In 2014, a group that believes Earth does not orbit the Sun released a documentary called The Principle. What’s their science like?
In the January/February 2015 Skeptical Inquirer, I presented an article about the modern geocentrism movement (“Modern Geocentrism: A Case Study of Pseudoscience in Astronomy”). I mentioned that geocentrists had produced a movie titled The Principle. This movie brought more attention to the geocentrists than they had previously experienced, with media outlets from Popular Science (Lecher 2014) to Slate (Krauss 2014) to NPR (Neuman 2014) reporting on the movie. The news media were interested because the producers of the movie had managed to include interviews with noted scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and George Ellis, but these scientists (as well as narrator Kate Mulgrew) later indicated they had been deceived into participating. This movie was released in October 2014 and had a very limited theatrical run. It was released on DVD on December 8, 2015. In this article, I give a brief overview of the backstory behind the development of The Principle, summarize the movie’s main points, and critically analyze the science presented.
