Fixedearth.com

Fixedearth.com was a website owned by a so-called "Non-Moving Earth and Anti-Evolution Foundation." It was primarily the work of one-time teacher and fundie wingnut Marshall Hall (1931–2013), who according to the site was peddling his own peculiar brand of extremist horseshit from 1973 until his death in 2013. Hall's equally loathsome wife Bonnie pledged to continue spreading his unremitting hatred after his death. This pledge appears to have failed, as the webshite disappeared from the internet sometime in 2019.

Marshall Hall.
The fault in our stars
Pseudoastronomy
Adding epicycles
Epicyclists
v - t - e

The site claimed that it was "Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism, and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven" and says it has uncovered "scientific evidence" confirmed by a literal interpretation of the Bible that the Earth is actually the center of the universe (meaning the Sun and all planets revolve around the earth). Moreover, Hall denied that other stars and exoplanets even exist – he considered the theory that the universe is 15 billion light years across to be a "Kabbalist lie," stating that the universe is not much larger than our own solar system. When faced with the mountain of evidence to the contrary gathered by space telescopes such as Hubble and Kepler, his response was to haughtily claim the telescopes are "phony." For only $400 plus $20 shipping, you could own a copy of his "undisputable evidence" yourself.

Michelson–Morley

The site argued that the Earth is completely still. It is neither orbiting the Sun, nor rotating on its axis. Its strongest "evidence" for this seems to be the Michelson-Morley experiment – which set out to discover the luminiferous aether, and found nothing (to within experimental error). The site proposed that these experiments can be re-interpreted as meaning the Earth is completely unmoving. The Ether was there, but couldn't be detected by the experiment because Michelson and Morley presumed that the Earth was moving relative to the Ether.

Modern astronomy has produced ample data in support of the cosmological principle, which states that there is no special, privileged point of observation in the universe. Conversely, it implies that we can arbitrarily pick any point as the "center" of the universe, since any choice is as good as any other. Because of this, the site is able to quote various astronomers or physicists who aren't crackpots but acknowledge that there is no reason in principle not to treat the Earth in this way. However the author of Fixedearth.com felt the need to explain:

“”Note: I do not accept this compromise approach. One Model must be a lie, and you can know--as anyone can--which Model that is!

We certainly can, though Fixedearth.com probably wouldn't like the conclusion that we (and virtually everyone else) would come to.

Satellites

Under the mistaken assumption (perhaps as a result of combing through poorly written patent applications) that satellites are a mixture of prograde and retrograde without differentiation the site argues that their apparent relative motion is in fact their real "absolute" motion, i.e., geostationary satellites are in fact simply stationary, the GPS satellites are in fact orbiting the Earth exactly once per day (rather than twice) and so on. The rare retrograde (mostly remote sensing or covert military) satellites are therefore assumed to be going much faster than they actually are. No explanation for how this is possible is apparently warranted. The proposed mechanism by which the multi-tonne geostationary satellites remain perched motionless above the Earth is electromagnetic, but apparently implemented by God, so no need to look for any enormous electromagnets in equatorial South America… Gravity is apparently OK for the other satellites though.

Religion

The website was written by a lunatic way-beyond-fringe Christian. Over and above any actual evidence for an unmoving Earth (clue: there isn't any), the site relied principally on quote mining the Bible, finding generous "literal" readings of fairy tales written for a different audience over two thousand years ago. It had a pretty uncompromising position on the Bible that most Christians won't like, arguing that the New Testament is subsidiary, etc. It was also very hostile to Kabbalah, which it sees as a Jewish conspiracy supporting a modern heliocentric view of the universe. Indeed, much of the website – for example, a particularly ugly page minimalizing the Holocaust – displayed some very heavily implied anti-Semitism.

gollark: You are like the hexadecimal value ce7d4761fa385c421e9b155e0ceea047498f2a33acefdafa6bb93f845de606061868f3a7ad48002042c7c79fc6aa5dc2bcc0528976eacb95b58e4932027b76b2.
gollark: You are like an endofunctor OUTSIDE the category of monoids.
gollark: You are like a homomorphism between two vector spaces.
gollark: You are like the novel *The Englishman's Boy*, by Guy Vanderhaeghe, encoded as a unary brain[REDACTED] program.
gollark: You are like orthogonal frequency division multiplexing applied to a 2kHz audio signal.

See also
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