It’s difficult enough keeping up with regular theories without having to keep up with their weird, paranoid cousin the conspiracy theory.
For anyone wanting a quick update on the latter, there appears to be a new one emerging, stating that the Moon is not made of rock after all. The idea, if you are willing to call it that, is that the Moon is in fact not lit by the Sun, but is its own light source.
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The idea is an odd one, and has to explain a lot of observed phenomena which has proved time and time again that the Moon reflects light from the Sun. The easiest example of this is how the different relative locations of the Sun, Moon, and Earth can explain the phases we see of the Moon, if you accept the fact that we see the Moon because of reflected light from the Sun.
The idea that the Moon reflects light from the Sun actually goes back at least 2,500 years, when Greek philosopher Anaxagoras wrote that “it is the Sun that puts brightness into the Moon”, and went on to explain how this caused eclipses and lunar phases.
In one particularly obtuse version of the “Moon is not rock” theory, people have gone further and made the claim that “rocks don’t reflect light” and “neither does the Moon”. This is particularly baffling, given that all rocks that you see you can see because light is reflected off them and into your eyeballs.
A simple test of this theory, if you were inclined to do so, would be to take an ordinary rock into a room with no windows at night and turn the light off. If you can no longer see the rock, that tells you it is because you see it via reflected light, how all vision works. Or, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you probably guess that the rocks know to turn themselves off when it’s dark.
