.

그는 압력에는 단단한 표면이 필요하다고 잘못 말합니다.

이 동영상은 사람들이 로비테일의 주장에 끌리는 이유에 대해 논의하며 마무리됩니다.

기존 과학에 도전하는 고독한 개인의 서사가 매력적입니다.

로비테일의 주장에는 종종 음모와 과학 자금에 대한 허위 진술에 대한 비난이 포함됩니다.

블랙홀의 첫 이미지에 대한 로비테일의 대응은 연구자들을 사기 혐의로 고발하는 것이었습니다.

이 동영상은 근거 없는 주장보다 과학계의 전문성을 신뢰하는 것이 중요하다는 점을 강조합니다.

Pierre-Marie Robitaille Is Clueless (Sky Scholar Debunked)

Pierre-Marie Robitaille Is Clueless (Sky Scholar Debunked)

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