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January 23, 2007

Junk Sciencespeak - Muslim Scientist Says Forget Greenwhich Mean Time - World Must Accept 'Mecca Time'

Topics: Understanding Islam

Are you ready for "Mecca Time"?

If Egyptian Researcher Dr. Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed has his way the world would abolish Greenwich Mean Time and replace It with Mecca Time. He's demanding another one of, you know, "conferences"!

You can watch the video of him explaining his "science" behind the idea - here.

Bad Astronomy nails his idea for what it is - Junk Science:

I was going to tear this apart step by step, but c'mon, why bother. This guy is so full of crap it would just be kind of sad to do it. People want to visit Mecca from the north and south poles? That ought to be a short list. And the stuff about magnetic fields and blood is utter garbage. I have had MRIs on my back and my knee in the past, and if blood flowed differently depending on magnetic field strength, my body would have exploded like an overstuffed balloon during the procedure. MRIs use a huge magnetic field, tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth's field. Plus, what does anything he is saying have to do with Greenwich time? It's like Al-Sayyid wrote down scientific-sounding words on a piece of paper, cut it into pieces, and drew them randomly out of a hat.

So this guy is full of it. But why get upset?

What makes me so angry about stuff like this is that he claims he's a scientist, when he is anything but, together with the fact that this is all based on fundamentalist Islam. So what we have here is a middle-eastern version of the young Earth creationist, someone who has the incredible ability to totally ignore every single fact and observation about reality, and instead substitute them with fantasy based on something in an ancient book written before we understood germs and electricity.

But what really, really makes me angry is that I know that this twinkie will be praised by millions of people who will take his word as, pardon the expression, gospel. They won't wonder that Dr. Al-Sayyid's words were sent over the Internet -- a triumph of human engineering knowledge -- or that what he said was broadcast over a television signal that took centuries of scientific progress to create.

Fundamentalist ignorance is many things, but irony is one of of its most obvious properties. But another property, and its most insidious, is its infection rate. The only cure for this sort of thing is knowledge.

Arm yourself.

You'll get a real kick out of reading the comments on the post. My favorite is:

I have no idea what "magnetic field of Earth is 8.5 degrees" even means, let alone what the connection between magnetic field and a standard time meridian is . . . . but what the hell, there's a magic rock in Mecca.

Apparently there are Muslims who will leave no stone unturned in order to Islamicize the world. They would have non-Muslims convert, leave the planet, or die. Having to use junk science in place of science and reason is apparently not a problem for them. The real problem is as Bad Astronomy says, " this twinkie will be praised by millions of people who will take his word as, pardon the expression, gospel. "

Other coverage: Why Don't You ... Blog posts "Magnetic Crackpottery."

Posted by Richard at January 23, 2007 12:44 PM

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• Junk Sciencespeak - Muslim Scientist Says Forget Greenwhich Mean Time - World Must Accept 'Mecca Time' - Jan 23, 2007