Solon's weird ideas about light are another. He doesn't seem to deny Apollo, he actually asserts the fact that they didn't see and photograph a sky full of stars as evidence for his theory. Every example that contradicts his beliefs gets ignored or rejected because it can't be proven they didn't use "gratings" or some other magical optical technique. And his conspiracy involves everyone who has ever worked with optics and/or vacuum, so unlike Apollo, it also requires that the conspiracy have started a good century or two ago.
Poor Solon had absolutely terrible research skills. He'd routinely ask innocently, "Why are there no picture of X taken from Y?", or "Why is there no mention of Z?" When immediately presented with a dozen examples of things he said didn't exist, he'd put his shoulders to the goalposts and quickly push them into... himself; he contradicted himself a
lot.
And, yes, he sure does love his gratings. He pretty much put gratings on every piece of glass in the solar system. He even proposed that the Shuttle's windshield had gratings, at which I had to point out that I've been in various Orbiters and they had no such thing. Even Earthbound solar cells were part of the Great Grating Extravaganza.
Which brings up a trait of quite a few conspiracists, namely, the Inability to Leave Anything Out. According to Solon's
own claims, there is no point in solar cells on the ground to have gratings, as they already operate well within his "conversion" zone. But there's no stopping to think about the superfluity of such a feature, because somewhere he read that some solar cells use some sort of grating, and he was darned well not going to leave
that out.
And the Apollo hoax CTs at least have some concept of a motivation for doing it. Solon's CT: they've been trying to keep people from realizing that visible light can't travel through vacuum and stars are only visible due to some hand-waving ionospheric effects because...because.
That's something he never addressed, all right: what was the
point of hiding something that could be discovered by any physicist with a decent-sized vacuum chamber? Funny, when I got my physics degree, they forgot to swear me into the Secret Plane Wave Society. But, as you noted, Solon's conspiracy pretty much puts an Apollo hoax, JFK, and 9/11 combined into the minor leagues; every physics book
ever dealing with EM has to be a hoax.
By the way, he did veer into Apollo hoax land after it was pointed out how the astronauts did see stars during the flights under appropriate circumstances. (IIRC, he went briefly with the "guilty press conference" routine.). But when I showed the A8 crew seeing the Moon from 50,000 miles, he accepted that and darned if that didn't match his calculations for maximum Moon visibility distance in a vacuum, how about that? No response to my follow up showing the A10 viewing the Moon from twice that distance... Except to complain that no wonder it took so long for Lyman Spitzer to get a visible-light space telescope named after him.
Ahem.
