It’s World Homeopathy Awareness Week
I wonder if it becomes more effective as less attention is paid to it, even to the point where less than one blog advocates it.
Category Archives: Antiscience
Feeling Left Out?
Don’t worry. Physics has its own version of the EXPELLED! garbage. Well, sort of: Einstein Wrong – The Miracle Year
Four and a half minutes of dreck, if you’re at rest with respect to your computer monitor.
Frame This!
Over at Cosmic Variance, a discussion about getting the message of science out, in the context of the recent EXPELLED! brouhaha.
To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.
There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.
I keep trying to add commentary, and deleting it. The post nails it, as far as I’m concerned.
Bear Stearns isn't the Only Bankrupt Thing These Days
OK, already, I’ll become the millionth blogger to note the delicious irony of PZ Myers being, well, expelled from a screening of the upcoming movie, “EXPELLED!” Ironic not only because of being expelled, but also because, if those that are advancing evolutionary science and tearing down creationism/ID are beetles (as something with which a student of Darwin might identify), they chose the lesser of two weevils — Richard Dawkins was allowed in.
You can’t make this shit up.
Writing about the politics and antiscience of creation—evolution is easy points. There are things going on all the time, and the cdesign proponentsists are just so intellectually and morally bankrupt that fodder for blogging is plentiful, and there really isn’t a shortage of smart people to shoot down all the crap that gets written. (Not that the ID folks have a monopoly on such behavior — it pains me when a science advocate makes arguments in the same vein, when there is such a wealth of evidence to present — but lies, whether repeated knowingly or parroted blindly, are just so widespread in the creationism/ID movement)
The thing is, the arguments are by and large the same as they have been for a long time. Way back in the USENET days, I was active on the talk.origins newsgroup (active enough that I was nicknamed “Chris” and hold a faculty position at the University of Ediacara) and I see things bandied around today in discussions, and it’s the same crap. The same hollow, fallacious arguments, the same lies that keep propagating despite having been debunked long ago. It just makes me tired all over. Facts don’t matter and won’t sway someone not interested in science.
But, if you’re interested, there is a large collection of links about the story.
Turning Physics on its Ear
So yesterday I linked to a couple of anti-relativity sites, and tearing down their arguments might be fun, as gg suggests in the comments. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people who have a beef with some part of physics. And the folks who think physics is in need of an overhaul aren’t limited to their own little websites, or posting to science forums. They write books, too. There’s a discussion about one such author over at Pharyngula (and the same topic popped up today on SFN) but it’s been dealt with pretty thoroughly over at the JREF forum. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not going to raise specific objections here.
But there’s an attitude that is presented, and echoed elsewhere, that the physics is wrong because it doesn’t explain things. And these people are hell-bent on explaining things. But they go about it in the wrong way — they seem to be mortally afraid of making a specific prediction. Of using math in a useful way.
A common refrain goes along the lines of X is not a mathematical model, and it does not, nor does it need to, reduce mathematically to the physics I’m attempting to supplant
And that’s the problem. It’s great that you can “explain” phenomenon A. But can you also “explain” phenomenon B, that doesn’t actually happen? If you can explain anything, then it’s not very useful. A useful explanation can’t be some vague handwave. The strength of the mathematical model is it allows one to actually calculate things. It’s not good enough to explain the bump on my graph. I want to know if the bump should be at 10 eV, because if your explanation puts it at 15 eV, then you’re wrong and need to go back and change something. Your work has to be able to be tested for being wrong in a verifiable way
The Great Deception
Over at Pharyngula there is a link to a talk summary (not surprisingly, related to evolution) that says
Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.
Wait. I thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was the greatest deception in the history of science
But, whither physics? Surely physics has foisted deception upon mankind, somehow. Ah, relativity to the rescue. Even worse than the evolutionary deception of Piltdown man, apparently
By now, science seems to be
so heavily invested in Relativity and Einstein, that it will be very
hard to admit Relativity has been so obviously wrong. It would be
like admitting to a crime.Lies in science have happened before virtually on the level of
relativity. In England a claim was made that the origin lay in
Britain, perpetrated by leading experts in the field of paleontology.
What they did was to use a fairly modern skull, filed off key
evidence from an ape lower jaw (joints, teeth), put them together
and claimed they had found it like that. This deception has lasted
for a long time, but not as long as the Relativity deception has.
And in addition
It is simply incredible that a theory with so many deceptions has held the attention of so many of physicists and other scientists from the field of natural and technical sciences for so long, and has managed to retain acceptability and even enter the textbooks for secondary schools and universities.
Actually, relativity and evolution are deceptions that follow from the Copernican deception. Evolution was the followup, and relativity was the third blow.
Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the Darwinian Revolution.
And then, after the Michelson-Morley experiment
Einstein’s Relativity hypothesis rescued heliocentricity from the findings of over 200 experiments which showed that the earth was not moving.
I always enjoy the conspiracy angle. We have so much invested in the deception of relativity that we just can’t afford to abandon it at this point. It takes tremendous effort, covering up such a theory that doesn’t actually work. Good thing it’s just a blind alley of physics, and no science or technology actually uses it.
Interestingly, I couldn’t quickly find the same vitriol-induced confusion over quantum mechanics. Perhaps it’s just that QM is so openly bizarre that despite the fact that there are those out there that decry it, it’s not considered deceptive.
Crackpots Are Always Right
It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to scam a few spacebucks out of somebody, and the ones driven by some ideology, there’s a whole host of folks who won’t let go if their pet hypothesis that disproves relativity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
The process of science is to disprove things, and most things get disproven. Benjamin Schumacher has written a nice little summary of it, and how it tends to pervade our thinking.
On occasion, some idea of ours turns out to be right, and then we’ve made a discovery. These occasions are wonderful and gratifying, of course. They are also rare, because most new ideas are wrong. The trick is to be verifiably wrong most of the time. If our ideas are verifiably wrong, then we can eventually get rid of them
The main factor that distinguishes the behavior of scientists is that scientists tend not to take it personally when contrary data is presented that slays our pet theory, while a crank takes it as a huge insult. They don’t like getting rid of their wrong ideas, except when somehow it doesn’t affect their conclusions at all.
Seriously Stupid
The red flag proclaiming “I don’t understand science” goes up when the story sounds something like this:
The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time, but it is relegated to a place among a host of ideas, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Relegated? To the “lowly” place that includes relativity?
I think writing of the phrase “just a theory” or “merely a theory” in a science article should make one’s word processor/computer explode. If you don’t understand why, and you’ve graduated from college, you need to go and ask for your money back.
Nanofear
Nanotechnology isn’t morally acceptable to a lot of people.
My immediate reaction, after playing “what the?” is that this is a reaction from ignorance. I mentioned before that many people get visions of nanobots taking over the world dancing in their heads when you mention the word “nanotechnology” so I suspect this is just a simple reaction. It’s unknown, so I am suspicious and am predisposed to rejecting the idea. Calling it immoral is just an easy way to reject it, requiring little thought.
Of course it’s ignorant, because most of the respondents probably have a computer, which has nanoscale components in it. And use other nanotech products, perhaps even on a daily basis.
I’m not sure how the pollster draws the religious conclusions, because the poll questions aren’t given and we only have his word that the people were well-informed adults. I don’t trust polls, especially ones that are opaque.
Unlimited Cake and Ice Cream
The first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Pretty straightforward. No loopholes.
So why does a press release from Los Alamos sound like it’s ignoring the first law of thermodynamics after painting the room green?
Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a low-risk, transformational concept, called Green Freedom™, for large-scale production of carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuels and organic chemicals from air and water.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Carbon-neutral fuel. Wow, just what the doctor ordered.
By integrating this electrochemical process with existing technology, researchers have developed a new, practical approach to producing fuels and organic chemicals that permits continued use of existing industrial and transportation infrastructure. Fuel production is driven by carbon-neutral power.
OK, no actual mention of the electrochemical process in the PR, but elsewhere it’s given as methanol production from water and carbon dioxide.
So it must be the reverse of 2 CH3OH + 3 O2 → 2 CO2 + 4 H2O
Which is going to require energy input, because the combustion of methanol is exothermic. Ah, hence the mention of the fuel production being driven by a carbon-neutral source. Recognize that? It’s the same handwave that was happening with hydrogen a few years back. It’s not an energy source, but at least it’s green … as long as you use a green source of energy.
If we had some cake we could have cake and ice cream. If we had some ice cream.
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