I can see why you have an issue with a guy getting a worthless PHd from that little school in mass (MIT). Mechanical engineering has nothing to do with science or plate tectonics (his specialty). The Air Force Academy usually scrapes the bottom of the barrel for physics professors
As a BSME and MSME from MIT who knows what it takes to get a graduate degree there, I am certain that Dr. Brown knew his stuff when he graduated. He'd have to be very well educated in thermodynamics, physics, mathematics, and more. Presumably he was the same at the AF Academy.
People change.
Dr. Brown forgot all his thermodynamics.
Glenn Morton had to school him on first- term undergraduate thermodynamics. He forgot all his physics and
Jellison had to point that out. (Personally I think Jellison left out a very important fact, the impossibility of getting the asteroids' orbits into the plane of the Solar System in Brown's fantasy, but when there are so many errors you just can't cover them all.) He's so loony the loonies think he's loony.
He's not what he once was.
Oh, and he has no education or qualifications in geology or plate tectonics. He can't even figure out a simple problem in strength of materials (rock) (see first link above).