Daily Archives: March 28, 2008

So Many Conspiracies, So Little Time

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The many-tentacled PZ over at Pharyngula explains why we need academic freedom…to question Newtonism

We’ve been lofting people into the sky for well over a hundred years, and quite often, they’ve fallen down. How many have died due to the tyranny of the gravity Newton put into the hands of conscienceless materialist scientists?

Oh, crap, he found out about the conspiracy. Things go up all the time, and yet no Newtonist will accept this evidence as against the existence of gravity! We always explain it away, hands a-waving, using buzzwords like “lift” and “buoyancy” to avoid admitting that gravity isn’t solidly established. We thought we were safe by declaring all these Newtonian things to be “laws” so they wouldn’t be questioned.

Time to make relativity and quantum mechanics even more incomprehensible.

Don't Worry, Higgs Will Know His Own

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Physics conspiracy: LHC could kill us all

Conspiracy nuts have suggested that it might also inadvertently destroy the Earth (or maybe even the entire Universe)
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[B]asically the cranks think that the collider will also cook up either an exotic particle or a tiny black hole that will suck up everything around it. It’s pretty much bunk, as others smarter than I have said (here for example).

But that hasn’t stopped Walter L. Wagner, a botanist and self-proclaimed nuclear physicist, from filing suit in US District Court in Hawaii to stop the LHC before it destroys all we hold dear. Wagner wants a “full-scale safety analysis” to be conducted of the collider before its start up, hopefully later this year.

If we’re really lucky, the LHC cook up an exotic particle that will “inadvertently” destroy the crackpots (and maybe take a few lawyers down, too). Not that anybody’s planning this, mind you …