He’s just a sad, broken man who has lost his way

        That phrase from Mike Bara's blog this week was the first thing that jumped out at me, and I thought "Tut-tut, Mike, that's no way to talk about your former co-author." Then I realized that for the second time he was matching wits with Prof Stephen Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA, Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, author of six popular books and Einstein-knows-how-many research papers.

        The contrast between the erudite cosmologist and the drop-out from Seattle Pacific Uni is certainly striking. But our Mike is far from intimidated. In his 2010 piece he wrote:

In my new book The Choice, I directly confront the arrogance which Hawking so perfectly displays in “The Grand Design,” and I utterly destroy the foundations upon which his declarations are built.

This week, he was equally arrogant, if not more so:

In my new book The Choice, I put scientific materialism to shame. There is no randomness in the Universe. There is substantive proof that the “laws of physics” which Hawking puts so much faith into, simply don’t exist. There is overwhelming proof of a new, little understood theory of physics, Hyperdimensional physics, which can explain everything without having to move the goalposts even once. But that theory and the evidence supporting it MUST be denied by the scientific materialists, because once you introduce the idea of a higher level of existence, the 4th dimension, you must also acknowledge something far more threatening to the scientific materialists; God.

        Overwhelming proof, eh Mike? Well, let's take a look at chapter 3 of The Choice and see how overwhelming this proof really is. Mike explains:

The name comes from the simple idea that everything we see and experience in this universe as energy actually originates from somewhere else—from outside our observable 3D realm.
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[I]f you take a sphere—like ... a planet—and you rotate it, then you will pull energy from the higher state of the planet (the hyper-sphere) and that energy will preferentially upwell from inside the planet according to the geometry of a tetrahedron encased in a sphere, and appear at or around 19.5 degrees.

        So far no proof, just a rather strange assertion. His "proof" is on page 47, as he notes that this 19.5° energy is demonstrated by Neptune's Great Dark Spot, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the erupting volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io (he doesn't specify how many of the 400 volcanoes of Io,) Olympus Mons on Mars, and the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.

        What do these features have in common? None of them are actually at 19.5° latitude (with the possible exception of a few Io volcanoes.) If he'd written Mauna Loa instead of Mauna Kea, he'd have got one right. That's not overwhelming proof. It's not even a little bit of proof. It doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain one thing properly.

        As for "utterly destroying" the foundations of physics, this blog has pointed out here, here and here that physics has utterly defeated Mike. He just doesn't understand.

Mike finds God, and someone else special
        Mike seems to have caught religion, the way other people catch flu. According to what he said during this podcast, his epiphany arrived along with the seductive dedicatee of The Choice, Alyssa Reid Leblanc. He hastened to assure us that it wasn't THAT KIND of epiphany, but there's photographic evidence that he hugged Alyssa a lot at one time. Sadly, Alyssa's Facebook profile reveals that The Choice is not among her favorite books.

        Curiously enough, it isn't on Stephen Hawking's list, either.

Update:
        Mike launched yet another attack on modern physics on May 20th (one day before The Rapture.) I posted a comment which is certain never to be seen on the Bara-blog:
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"....their limited, three dimensional way of thinking."

Funnily enough, superstring theory gets almost as much ridicule as you and Hoagland do, because it posits 11 dimensions. Four dimensional physics is so common that it's probably taught in high school these days (I wouldn't know, personally.)

But the physicists of the world are sure to take note that they're being chastised by someone who believes:

- Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is unusually close to Earth
- Earth and Mars would remain at the same distance if the orbit of Mars were circular
- Satellite orbit discrepancy is measured by altitude above Earth, not the semi-major axis