Bad Astronomy

Mecca lecca no, Part 2

After writing the previous article, I found this on the web: a post by Hell’s Handmaiden that contains a video with an interview of a Muslim “scientist”. Warning: this may make your head explode.

This guy, Abd Al-Baset Sayyid (about whom I’ve written before) is spouting 100% pure unadulterated nonsense (and from this video it’s clear, as I said in the previous post, that it’s his stuff being talked about in the BBC article). It’s like listening to a little kid explaining a dream he had. The Earth emits infinite short-wave radiation? Centered on Mecca?

The zero-magnetism stuff he says at about 2:00 minutes in is jaw-dropping. Compasses don’t work on the Equator? News to me! He doesn’t understand that the needle in a compass is also a magnet, and will always align itself with the magnetic field lines? He would fail 4th grade science.

According to him, gravity’s lower in Mecca, too. Cool. We should launch rockets from there.

Wow. I’m not sure if I feel better or worse knowing that it’s not just creationists in America that spew out crap like this. It’s a little comforting knowing that it’s not an American trademark, but it’s terrifying to think that even if we could somehow get folks in the US to see things straight, there are still hundreds of millions of other people across the globe who are so woefully uneducated in the ways of reality.

Clearly, Abd Al-Baset Sayyid is a crank. But he seems to get airtime, and that’s what makes me seriously unhappy. He has the right to emit as much nonsense as he wants, but I certainly wish TV shows wouldn’t let him do it to millions of people, just because his nonsense happens to align with their beliefs.