Wal Thornhill is a Complete Fraud (Thunderbolts Project Debunked)

Hey everyone, so you may remember some debunks I’ve done regarding Electric Universe, SAFIRE project, Sky Scholar, and Suspicious0bservers. These are all slightly different flavors of pseudoscience pertaining to astrophysics. I’ve recently felt compelled to return to the subject to debunk one of the main figureheads of this tripe, as I’ve only briefly mentioned him thus far, and that is Wal Thornhill, the fraud behind the channel “Thunderbolts Project”. This channel is a hub for mythological space fantasy and blatant science denial, ultimately inspired by, or some would say plagiarized from, the delusions of Immanuel Velikovsky in the 1950s. These

include Venus being birthed from within Jupiter and flying across the solar system to somehow settle into its nearly circular orbit, huge electrical arcs zapping through space to carve formations into planets that are easily explained by tectonic activity, and other such rubbish that doesn’t even qualify as science fiction. What Thornhill and pals amplified of these myths was some real Ancient Aliens type nonsense. They weave extravagant tales of ancient cave paintings that recorded strange phenomena in the sky, which for whatever reason have never happened since, kind of like how god used to talk everyone’s ear off in

biblical times yet doesn’t make a peep today. Wal’s reliance on mythology is not a coincidence, as he is not a physicist. Given his lack of credentials, it’s no surprise that according to him, every single legitimate physicist is lost in dogma, but after dismantling Wal’s sad little script it will become quite apparent who is lost. We will cover a few topics in this video, but let’s start with my personal favorite, comets. When Wal first started attracting attention from a suggestible corner of the internet, lots of physicists pointed out how utterly insane his claims are, not supported

by any evidence whatsoever, while simultaneously contradicting well-understood science. But beyond this, many also pointed out that Wal never seemed to make any predictions. To qualify as a theory, something must make concrete, falsifiable predictions. There must have been some kind of internal pressure for Wal to address this, because he ended up making some predictions about comets. He wrote this blog post in 2005 right before the Deep Impact mission was to make contact with comet Tempel 1. He starts by mocking astronomy and our understanding of solar system formation, as of course he must, pretending that we don’t

know what comets are, when we certainly do. When systems form, material in the protoplanetary disk coalesces into discrete objects by gravitational influence. Planets, moons, and smaller objects like asteroids and comets. Comets form very far away from the star where it’s very cold, so there’s lots of ice and dust in them, and most have huge, highly elliptical orbits that take a long time to complete. Not hard to understand, but to Wal it’s fairy tales of course. He says they actually form from violent events, rocky bodies blown off of moons and planets by lightning bolts in space.

I know what you’re thinking, why don’t we see any such lightning bolts now, ever? How did the comets get blasted all the way to the Oort cloud? Great questions, but don’t look for answers. Furthermore, Wal says comets are “negatively charged”. This is also completely insane since bulk matter is electrically neutral, as anyone who did well in their high school science classes should know. And of course to him, the sun is positively charged, and that’s why the comets go around the sun, not gravity. But this whole “electric sun” model was debunked to smithereens in my video

on the SAFIRE project, so head there if you’re interested in that. Then the coma of the comet is “electrical discharge”, not material subliming from solid to gas as it gets closer to the sun, thus causing the comet to heat up. He goes on to say that if the mission succeeds in impacting the comet, it won’t be because of those idiot scientists involved in the project. Those morons are sending a spacecraft to an electrical environment that will cause all of its electronics to fail. Wal had a nice long list of very concrete predictions in this blog

post as well. Again, electronic systems will short out before impact. Electrical energy will be released before impact. There’s a bit about X-rays, which must accompany discharges to the projectile, and he says this will not match X-ray production through the mechanics of impact. He says it will be more like a lightning bolt. And most importantly, no ice. This is emphasized several times. Very little water or ice. Well, the mission was carried out, and spoiler alert: it was a success, nothing malfunctioned, impact was achieved, and a portion of the comet was blasted up so that data could

be collected about its composition. What did they find? Water ice, dust, and organic materials, which also do indeed comprise the comet’s ejection plume. No huge imbalance of negative charges. Just a big ball of ice and dust with organic molecules on it. Nothing that Wal predicted was even remotely accurate. Shocking, huh? Now, if you were an honest person in Wal’s shoes, what would you do? Admit that you were wrong and reevaluate your life choices? Not him. He just ignored everything and kept spewing his nonsense, knowing that none of his followers would bother checking any other sources.

But what I want to stress is not just that he ignored everything about the mission, he actively lied about it. Remember his predictions about the advance flash? This was supposed to be due to an electrical imbalance between the impactor and the comet. Images showed a faint first light as the impactor was vaporized from colliding with the surface material, followed by a brighter outburst caused by the ejecta. Even though an electrical discharge would be very bright, Wal decided to claim that the first faint light was what he wanted, so on his website under “confirmed predictions”, he

lists this. Then remember the X-rays? Well the Chandra satellite observed the event in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and turned up only the expected X-rays associated with charge exchange between cometary neutrals and heavy ions from the solar wind, which is continuous, not a brief occurrence. From the abstract of the relevant paper, “No obvious prompt X-ray flash due to the impact was seen.” So when Wal claims victory on this, there’s no way to sugar coat it. He’s lying. And not just once. For “subsurface composition”, he says there was no change in measured water after

the impact, when in actuality we saw thousands of tons of excavated ice. This is just the culmination of one of his favorite lies. In his blog he had written: “By the time of ‘Deep Impact’, comet theory had fragmented into contradictory hypotheses, due in part to the absence of detectible water on cometary surfaces—a prerequisite of standard theory.” Yet we’d known for decades that subsurface water ice contributes to outgassing, and here was the confirmation up close and personal. Ice. But what’s a con man to do? He said no ice, so there can’t be ice, so when there

was ice, he just lies and says there was no ice. Wal continued this charade for years. The Epoxi mission renamed the familiar Deep Impact probe and sent it to visit comet Hartley 2 in 2010. This one is a very active comet, spewing out jets of water and other material in all directions. The craft passed close by the comet’s surface, got lots of great pictures, and used on-board instrumentation to detect, you guessed it, lots and lots of ice. Several types, in fact. Here are some great images depicting the distribution of water gas and water ice, as

well as carbon dioxide and dust. These carbon dioxide jets are the things Wal was pretending were electrical discharges. Sorry, buddy. This time he was essentially silent about the mission, hoping none of his followers would notice. And so the façade continued, until the Rosetta mission in 2016, which planned to actually land on comet 67P. Again, he trotted out his typical pageantry regarding how lost these scientists are, as though he’s capable of building a toaster, much less landing on a comet. And again the mission was successful, with not a single datum even remotely corroborating anything Wal has

ever said. With the data gathered from 67P, we now know even more about comets. Let’s briefly discuss the many ways we know that Wal is dead wrong about comets. First off, the diamagnetic cavity. This is the region from the surface of the comet out to what is known as the contact surface, or cavity boundary. Within it, there is essentially zero magnetic field. Not a very good sign for a supposed “negatively charged object” of this size. The reasons for this are a bit complicated, and may vary between highly active comets, like the comet popularly known as

Halley’s comet, and low activity ones, such as 67P. But it can be understood as a frictional force between the particles of the outgassed material. This prevents the magnetic field carried by the solar wind from entering this region. At any rate, no magnetic field was measured at either Halley or 67P. No magnetic field means no electrical discharge. We’ve known this since 1986. Landing and taking local measurements on 67P just confirmed what we already knew. No intrinsic magnetic field was measured. Second, composition. Wal says comets are rocky fragments of planets and moons, so when Rosetta reached 67P,

it should have found lots of rock there. There wasn’t any. MIRO, the microwave instrument on board Rosetta, probed the nucleus temperature to different depths in sub-millimeter. The thermal inertia of the material shows it to be nothing like rock whatsoever. The CONSERT experiment sent radio waves right through the comet, from the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft to the Philae lander. The results are completely different from what one would expect of rock. An instrument on the Philae lander physically hammered on the nucleus material, and was able to record the sound speed of the hammer blows as they reached different

feet of the lander at different times. The measured speed is not at all consistent with rock. Debris from a cliff that collapsed on the comet shows fragments with icy surfaces, which does not occur with rock. The density of the comet is not at all like that of rock. And so forth. And finally, the centerpiece of Wal’s three-ring circus, the electricity. There wasn’t any. As with all previous comet missions, both Rosetta and Philae were fitted with magnetometers. Those instruments would detect any electrical discharge with ease. They didn’t detect any. If you are going to pretend that

comets are electric, and a craft physically lands on one and doesn’t detect any electricity, that’s what’s called a death blow. But it doesn’t end there. What about all the water that is detected within comets? To Wal this can’t be water, and he has an answer for this too. He claims that it’s oxygen anions that combine with protons from the solar wind to form hydroxyl radicals, and the dumb dumb scientists gathering the data are too dumb to tell the difference. From another one of Wal’s blog posts in 2010, we read: “The negative ions combine with the

positive hydrogen ions from the solar wind to give, amongst other things, the OH radical, which is then misinterpreted as signaling the presence of water ice on the comet.” This is repeated from earlier claims in 2006: “When astronomers view the comas of comets spectroscopically, what they actually see is the hydroxyl radical (OH), which they assume to be a residue of water (H2O) broken down by the ultraviolet light of the Sun (photolysis). This assumption is not only unwarranted, it requires a speed of ‘processing’ by solar radiation beyond anything that can be demonstrated experimentally.” This is idiotic. There

is no possibility of confusing signals pertaining to water and the hydroxyl radical. They are nothing alike. The first unambiguous detection of water on a comet was made by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory in 1985, for Halley. Water was also detected by the Vega spacecraft in-situ at that same comet. Both of those observations were made in infrared. There is no possibility of confusing the water signal with a hydroxyl radical signal. Numerous other unambiguous detections followed between 1986 and 2010. A number of them were detected in sub-millimeter observations by the ODIN satellite. These detections are at around 557

gigahertz, and again, that is most definitely water. The same can be said for comet Shoemaker-Levy, shown here with infrared hot bands. So Wal either has no idea what these signals look like, or is just pulling something out of his ass to save face. Likely both. Furthermore, the mechanism Wal suggests for the production of these hydroxyl radicals is electric discharge machining, a man-made process carried out under controlled laboratory conditions, submerged in lubricating oil, so it is not even remotely reasonable to suggest this takes place on a comet. And after all this, multiple missions sending probes to

pass by or land on comets, collecting mountains of data, finding lots of water, no electricity, absolutely all of which spectacularly obliterates every single thing Wal has ever said about comets, what is he left with? Does he take the loss and just keep his mouth shut about comets? Nope! Just type “thunderbolts project comets” into YouTube, and see what you get. Dozens of videos, all published AFTER the Rosetta mission, that are titled things like “Undeniable Evidence for Electric Comets”, “Electric Comets: Born From Fire”, “Electric Comets in an Electric Universe”, and other blatant reality-denial. What could these videos

contain, you ask? Essentially just rapid-fire lies and deliberate misrepresentations of press releases, omitting sections that directly contradict what he claims they say. At this point we’ve talked about comets long enough, so it would be redundant to comb through every one of these turd sandwiches, but rest assured, Wal and pals have absolutely no shame in lying right to people’s faces about comets. So much so that I still get comments on my various electric universe debunks from ignoramuses saying “Haha, you still believe comets are dirty snowballs!” who are totally oblivious to the fact that we landed on

one, and that’s exactly what they are. With electric comets firmly in the trash can, we are going to move on to some other ridiculous things that Wal has said, but first let’s pause for a quick announcement. Are you shocked and appalled by people who lie about science on the internet? Would you like to gain comprehensive knowledge of various subjects so that you don’t fall for it? Well I have just the thing for you. Brilliant offers extensive courses in dozens of areas of science and math. More than simply a collection of lecture videos, Brilliant utilizes hands-on

interactive problem solving for a more engaging way to learn. Classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism - Wal, if you’re watching, you might want to brush up on that one - relativity, and other areas of physics. I recommend “Everyday Math”, which reinforces useful math concepts like fractions and ratios using intuitive visuals. There’s also engineering, logic, software development and programming, statistics and finance for all you budding moneymakers. Don’t waste another moment, join over ten million people learning on Brilliant and sign up today. Visit Brilliant.org/ProfessorDaveExplains to get started, and the first 200 people to sign up will get 20%

off their subscription. Happy learning! Now, back to Mr. Thornhill and his lies. When lying about physics, Wal has a mantra, which is that most of modern physics is not really physics, but rather mathematics. There are two reasons for this. First, he doesn’t understand math, and would rather ignore it. Second, he knows that his target demographic probably also does not understand math, and would also like to ignore it. So Wal cultivates an environment where he and his followers can treat math like a mean bully, and pretend that physics can be done without it. The problem is

that science requires gathering evidence. This means making quantifiable predictions that can be tested by way of some observation. And with physics, that means math. When it comes to mountains of firm quantitative, reproducible evidence supporting things like general relativity and other aspects of physics Wal denies, he either ignores the relevant experiments and applications, or attempts to explain how physicists are misinterpreting experimental results, to sell the story that it’s just a bunch of scary numbers that have no correlation with reality. He’s had his work cut out for him over the past decade or so, with all the

scientific breakthroughs that keep occurring. Just to name a few examples, Wal claims that 1: LIGO never detected gravitational waves, 2: EHT never imaged a black hole, and 3: CERN never detected the Higgs Boson. In other words, any time science proves him wrong, it’s fake. For the remainder of this video we are going to focus on these blatant attempts to deny real science. First up, let’s check out Wal’s video, “An Examination of Gravitational Waves”, which he incredulously places in quotation marks. If you are unfamiliar with this phenomenon, these are waves that propagate along the curvature of

spacetime at the speed of light, which are produced when a massive body is accelerated. Postulated by Einstein as part of general relativity, they were first detected in 2016, another in a long string of discoveries vindicating the theory. Strap in for some damage control. For the first time scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, and opens an unprecedented new window to the cosmos. Once again we see science journalists

thirst for sensational headlines, with academics feeding a media frenzy. Some would call this more a theory of funding, not gravitational waves but gravy waves. The more sensational the headlines the more news media attention and funding potential. He starts right away by poisoning the well. If all astrophysicists agree on something, it can’t be because they’re right, it’s because of corruption. If media accurately reports on a scientific discovery, it has to be sensationalism. This is a standard tactic for the charlatan, and one he uses a lot. Here’s another instance from a different video. So they have hundreds

of thousands of templates against which to match these signals. And then of course the signals have to be sort of pulled out of the noise, they’re looking at signals that are incredibly tiny. Which gives rise, of course, to the possibility that what they’re seeing is like making faces out of clouds. Yes, Wal. Those idiots have no idea what they’re doing, they’re just making faces out of clouds. You’re so much smarter than those bozos, aren’t you? Well here’s a document called “A Guide to the LIGO-Virgo Detector Noise and Extraction of Transient Gravitational-Wave Signals”, freely available and

linked below. Wow, look at all the dummy dumb dumbs that contributed to this big pile of dumb. Maybe instead of baseless dismissal, you’d like to be a big boy and show us precisely where this methodology is invalid? It’s all here for you in black and white, so please, be specific. Us small brains would really appreciate it if you could fix our science for us. In the form of a submission to a peer-reviewed journal, preferably. Anyway, back to the first video for some more science denial. The first hurdle was easy to jump, and it’s the one

that shows the signal detected can have nothing to do with gravity. There are two L-shaped LIGO detectors, each about two and a half miles or four kilometers long, one in Hanford, Washington, the other in Livingston, Louisiana. The two instruments are 1800 miles or 3000 kilometers apart, and since both obtained the same reading, scientists consider their discovery confirmed. The important thing to note is that the signals did not arrive at the same time in each instrument. But as Newton’s law of gravity demands, and simple observation confirms, time isn’t involved. This is idiotic. The signals were received

seven milliseconds apart, because the facilities are 3,000 kilometers apart. The speed of light is very fast, the fastest speed there is, but it still takes time for gravitational waves to get from one place to another. I am confident that everyone watching this video immediately understands what I just said, so it’s hilarious that Wal doesn’t. Of course in reality he understands it just fine, this is merely the lie he’s crafted to deny this discovery. He invented a way out of thin air for the LIGO results to be wrong, and now he has to validate it. Gravity

doesn’t travel at the speed of light, he says. And why is that? For example, if gravity travelled at the slow speed of light, the Earth would be pulled to where the sun appears in the sky, and not the sun’s real position in space. This would result in a slingshot effect and toss planets out of the solar system in short order. Yes, since the sun is eight light minutes away, Earth is indeed pulled to where the sun was eight minutes ago. Which is the center of the solar system. Which is where it always is. So it’s

being pulled toward the center of the solar system at all times. Which is why it orbits the sun. Are you really gonna stick with this flawed premise, buddy? So if the LIGO signals were caused by a gravitational disturbance, both detectors should have received it at the same instant. They didn’t, so the signal has nothing to do with gravity. Ok, sport. Well physics says otherwise. We can look at the 2017 detection of GW170817 to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. This was a binary neutron star merger detected by both LIGO instruments as well as

VIRGO in Italy, and the time difference allowed them to triangulate a tiny patch of sky as the source of the signal. Lo and behold, the light from the associated gamma ray burst was detected by two different spacecraft, Fermi and Integral, from precisely the same area, and within two seconds of the gravitational wave detection. This was the first cosmic event detected in both gravitational waves and light, and clearly demonstrates gravity traveling at the speed of light. So Wal, what do you say about such clear and irrefutable data? When confronted with evidence that conflicts with your paradigm,

the usual response is denial followed by accelerated forgetting. I couldn’t have said it better myself. A bit later Wal made another video on this phenomenon to see if he could embarrass himself some more. Let’s see what else he came up with. The 2017 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded once again to mathematicians. This time it’s for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. It seems the inmates are in charge of the asylum. As you can see, he starts by combining his two favorite things, whining about math, and lying. The

2017 Nobel Prize in physics went to Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss. Wal is claiming that these three individuals are mathematicians. That would mean they either work in some area of mathematics, or at the very least, have earned degrees in mathematics. Well Barish got his bachelor’s and doctorate in physics at UC Berkeley. Experimental high energy physics to be precise. Thorne got his bachelor’s in physics from Caltech in 1962. His masters and doctorate, also in physics, were at Princeton. Weiss got his bachelor’s and doctorate in physics from MIT. Sounds like a bunch of physicists to

me. So why did Wal say they are mathematicians? Do habitual liars like Wal even know they’re lying after a certain point, and how easy it is to catch them lying about such trivial things? Does he not know about internet? The mission of a theoretical physicist trying to work out the nature of substance and elementary particles is to get the maths to work out correctly, and consistent with what’s gone on before. So we’re discussing mathematics, not physics. And of course, what’s gone on before is that mathematicians raised Einstein’s general relativity to the status of scripture, while

that theory ignores the substance of stars and planets that exhibit mass and gravity. So the theory has no physical basis whatsoever. It depends instead on a warped view of reality. It’s hard to know whether Wal really does know zero things about general relativity or if he just relies on his targets knowing zero things about general relativity, but anyone who says something like this about GR is a moron. Completely contrary to ignoring stars and planets, it is specifically observations of stars and planets that have firmly corroborated relativity countless times. The first was the famous observation with

Eddington of a star’s apparent position bending around the sun during a solar eclipse. Then there was the flawless alignment with the perihelion precession of Mercury. The observation of gravitational lensing all over the universe. Modeling the paths of stars near galactic center as they rapidly orbit a supermassive black hole. All things having to do with stars and planets. And that doesn’t even include GPS, which literally would not work without mathematically adjusting the rates of clocks onboard satellites to account for relativistic effects. When people like Wal whine about how empty and scriptural relativity is, they publicly admit

to knowing less than an undergraduate freshman about the topic. I have several astronomy tutorials regarding the myriad phenomena that confirm general relativity, so I won’t reiterate those any further here, but to put it simply, the majority of Wal’s rhetoric amounts to him outright stating that he doesn’t understand physics so it must be wrong. Also, Wal is just totally full of it with this quote. This was said by award-winning science author Jim Baggott. He wants the viewer to believe that all physics does is throw numbers around to validate Einsteinian dogma. This is stupid. Let’s look at

the full quote to get all the context Wal is dishonestly trying to remove. Your mission is to get the maths to work out correctly. That’s your first priority. Get the maths to work in a way that’s consistent with theoretical structures that have gone before, and hopefully in such a way that might give you some insights as to an experimental test you can do or give you something to look for in a laboratory like CERN. Funny how the second half specifically contradicts the fantasy Wal is weaving with the first half, isn’t it? What this quote means

is that when you do physics, you have to do math, and your math has to be consistent with all the observations we’ve already made. It can’t explain known phenomena less accurately than the physics we already have. Then on top of that, it has to make falsifiable predictions that can be used to test its validity. Wal is weaving the fantasy that physicists do only math but no science, and is using this quote deceptively to support that lie, when the second half of the quote specifically refers to laboratory science. This is called quote mining, folks. All the

charlatans do it. And guess what? What Jim is saying describes general relativity immaculately. Einstein’s math is even more consistent with existing observation than Newton’s, since Mercury’s orbit didn’t fit Newton’s model, but it does fit Einstein’s. And more importantly, it also allowed for predictions, like that first one we mentioned with the solar eclipse in 1919. A prediction about something we should observe, which was flawlessly confirmed. You have to figure that Wal has heard about this stuff, don’t you think? But Newton’s theory, which is used successfully to navigate the solar system, has gravity operating instantly. Time doesn’t

appear in his law of gravity. We are probably starting to see a pattern. Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than relativity and it works quite well, so when it treats gravity as having instant influence, it must be right. Since he truly does not understand physics, perhaps we can forgive Wal for glossing over the fact that the equations of motion in general relativity reduce to Newtonian mechanics in situations where things are moving much slower than the speed of light, and the gravitational field is fairly weak and unchanging. In other words, GR gives us everything Newton did

for non-relativistic situations, and only becomes more accurate in a significant way for relativistic situations, meaning going very fast or in the presence of a very powerful gravitational field. But of course this is way above Wal’s head. He’s still trying to learn the definitions of basic vocabulary words. The dirty little secret is that mathematics is the foreign language of physics. Few claim to understand the language, and the math-to-English dictionary is woefully incomplete, because the editors, the natural philosophers, were sacked a century ago. So key words like mass and energy are physically undefined. That’s funny, if mass

and energy are undefined, then what’s with these crystal-clear definitions I just found that are learned in high school? When it comes to experiment, how can our prize winners claim an infinitesimal is a hypothetical gravitational effect, allegedly caused by objects, black holes, that have never been observed. How can our prize winners be so specific about the masses of two merging black holes. A black hole has never been observed. In his defense, Wal said this before we did literally observe a black hole, and we will get to this image in a moment, but it really doesn’t matter.

The evidence for the existence of black holes has been undeniable for decades, such as observations of stars making hairpin turns around seemingly empty regions of space. And sorry, it’s no longer a hypothetical gravitational effect. It was predicted within the framework of general relativity, and then it was detected. So it’s not hypothetical. And if he had actually learned physics, he would know how we can be specific about the masses of black holes. Scientists don’t just pull numbers out of thin air. They do calculations regarding the motion of objects in the vicinity of the black hole, based

on Kepler’s laws, which have been around for 400 years. He should know this. It's a self-serving myth that Einstein’s mathematics predicts black holes. The originators of black hole theory in 1965, including Thorne, chose not to mention that Einstein’s October 1939 paper, which they refer to, concludes with: “The Schwarzschild singularity, the term black hole had not been introduced then, does not appear for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily. And this is due to the fact that otherwise the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light. Einstein showed mathematically that black holes cannot form gravitationally

for the same reason that stars and planets cannot, because the infalling matter begins to circle the center of mass until the centrifugal force balances the gravitational force. Now we get to the really devious tactics. Wal is trying to cite Einstein himself to discredit the existence of black holes. The notion that black holes are not a direct result of GR is insane. GR is about the warping of spacetime around massive objects. The more massive an object, the more warping there is around it, and thus the greater the escape velocity. If the warping is significant enough, the

escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. That’s a black hole. But here’s the funny part, Wal claims that Einstein was right about black holes being impossible, and that GR is wrong, even though Einstein was using GR to make this case. So if spacetime is a “meaningless concatenation of non-physical terms”, according to Wal, why is he listening to Einstein use that concept to pretend he’s right about anything? Furthermore, he is always whining about how Einstein’s words are revered as dogma, and yet here's an instance where Einstein was wrong, and physics evolved from where it was in

his time. So do physicists just blindly repeat what Einstein said, or are you now criticizing them for disagreeing with him? Who is holding Einstein up on a pedestal now, Wal? The hypocrisy is dazzling. At any rate, not long after this video, in 2019, a team working with the Event Horizon Telescope did indeed image a black hole. I think most people have seen this picture. What do you think Wal’s reaction was? When confronted with evidence that conflicts with your paradigm, the usual response is denial followed by accelerated forgetting. Nail on the head. Let’s check out his

pathetic attempt to deny the validity of this image on “Wal Thornhill: Black Hole or Plasmoid”. Yes, that’s right, since there can’t be a supermassive black hole at the center of every galaxy, it has to be something else, so to Wal, it’s a plasmoid. Let’s hear some stupid. We seem to attract an inordinate number of viewers who have little or no prior familiarity with plasma cosmology and the electric universe theory. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of the general public have no idea that any theoretical alternatives to the black hole exist, and actually should be

taken seriously. No, they should not be taken seriously. This graphic can be debunked in five seconds. This magnetic field is thousands of times weaker than a kitchen magnet, these currents have never been measured and do not exist, and most importantly, this fantasy relies on galaxies being in a relatively planar spiral formation. Guess what! Galaxies don’t all look like this. A huge proportion of galaxies are either elliptical or irregular. What this means is that many galaxies are just a big blob of stars. Whoopsie. Where are the currents coming from there, Wal? Care to explain that? Plasma

cosmology is a model of the universe which recognizes the now undeniable significance of plasma and the electromagnetic force in the cosmos. I love when they do this. They spend all their energy complaining about how physicists are so arrogant, thinking they understand the universe, and that they should leave room for mystery and new ideas. Then in the same breath they claim that because physics involves mysterious entities like dark matter and dark energy, it’s all fantasy. Unreal. For several decades plasma cosmologists have successfully reproduced, in laboratory experiments, many astrophysical phenomena. An electric plasma universe predicts, and in

fact requires, the pervasive and shockingly well-ordered cosmic magnetic fields which are now recognized, but are not explained and were not predicted by gravity-centric cosmology. And for decades it’s been proposed that at the center of galaxies is not a black hole, but rather a physically real object which is produced and observed in laboratories, called a plasmoid. Hey brainiacs, did you forget that you can’t see anything within the event horizon of a black hole? Look at this plasmoid. Can you can see it? Yeah, that’s a problem. How dumb do they think people are? And of course the

attempt to sound industrious, we’ve made cool looking electricity thingies in the lab that kind of look like other huge space thingies, so they’re the same thing. Nothing wrong with that logic at all. And yes, electric universe predicts a bunch of stuff about magnetic fields that we do not see. That’s not really something to be proud of. Also the plasmoid has a donut shape, so it’s quite likely that what we will be told is that they’ve seen a glowing accretion disc, but gravitational accretion has nothing whatever to do with it. It is all electrodynamic. So, yes,

there can be, or they should actually see a glowing donut-shaped object, quite bright, because there’s an awful lot of radiation from this object, and in the center there will be nothing. No black hole, just the plasmoid. So basically, the argument is that a black hole is really a plasmoid because they kind of look alike, even though no, they do not look alike at all. Great work, guys. As you can imagine, Wal made a lot of content denying this black hole image because it’s so devastating to his scam. Let’s check out another, “On the Black Hole’s

Non-Existence”. So what are your thoughts on some of the best evidences in the Milky Way which tell us that it is a plasmoid and not a black hole at the center of the galaxy? The stars that orbit that so-called black hole in Sagittarius A star do so very rapidly, which suggests if you’re using gravity in your equation, that the mass at the center, the focus of that orbit, is of the value they give, millions of suns, or maybe even billions. And that’s only because they’re using the wrong force. We’re talking about electromagnetic forces. But we

aren’t. We’re talking about gravity. Wal’s attempt to refute the existence of Sagittarius A is basically “nuh uh, because big numbers are scary”. Wal, here’s a little secret. General relativity is not just used to calculate orbital velocities of stars near the black hole. The equations of GR also predict, with enormous precision, the orbital trajectories of these stars, as we observe them. Just the way that a calculation of the perihelion precession of mercury vindicated GR almost a hundred years ago, the calculation of the perihelion precession of a star like S2 around Sagittarius A does exactly the same

thing, not to mention the observation of gravitational redshift at closest approach. As any scientist knows, observation flawlessly matching prediction to corrborate a model is what science is all about. That Wal does not acknowledge this means he does not know what science is. Now let’s hit one more video to wrap things up. Wal likes to give fake lectures at his fake conference. This one is called “The Long Path to Understanding Gravity”. And congratulations, because the electric universe conferences are perhaps the only real conferences to come to if you want to learn about science. Yeah, totally. All

those hundreds of science conferences attended by real scientists who do real science totally have nothing to do with science. Only your pathetic cash grab freak show attended primarily by gullible laypeople is real science. The balls on this guy. Now, Peter Higgs, the whole reason for the Large Hadron Collider, was to show the existence of a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson which was supposed to give all other particles, the ones that make up you and I, mass. That’s the most incredible nonsense idea I’ve ever heard. “Nuh uh!” strikes again. Brilliant refutation, Wal. But sadly, not

accurate. Just a quick lesson in particle physics, the Higgs mechanism states that the Higgs field gives all elementary particles mass. Something like a proton is not an elementary particle. It’s made of quarks, which interact with the Higgs field to obtain roughly one percent of a proton’s total mass. The three quarks in a proton are bound by the strong nuclear force, which is mediated by gluons, and the remaining 99% of the proton’s mass is due to the gluon binding energy, given by m = E/c^2, so not from the Higgs boson. Not exactly common knowledge of course,

but quite well-understood physics for those who care to learn, no matter how confusing it seems to Wal, since he can’t even describe it properly. Let’s see how he tries to justify this confusion. The particles that make us up we know have mass, and they contain energy. An atom bomb tells you that. You can see the energy released by those particles when they’re messed around with. They must have energy, they must have mass themselves, it’s got nothing to do with something outside. Man, is this guy eloquent. Well, as I just explained, yes, the majority of a

particle’s mass is intrinsic to the particle itself. Wal is criticizing the standard model of particle physics for agreeing with him. But his logic would be flawed even if that wasn’t true. Even if a particle did obtain all of its mass from the Higgs field, that wouldn’t change anything about the way an atom bomb works. Where does the kinetic energy of a sailboat come from? It’s not intrinsic to the boat. How about fire? Throw a match into a pool of water and it’s extinguished. Throw a match into a pool of gasoline and observe a burst of

energy. That an atom bomb converts mass into energy says nothing whatsoever about the source of the mass. It’s like he’s in a contest to see how many ways he can be wrong at the same time. Meanwhile gravity is lost in the mystic rubber sheet of a non-physical fourth dimension. You’ve all seen that picture of the rubber sheet, which has got a heavy object on it, so it sort of forms a funnel. That’s using gravity to explain gravity, because you will not form a funnel, unless gravity is pulling that mass downwards. This is profoundly stupid, even

for him. He is stating that diagrams attempting to depict a lower-dimensional representation of the warping of spacetime are actually just showing a sheet sagging down due to the gravity of the Earth he is pretending is below it. Forget the fact that these diagrams are only analogous to the real effect, because it’s impossible to depict three spatial dimensions warping around a fourth in any medium, let alone a flat screen. Using 2D curved onto 3D to represent 3D curving onto 4D is hard to wrap your head around for anyone, so Wal has no chance at getting it.

But the fact that he thinks a diagram like this, of a star or planet in space, has anything to do with the gravity of the Earth just because he’s sitting on the Earth while looking at the picture, is the funniest thing in the world to me. It’s kind of like when flat earthers think that north is somehow uphill. Clearly what this equation is telling us is that energy, mass, and the speed of light are all properties of matter. How is the speed of light a property of matter when light is not matter? Why are people

in the audience not laughing at him? And of course when I say that it means that the speed of light depends on a medium. If there’s no medium there is no light transfer, it’s not possible. it is. This is a common point of confusion for people like Wal, who think that light needs a medium to travel through, like sound does. Sound waves are reverberations of a medium. Light is not. Light is oscillating orthogonal electric and magnetic fields. We’ve known this since the time of Maxwell. For someone who never shuts up about electricity, you’d think he’d

know that. And c is supposed to be a universal constant, one of these physics constants. But it depends on the medium, which means the vacuum is a medium. Yes, c, the speed of light in a vacuum, is a constant. It does not “depend on the medium”, because it is specific to a vacuum. Can this guy even read? It’s been found that the speed of light is not a constant, it varies. So what happened? They now define the meter in terms of the speed of light, so they forced it to be a constant. No, it doesn’t

change. The time it takes light to travel through different media may be different, because of the way light interacts with different materials, which changes the path traveled by the light. The speed doesn’t change. It’s constant. This is what’s so funny to me. He is pretending that science says that the speed of light is constant, and also not constant, and that scientists are so stupid, that they don’t realize the contradiction. So even though an equation works, it describes reality sufficiently so that you can build things and do science, so to speak, unless a physicist can explain

the meaning of each symbol and operator on the board in real physical terms, plain language, the equations remain merely descriptive with no real meaning. Physicists can do that. They understand physics. They know what the symbols mean and can explain them. What Wal means by “plain language”, is tiny words that even he can understand. Sorry Wal, ignorance is not an argument. So we don’t understand gravity. Newton described it with his equation, force equals the gravitational constant, big G, you multiply that with the masses of two objects. The question is not answered. How does this mass know

about this mass? How can this be so? And the equation says you divide by the distance between them squared. And it works, I mean NASA uses this equation to navigate the solar system. You’ll note that it’s the same form as the electric force, you just substitute there for the masses, the two charges, but as we saw yesterday in Jerry Pollack’s talk, that force is enormous compared with the gravitational force. So this suggests that mass may be understood electrically. If you can substitute charge for mass and you come up with an electrical force, then perhaps mass

can be understood electrically. Yeah, you better believe Wal won’t miss an opportunity to point out the totally irrelevant coincidence that both gravity and electromagnetism operate by inverse square laws. Wow, that means gravity is electromagnetism! No, it doesn’t. Do you know how I know? Do anything with an object of neutral charge. Throw a rock. Can you model its motion using Newton’s law of universal gravitation? Yeah. Can you do the same thing with a huge bar magnet or electrode, and nothing changes? Yeah. Mass. Not electromagnetism. Of course I talked about this for 20 minutes in my original

electric universe debunk, so head there for more on this nonsense. Universal gravitational constant, big G, has the peculiar dimensions, and this is a mathematical form, it has nothing to do with the three dimensions of space, of length, mass, and time. Hey Wal, you see how length is cubed? Yeah, that’s the three dimensions of space. What’s the volume of a cube? The side length cubed. That’s why we refer to raising something to the third power as “cubed”. Whoops. Back to middle school geometry. So G actually should not be a constant because it refers to mass, and

as I said before mass is the energy tied up in a particle. It’s an electrical variable. So G is not universal. Gibberish. Mass is not an electrical variable. Particles with no electrical charge also have mass. This is stupid. That means that big G, which we measure on Earth, is neither universal nor a constant, and in fact it’s the worst defined constant in physics. Every time it’s measured it’s different. And even using the same equipment it varies. No, it is a constant. If he had ever done any science before, he would know about the problems inherent

in taking measurements. Getting a measurement of G is a delicate process. It was done for the first time in 1798 by Henry Cavendish who got this value with primitive equipment. Compare that to the current value, which you can see is almost the same. Different methods produce slight variations, but this speaks to idiosyncracies in methods of measurement, and does not imply in any way that G is not a constant. When he says people get different results using the same instruments, he’s either lying or deceptively referencing discrepancies out to the fifth or sixth decimal place. We are

not perfect and our measurements are not perfect. They are approximations of reality. G is a constant. Wal, instead of flashing graphics about pterodactyls that somehow disprove physics, try doing some science for a change. It was pointed out to me a few months ago that if you calculate using Newton’s law the force of the sun on the moon and the force of the Earth on the moon, when the moon is between the Earth and the sun, a new moon, the sun is pulling on the moon twice as strongly as the Earth. And the question is: well

why, how do we have the moon? That’s a good question. None of these questions are answered by Newton’s simple equation. Actually they are, you just have to understand high school level physics. Just because there is a gravitational force between two objects doesn’t mean they should go flying towards each other. If that were true, the moon would have crashed into the Earth a long time ago. The moon doesn’t crash into the Earth because it is in orbit around the Earth. Just like all the satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Why don’t they crash into the Earth? Because

of their rotational or angular velocity. If they lost that rotational velocity, they absolutely would crash into the Earth. So would the moon. If the Earth and moon were somehow at rest with respect to one another, they would collide. And the Earth and moon would both crash into the sun if they weren’t both orbiting the sun. When Wal says that Newton’s equations don’t answer these questions, it’s because he’s never tried. Because they do. The Earth-Moon-Sun three body problem has been computed numerically many times. But we all know how Wal feels about reality, right? When confronted with

evidence that conflicts with your paradigm, the usual response is denial followed by accelerated forgetting. Now we could spend another hour on this video alone, not to mention the hundreds of other ridiculous videos on his channel, but I think we get the picture. Wal Thornhill is a fraud who makes a living lying about physics in ways that are so idiotic that he can be easily debunked by someone with only a casual understanding of physics. It’s just another brand of science denial from another two-bit grifter. Everything he doesn’t understand must be wrong, and everything that proves him

wrong must be fake. And most importantly, once the script of lies is established, it can’t change one bit, no matter what real science actually turns up. This epidemic of science denial is a symptom of the post-truth era that I feel compelled to fight against, no matter what the brand or who is peddling it. And with that another debunk comes to a close. I hope that anyone who had ever found Thunderbolts Project to be even remotely intriguing can now see what a sad little joke it really is. And I also hope that everyone else was able

to pick up a few interesting morsels of physics along the way. I’ll see you next time.