191) “From Pythagoras to Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, to modern astronauts like Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins, to director of NASA and Grand Commander of the 33rd degree C. Fred Kleinknecht, the founding fathers of the spinning ball mythos have all been Freemasons! The fact that so many members of this, the largest and oldest secret society in existence have all been co-conspirators bringing about this literal “planetary revolution” is beyond the possibility of coincidence and provides proof of organized collusion in creating and maintaining this multi-generational deception.”

Again, this is not the place to explore the folly of the conspiracy theory about freemasonry. 

However, I'll spend a short time discussing this illustration that Mr Dubay uses:

The only evidence he offers that all these thinkers were Freemasons is the presence of  a pair of compasses, or sometimes a square, in portraits of them. 

Now, it's certainly true that Freemasons use the square and compasses as a symbol. That's because actual masons, that is builders in stone, have used these for many centuries as tools in their work. 

So did anyone whose work involved measuring  and drawing accurately. In fact, that is the meaning of  the compasses  or setsquare in these pictures: they denote precision and care in measurement.

It's a little like the way that many present-day photos or TV interviews of thinkers include a computer in the picture.

These are standard tools used by builders, architects, map-makers, artists, architects, navigators and many others. Often, they have been used as symbols of those trades, too.

By pure chance, I noticed an example of this while I was thinking about Dubay's claim. I am a volunteer steward in a local museum, and I noticed this map on the wall there. 

Here again is the symbol of the compasses marking out the scale on the map, and implying accurate and careful measurement. There's no necessary connection with the Freemasons when you see that.

Later, I noticed these compasses in a display of coopers’ tool  for making barrels. Does this imply that barrel makers were freemasons? 

And, while I was tidying up the map photo above to post it, I noticed the icon for the tool I used to crop out the surrounding wall: 

Yes, it's the square from the square and compasses, as seen beside Pythagoras, Copernicus and Galileo in Dubay's "evidence". Does this mean that this standard symbol in my image editor program is a secret tool of the Freemasons? No, it means that it depicts the tool traditionally used to get right-angles straight. As it does in Dubay's pictures.

By the way, is Dubay really claiming that Freemasonry existed more than 2500 years ago, at the time of Pythagoras?

19  "Tycho Brahe  famously argued against the heliocentric theory in his time, positing that if the Earth revolved around the Sun, the change in relative position of the stars after 6 months orbital motion could not fail to be seen. He argued that the stars should seem to separate as we approach and come together as we recede. In actual fact, however, after 190,000,000 miles of supposed orbit around the Sun, not a single inch of parallax can be detected in the stars, proving we have not moved at all.”

Another genuinely interesting one, even though it’s long since been explained. In fact, it’s a great example showing that new scientific theories often can’t answer every objection at first, even though they are right. It’s worth spending a little time on.

Mr Dubay is relying on what was once quite a good objection to the heliocentric arguments of Copernicus and Galileo from the 16^th century.  However, he carefully doesn’t mention that it was one that was answered at that time, and has been proved conclusively to be false, when the parallax was first measured by  Friedrich Bessel in 1838 . 

To find out how, I’ll try to make Mr Dubay’s explanation a bit clearer, and yet again give you a simple way to test his claim for yourself.

OK, so Galileo and Copernicus said that the earth circles the sun. Tycho Brahe objected; “In that case, why don’t we see the stars seeming to move from side to side as the earth moves form one side of the sun to the other, because of parallax. Good question.  The short answer is: because the stars are much too far away!

What is parallax? I’m look out of my window at some nearby houses. If I move my head from side to side, the houses seem to move a bit. That’s because I’m viewing them from a slightly different angle. So why don’t stars seem to do the same?

Well, further off, I can see another street of house. These seem to move much less, because they are further away. So the angle doesn’t change so much. If we drew this, the further house would make a much narrower triangle with my head’s  left and right position. The base of the triangle would be a couple of feet, the length of the longest side maybe 70 feet, enough for me to see a little “wobble”. That is parallax.

Further away still is a taller building that hardly seems to move at all. Any change in angle is too tiny for me to see. And that’s the clue to the answer.

Tycho Brahe had actually found an early piece of evidence that the stars are much further way han was though at his time. In fact, even the closest star is about 4.3 light years away. That’s 2.53 * 1013 miles away – or about 40 million million kilometres. That’s something like 270,000 times as far as the distance from the Earth to the sun.

If you drew THIS triangle – well you couldn’t, not on any sensible sized sheet of paper. It’s be just a line. 

Why? Suppose you could draw the “long side” (the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri ) as a line a mile long. How wide would the base of the triangle be? That is, the distance that the earth travels from one side of the Sun to the other?

Answer: just under 1/2 an inch - compared to a mile. Obviously you couldn’t expect to see any parallax wobble with such proportions, could you?

Mr Dubay’s argument seems even weaker than I thought. Give him a mile, and he’ll take half an inch!