Food for Thought

[JRowe]

One of the questions most commonly asked is why one should accept a model like DET as opposed to the mainstream RET. Now, personally I think the evidence for DET stands by itself. One shouldn't have to disprove one model in order to demonstrate another is preferred. For those interested in the flaws with mainstream RET, however, I will contribute such things to this thread. Over time, it will grow.

Before that however, two quick notes.

First, when I speak of RET, I am not just referring to the direct consequences of a globe-shaped world. Science does not work that way, the entire theory must be taken into account. There are myriad consequences, especially on the cosmic scale, which would not be shared with FE models. These distant consequences are as key as anything to do with water levels or local gravity, because if they do not work then the model that requires them cannot function either.
Second, I do not expect any one of these arguments to convince you. Especially when I am asking you to go against what you're used to, to believe in something the uninformed masses think of as a joke, it takes more. I only ask that you keep an open mind when you see the growing number of gaps in the mainstream RE view.

Posts will be added as time goes by. It will be sparser to begin with. I will try to keep it primarily populated by less cliche, less overused points.

[JRowe]

The Dark Matter Approach
RET proposes a substance called dark matter to explain anomalies in how gravity and the view from a globe explains the movements of the stars. Dark matter is a poorly defined concept, but there are certain traits that it requires.

1. It is immaterial, unable to physically interact with regular matter (and perhaps even other dark matter)
2. It can solely be detected by means of its gravitational influence. That is, it both exerts and is affected by gravity.

This kind of topic is the perfect way to locate flaws in a model. It is a relatively recent addition to the RE view of the universe, so what came before was not designed with it in mind. If RET is incorrect, we would expect to see errors in trying to apply the new concept to longer-held beliefs.
In this case, we take the creation of the solar system.

Dark matter is a mass. That is why it exerts gravity, and as such why it has to be affected by gravity. Assuming a relatively uniform dispersal of dark matter at some point in the distant past, it would be drawn to the same centers of mass as regular matter. Whether or not there is interaction, the effect of gravity is still there. The cores of stars and planets and galaxies would drag it in.
There is said to be over five times as much dark matter as regular matter.
And we know it is meant to be where we are, scientists are running experiments to detect it. So how much would be here? Here, let us use logic rather than the claims of people with a vested interest in it working. We know dark matter should be attracted to masses, and as such there should be a greater concentration of it within solar systems than in the voids between. There should also be more within planets, stars and moons than in the empty space that otherwise makes up the RE solar system.
The five times figure still sounds good, but let's be kind. Let's suppose most of that ends up in the Sun, and have a 50/50 split. Even with that concession, the Earth's mass would still be half made up of dark matter. Because, lest we forget, it exerts gravity. The calculations scientists have done to find the mass of the Earth by means of its gravity would be way off. The materials they thought composed the Earth in fact only would make up at best half the mass of the Earth.
So we should expect to find massive unanwered questions, historically, in fields like the composition of the Earth. Alternatively we should find huge rewrites in the field, to allow for the new discovery.
We see none of this. They convenient brush aside what the actual consequences of dark matter would be on the existing theory.

The same can be said for the Sun. No such excuses exist there, the incredibly light gases believed to compose it should only add up to a sixth the mass of the body. Given the Sun is meant to be composed primarily of hydrogen, and then some helium, the two lightest gases there are, there is no way to alter its composition to explain this oddity. The only explanation would be that we somehow have a drastically wrong idea of either the size of (and so distance to) the Sun, or that we have miscalculated the force of gravity and subsequent density of the Sun. Either way, the RE model is incredibly flawed.

Dark matter, if it exists, should have shattered the RE status quo. In fact we see no such thing, we see no changes, no edits. We see excuses, but no creditable explanations for just why dark matter would leave our masses alone.

[JRowe]

The Inverse Square Law Approach
Gravity is of course a cornerstone of RET. It is fundamental to countless crucial areas, though many REers will tell you that it is not fully understood. This is, though suspect, not in of itself a sustainable argument. One shouldn't expect omniscience. However, lack of knowledge only goes so far.

Of the many properties ascribed to gravity, one is that it obeys the inverse square law. This means that, when a body exerts a certain gravitational pull, the gravitational pull weakens in proportion to the square of the distance to the source of the pull. At first glance, this seems reasonable.
Many things obey the inverse square law. For easy examples, sound and light. When measured it is found that their intensity decreases with respect to the square of the distance from the source.

The underlying theory is simple and intuitive, though may be proven mathematically. Let us suppose an object emits a sudden burst of light, or sound, heat, even matter... We may model this burst as travelling out in a sphere. If the burst was instantaneous, then every part of this light/heat/etc is now the same distance from the source.
A few moments later, and that distance, that radius, is larger. Unsurprisingly this now means that the surface area of the sphere is much larger. The same amount of light/heat/sound/matter now occupies a larger area, and so is sparser and weaker. To rigorously show this follows the inverse square law, simply look at the formula for the volume of a sphere compared to surface area and its dependence on r².
To generalise this, focus on just a portion of the sphere if the substance was emitted in a limited number of directions. The underlying principle stands.

There is something that sets all these cases apart from gravity however.
The specific reason this law holds is that something of set size has to occupy larger and larger areas. A finite amount of heat, photons, matter, energy...
Gravity is none of those things. It is not even a force, as many REers will tell you, though it causes one. There is nothing in it that would be dispersed as you got further and further from the source. There might be a reduction, but there is no reason for it to follow the inverse square law.
For gravity to follow the inverse square law, to diminish at the rate of the square of the distance, there has to be something that spreads out over a larger area. What is this something, this tangible finite entity that disperses from a source? Such a concept is simply not in line with the little REers claim is established about gravity.
While gravity's effects are finite, it is not and cannot be composed of any such thing. Thus, we would expect linear reduction.

[JRowe]

The Planetary Approach
There is an easy way to determine that other celestial objects are not as we are taught. Before I begin this argument I will make a note on terminology. As a result of this argument, and the model itself, the Earth is the only thing I would call a planet. Mercury, Venus et al are not the same class of entity and have far more in common with stars than the Earth. However, as most people are used to thinking of them as planets, I will default to the mainstream terminology for the purposes of this post so that my point is clearer.

You likely have a clear image of many celestial objects in your head, planets and otherwise. The moon is endless plains of grey sand and rock. Mars is rust-brown sand and rock. Venus is volcanic and toxic. Jupiter is endlessly stormy gas. And everything we've seen from photos and statements from mainstream scientists is in line with this. Everything else in the Solar System is what is termed a single biome planet; a body with only one ecology.
It's an idea that is popular in sci-fi. The best known examples would be Star Wars; we have Hoth the ice planet, Tattooine the desert world. Something of a cliche, and plainly one that appeals to the human imagination, despite repeated criticism from the scientific. 

But is it realistic?
We have only one planet that we can directly observe, and we see it covered in rainforest and desert and sea and ice. Certainly, if a world lacks water or plant life there are limits to the variation possible, but there should still be some. If you want to limit the materials to just sand and rock, then we should observe some areas of pure sand, some solid areas of just rock, but if you look at the myriad photos claimed to be of the moon (for example) then no matter the landing site they all seem to be pretty much identical. If you look at all the images from the Mars Rovers, it's the same. Loose rocks scattered over a sandy plain. There is no variation in the surface, the materials, the composition, the color...
And that is to say nothing of the utter lack of climate variation.
Instead every single body that we have seen is little more than a quarry, and every single world that we are told about supposedly lacks any variation.

If one were to strip the Earth of all its water and plant life, you would still find that there were rocks of a multitude of colors, huge variations in the surface structure, some solid areas and some sandy... Does that bear any similarity to how we are told other planets look?

The way we are told the Solar System is composed is devoid of any logic or common sense.

[JRowe]

The Spatial Approach

One point key to RET is the idea that space itself is stretching. This is a required tenet, to explain a number of phenomenon (such as Olbers' Paradox). It is however crucially flawed, in a similar fashion to the dark matter situation above.

The basic principle here is simple. RET uses a placeholder term of dark energy to refer to the power source that drives the expansion of space, and you can find a lot of analysis referring to the scale factor, a lot of things describing what would need to happen for the universe to expand the way RET requires.
This is a recurring motif with RET. RET is assumed to be true, and so the consequences for each new observation are fitted into it. Inherently there is nothing wrong with this, it is the only way to see what would be required, but the issue is when a model is held onto far longer than it was meant to be. 'What' should happen is only the first step, 'why' it happens is just as important. RET can of course define what space would need to be doing, so the next question is why it expands.

Some of you may use dark energy as the answer here, but in which case how? Connect the dots between 'dark energy' and 'space itself expanding.'
So much of the model for the expansion of the universe is predicated on what they would need to happen rather than explaining how on earth it could.

Now, a more general word on scientific hypotheses. No scientific model is expected to be complete, there will always be questions, always be more detail to go into, especially when one lacks resources. However not all gaps are created equal; a good example of this would be abiogenesis.
We do not know how life originated on Earth, scientifically speaking. However there are a multitude of hypotheses, a lot of possibilities; the reason the answer is unknown is because we lack the means to sort between them. Unless someone invents a time machine we're not going to be able to go back and see which, if any, occurred.
The gap here is not because we don't know the answer, it's because we don't know which is accurate.
The problem with somehow connecting the presence of dark energy to the accelerating expansion of space (and, for that matter, justifying dark matter's dispersal to be as RET requires and away from centers of gravity) is that if you ask why it happens, all you get is crickets.

In all my research, there has been endless prevaricating about what is going on, what would need to happen, but total silence on how exactly it is space can expand, and how dark energy drives it. No hypotheses, no flights of fancy. Endless discussion on the scale factor, on what would need to occur, but it seems no one knows why or how it could.

[JRowe]

The Hawking Approach

One of the best ways, in my opinion, to identify any flaws in a complex web of ideas such as a scientific field, is to look at what the implications of recently decided-upon facts are on long-established ideas. Those early ideas would not have been designed to function in light of later discoveries; it is the obvious place for an error to arise. One such example of a field would be that of singularities, or more specifically, the subject of Hawking Radiation.

The basic idea of Hawking Radiation is complicated, but it can be simplified if you are willing to accept (for the purposes of discussion) the claims made by the scientific community. One is the nature of a black hole, a region of space subject to such an extreme gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape if it travels past what is called the 'event horizon,' the border of the singularity. Two is the concept of virtual particles, tiny pairs of particles that spontaneously come into existence, one of typical matter, and one of anti-matter with negative mass and negative energy both. The thought process behind virtual particles is that they have a net energy and mass of zero, and they immediately annihilate each other meaning nothing is created and conservation of energy is maintained.
However, it is stated that virtual particles, when they come into being at an event horizon, behave in a certain way in this special circumstance. At the event horizon, one particle will not be able to escape the singularity, while the other will, causing them to separate. Thus one particle goes into the black hole and the other spirals out into the universe.
This is said to make a black hole decay over time, as the mass within the black hole is annihilated particle by particle, and from an outside perspective will seem to 'radiate' outwards as the other half of the particle pair is expelled.

The problem with this is what is required. The concept of Hawking radiation follows from that which came before, virtual particles from quantum theory and singularities from the theory of relativity, but then for it to make sense on a logical level it also requires a certain kind of special pleading, that being that the anti-particle of the pair always travels into the event horizon. If it did not, the black hole would not decay; if base probability was to blame, an anti-particle would travel in and destroy part of a mass at the core of a singularity/black hole about as often as a particle travelled in and replenished that mass. Thus, the claim that a black hole decays does not follow, and yet this is a claim that is made, that is stood behind.
One can only speculate as to why. I suspect it is simply because it would not be tenable for black holes to essentially spontaneously generate beams of matter and anti-matter, thus this exception is made, but there is no solid reason as to why anti-matter would always go inwards and matter always go outwards.
After all, virtual particles are claimed to have consequences elsewhere in the universe, such as in the Casimir effect, so the concept of it having measurable consequences is not new, there is nothing even conceptual that prevents anti-particles from sometimes being the ones emitted. To believe in Hawking Radiation however, one must simply assume they do, for no reason except that it is what is required even if it would have no cause.

The conclusion, then, is that somewhere along the line, something went wrong. The thought process that led to virtual particles and to black holes must, at at least one stage, have been in error. This is something that should be obvious, as the lack of any elaboration on the topic should make clear, and yet no study is done. The claim is pushed with no question, no examination. It is emblematic, not just of the issues with mainstream science, but of the rut the modern scientific ocmmunity has fallen into when it comes to actually questioning and performing genuine science.