They know but are not telling you that the upper tectonic plates of earth also join in the Pacific. I thought I'd take a break from conspiracies to promote evolution and conspiracies to fake climate change, to tackle another conspiracy of evil scientists to hide from us the fact that our earth is expanding. Once again, this isn't just a hypothesis, according to its adherence, it's the irrefutable truth. The idea that the earth has been expanding dates back to the 19th century as a way of explaining another scientific hypothesis continental drift. But with the advent of plate tectonics, the expanding earth idea has gone the same way as the flat earth and the earth-centered universe. In other words, some people still believe it. And now that we live in the age of the internet, where wacky ideas can be spread by anyone with a pulse and a keyboard, the expanding earth idea has been revived. Okay, not yet, Joe. Apart from Joe, a creationist who thinks the expanding earth explains the biblical flood, there's also a living geologist attached to the idea James Maxlow. But nearly all the messages I got alerting me to the expanding earth flammary referred to this video by comic book artist Neil Adams. It shows very slickly just how well all the continents fit together as we reduce the size of the earth. No twisting, no form fitting. Well, let's be honest, quite a few places do have to be squashed to make them fit, like Alaska. No altering shapes or sizes. Not quite true either. Adams has taken the shapes of the continents as they appear in an atlas, but these are just the parts of the continental crust that are above sea level. In fact, the continents are bigger and their shapes are different because the true edges of the continental shelves. But never mind that Adams got the shape and the size of the continents wrong and had to squash them to make them fit, that's not what really debunks the notion of an expanding earth. Two years ago when someone first messaged me about the video, I wrote to Neil Adams with a simple question, if the earth has been gaining all this mass, where does the extra mass come from? The answer I got referred to superheated denseness like a giant electromagnetic engine creating energy like a small confined sun. And no, I couldn't make head or tail of it either. It certainly didn't explain where the extra mass came from. So let's try James Maxlow, the geologist who's been advocating the expanding earth theory for over 30 years. If anyone can explain where the extra mass came from, he can't. So where did all this mass come from? I don't know. Oh, so Maxlow, the geologist doesn't know, I suppose we've got no choice but to have another stab at Neil Adams. I asked again about not now, Joe. I asked again about where the extra mass came from. Eventually I got this. Pretend we have pipes going to the core and as you convert hydrogen to helium and release more energy, we pump more prime matter down the pipes. For that new energy to impact in new pair production cooling it down. Now we make more helium and pump in more prime matter. That's how it works. Prime matter has in-facing fields and can flow anywhere. What this tells us is that Adams thinks nuclear fusion, which takes place in the center of stars, is taking place in the center of the earth. Pair production is real enough when energy condenses into a positron and electron, but these particles are short-lived. They aren't atoms and they turn back into energy in a fraction of a second. And what's prime matter? Well, Adams says it's some sort of potential matter floating around in space and you can't see touch or detect it. It was first theorized by, no, not Einstein. No, not Hawking, either. It was first theorized by an ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle. I tried to understand what this imagined substance might be. Adams grew increasingly frustrated as he tried to explain it to me. Imagine nothing. A force pulls outward on it, spin, to make it less than nothing. You get undetectable bubbles distributing the pressure. The bubble is an electron. At its center is a point particle we call a positron. Actually, we call it a positron too, Neil, if I'm thinking of the same positron that you are. If you pop the point positron out with a high energy photon, you will get matter. So if you put the whole thing together, it's bubbles of nothing going down pretend pipes into a mini-sun at the center of the earth. I'm probably not explaining it any better than Adams is, but then I don't have a clue as to what he's on about. This is new age hippy speak, not the language of science. Adams assured me that the reason I don't understand it is because I've been brainwashed by science and I'm just not thinking. Different materials. Let's go back to Max Loeb, who says he doesn't know how new matter forms either, but of course that doesn't stop in speculating. Whatever the sun is made of. Whatever the sun is made of, it's made of hydrogen and helium. Oh, whatever. This blob of pure energy, whatever plasma, whatever. The sun isn't a blob of pure energy. It's a concentration of hydrogen that's fusing into helium and releasing energy in the form of heat, light and radiation. A similar blob of energy, Max Loeb speculates, is found at the center of the earth and the new energy is converted into matter. Only one problem. When fusion takes place because that's what we're talking about, matter is converted into energy. So if you then convert that energy back into matter, there's no net gain of mass. It's rather like having an electric car with a generator that charges the battery and using the battery to run the car. You just can't do it. Leaving aside the question of whether we actually have nuclear fusion happening at the center of the earth. Okay, now, Joe. Oh, drop my ear up, man. Never mind, we'll come back to you. Two years on, and I check Neil Adams' website again, he's still sticking by his theory and still bristling at any criticism of it. But even the imaginary blobs of energy and bubbles of nothing are not the definitive answer as to why an expanding earth is absolute nonsense. The reason we know the earth isn't expanding is because we can measure it directly. And there's no sign at all that the earth is growing, or has been growing since these measurements began. On the other hand, we can measure uplift in mountain ranges by several millimeters a year and along tectonic fault lines, and these are entirely consistent with plate tectonics. Remember, it was when plate tectonics came along that the idea of an expanding earth was discarded as a way of explaining the drift of continents. Plate tectonics does that job admirably and with a mountain of evidence to support it. It shows that as new crust is formed along mid-ocean ridges, it doesn't keep building up to make the earth bigger. It moves like a conveyor belt, eventually subducting under a larger and thicker continent. The magnetic polarity of the rocks moving away from these mid-ocean ridges shows its alignment to the magnetic poles at the time it was formed. Through geological time, these change as the earth's poles flip over. We can measure the drift of the continents so we know exactly which direction they're moving in and how fast. We can see where they were in the past through fossil vegetation and how they were oriented because of the polarity of their volcanic rocks. We can see which continents were joined and how through their shared stratigraphy and paleontology. That means the order and type of rock and the fossils these rocks carry. We can measure uplift in places where plates are colliding today. We can even visualize subduction taking place by plotting the source of earthquakes as the subducting plate jars against the thicker plate. In other words, continental drift is explained perfectly by the circulation system of oceanic crust. Adams and Maxlose hypothesis not only overturns everything we know about, not now Joe. It not only overturns everything we know about seismology, paleontology, glaceology, stratigraphy and volcanology. It also overturns many of the disciplines within physics about where matter comes from, what energy is and how elements are formed. The astonishing thing is that this silly 19th century idea has been dormant for more than half a century. But all it takes is a slick piece of video graphics and an electronic soapbox to the world and people are willing to believe it.