Some of them are so far out there as to be risible. A few of those that come to mind:
- the "phantom time hypothesis" -- that almost three hundred years' worth of history didn't happen, and was a later invention developed through collusion between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church
- "vortex-based mathematics," which claims (1) that spacetime is shaped like a donut, (2) infinity has an "epicenter," and (3) pi is a whole number
- the planet Nibiru, which is supposed to either usher in the apocalypse or else cause us all to ascend to a higher plane of existence, but which runs into the snag that it apparently doesn't exist
- a claim that by virtue of being blessed by a priest, holy water has a different chemical structure and a different set of physical properties from ordinary water
- gemstones can somehow affect your health through "frequencies"
In this same category, of course, are some things that a lot of people fervently believe, such as homeopathy, divination, and the Flat Earth.
These, honestly, don't bother me all that much, except for the fact that the health-related ones can cause sick people to bypass appropriate medical care in favor of what amounts to snake oil. But on an intellectual level, they're easily analyzed, and equally easily dismissed. Once you know some science, you kind of go, "Okay, that makes no sense," and that's that.
It's harder by far to deal with the ones that mix in just enough science that to a layperson, they sound like they could be plausible. After all, science is hard; I have a B.S. in physics, and most academic papers in the field go whizzing over my head so fast they don't even ruffle my hair. The problem, therefore, is how to tell if a person is taking (real, but difficult) science, misinterpreting or misrepresenting it, but then presenting it in such an articulate fashion that even to intelligent laypeople, it seems legitimate.
One of the first times I ran into this was the infamous video What the Bleep Do We Know?, from 2004, which is one of the best-known examples of quantum mysticism. It takes some real, observable effects -- strange stuff like entanglement and indeterminacy and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the role of the observer in the collapse of the wave function -- and weaves in all sorts of unscientific hand-waving about how "the science says" our minds create the universe, thoughts can influence the behavior of matter, and that the matter/energy equivalence formula means that "all being is energy." Those parts aren't correct, of course; but the film's makers do it incredibly skillfully, describing the scientific bits more or less accurately, and interviewing actual scientists then editing their segments to make it sound like they're in support of the fundamentally pseudoscientific message of the film's makers. (It's worth noting that it was the brainchild of none other than J. Z. Knight, whose Ramtha cult has become notorious for its homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and racism.)
I ran into a (much) more recent example of this when I picked up a copy of Howard Bloom's book The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates at our local Friends of the Library used book sale. At first glance, it looked right down my alley -- a synthesis of modern cosmology, philosophy, and religion. And certainly the first few pages and the back cover promised great things, with endorsements from everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Robert Sapolsky to Edgar Mitchell.
I hadn't gotten very far into it, however, before I started to wonder. The writing is frenetic, jumping from one topic to another seemingly willy-nilly, sprinkled with rapid-fire witticisms that in context sound like the result of way too many espressos. But I was willing to discount that as a matter of stylistic preference, until I started running one after another into weird claims of profound insights that turn out, on examination, to be simply sleight-of hand. We're told, for example, that we should believe his "heresy" that "A is not equal to A," and when he explains it, it turns out that this only works if you define the first A differently from the second one. Likewise that "one plus one doesn't equal two" -- only if you're talking about the fact that joining two things together can result in the production of something different (such as a proton and an electron coming together to form a neutral hydrogen atom).
So his supposedly earthshattering "heresies" turn out to be something that, if you know a little science, would induce you to shrug your shoulders and say, "So?"
But what finally pissed me off enough that I felt like I needed to address it here was his claim that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is wrong, which he said was a heresy so terrible we should "prepare to be burned at the stake" by the scientific establishment for believing him. Here's a direct quote:
... the Second Law of Thermodynamics [is] a law that's holy, sacred, and revered. What is the Second Law? All things tend toward disorder. All things fall apart. All things tend toward the random scramble of formlessness and meaninglessness called entropy.
He then goes into a page-long description of what happens when you put a sugar cube into a glass of water, and ends with:
The molecules of sugar in your glass went from a highly ordered state to a random whizzle [sic] of glucose and fructose molecules evenly distributed throughout your glass. And that, says the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the fate of everything in the universe. A fate so inevitable that the cosmos will end in an extreme of lethargy, a catastrophe called "heat death." The cosmos will come apart in a random whoozle [sic] just like the sugar cube did. The notion of heat death is a belief so widespread that it was enunciated by Lord Kelvin in 1851 and has hung around like a catechism.
Then he tells us what the problem is:
But is the Second Law of Thermodynamics true? Do all things tend to disorder? Is the universe in a steady state of decline? Is it moving step by step toward randomness? Are form and structure steadily stumbling down the stairway of form into the chaos of a wispy gas?... No. In fact, the very opposite is true. The universe is steadily climbing up. It is steadily becoming more form-filled and more structure-rich. How could that possibly be true? Everyone knows that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is gospel. Including everybody who is anybody in the world of physics, chemistry, and even complexity theory.
*brief pause to scream obscenities*
*another brief pause to reassure my puppy that he's not the one I'm mad at*
No one, scientist or otherwise, is going to burn Bloom at the stake for this, because what he's claiming is simply wrong. This is a complete mischaracterization of what the Second Law says. Whether Bloom knows that, and is deliberately misrepresenting it, or simply doesn't understand it himself, I'm not sure. What the Second Law says, at least in one formulation, is that in a closed system, the overall entropy always increases -- and the critical italicized bit is the part he conveniently leaves out. Of course order can be increased, but it's always at the cost of (1) expending energy, and (2) increasing entropy more somewhere else. A simple example is the development of a human from a single fertilized egg cell, which represents a significant increase in complexity and decrease in entropy. But the only way that's accomplished is by giving the developing human a continuous source of energy and building blocks (i.e., food), and cellular processes tearing those food molecules to shreds, increasing their entropy. And what the Second Law says is that the entropy increase experienced by the food molecules is bigger than the entropy decrease experienced by the developing human. (I wrote a longer explanation of this principle a while back, if you're interested in more information.)
Let's just put it this way. If what Bloom is saying -- that the Second Law is wrong -- was true, he'd be in line for a Nobel Prize. There has never, ever been an exception found to the Second Law, despite centuries of testing, and the frustrated desires of perpetual-motion-machine-inventors the world over.
A model of a perpetual motion machine -- which, for the record, doesn't work [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiia Monto, Deutsches Museum 6, CC BY-SA 4.0]
So Bloom got it badly wrong. He's hardly the first person to do so. Why, then, does this grind my gears so badly?
It's that apparently no one on his editorial team, and none of the dozens of people who endorsed his book, thought even to read the fucking Wikipedia page about this fundamental law of physics Bloom is saying is incorrect. And he certainly sounds convincing; his writing is like a sort-of-scientific-or-something Gish gallop, hurling so many arguments at us all at once that it's all readers can do to withstand the barrage and stay on our feet.
For me, though, it immediately made me discount anything else he has to say. If his understanding of a basic scientific law that I've known about since freshman physics, and taught every year to my AP Biology students, is that flawed, how can I trust what he says on other topics about which I might not have as much background knowledge?
And that, to me, is the danger. It's easy to point out the obvious nonsense like space donuts and gemstone frequencies -- but far harder to recognize pseudoscience that is twisted together with actual science so intricately that you can't see where one ends and the other begins. Especially if -- as is the case with The God Problem -- it's couched in folksy, jargon-free anecdote that sounds completely reasonable.
I guess the only real solution is to learn enough science to be able to recognize this kind of thing when you see it. And that takes time and hard work. But it's absolutely critical, especially in our current political situation here in the United States, where there are people who are deliberately spinning falsehoods for their own malign purposes about such critical issues as health care, gender and sexuality, and the climate.
So it's hard work we all need to be doing. Otherwise we fall prey to persuasive nonsense -- and are at the mercy of whatever the author of it is trying to sell.
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