Faith in the facts

I keep waiting for a day to go by in which someone in the Trump administration doesn't say something completely batshit insane.

The latest person to try to reach the summit of Mount Lunacy is Dr. Mark Green, nominee for Army Secretary, who apparently got his Ph.D. from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.  Because besides such bizarre statements as "the government exists... to crush evil," particularly evil in the form of transgender people who are just looking for a quiet place to pee, Green has gone on record as saying that he not only doesn't accept evolution, he doesn't believe in...

... the Theory of Relativity.

In a speech that focused not on what he would do in his role as Army Secretary, but on The Universe According To Mark Green, he said, "The theory of relativity is a theory and some people accept it, but that requires somewhat of a degree of faith."

No.  No, no, no.  Faith is exactly what it doesn't take.  Although religious folks will probably disagree with me on this definition, faith is essentially believing in stuff for which you have no evidence; and as such, I've never really understood the distinction between "faith" and "delusion."  All that it takes to accept the Theory of Relativity is understanding the evidence that has been amassed in its favor.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming.  Given its staggering conclusions -- weirdness like time dilation, the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit, and warped space -- it is understandable that after it was published, scientists wanted to make sure that Einstein was right.  So they immediately began designing experiments to test Einstein's theoretical predictions.

Needless to say, every single one of the experiments has supported that Einstein was 100% correct.  Every time there's some sort of suspected glitch -- like six years ago, when physicists at CERN thought they had detected a faster-than-light neutrino -- it's turned out to be an experimental error or an uncontrolled variable.  At this point, media should simply have a one-click method for punching in the headline "EINSTEIN VINDICATED AGAIN" whenever this sort of thing happens.

What is funniest about all of this is that the technology Green would be overseeing, as Army Secretary, includes SatNav guidance systems that use GPS coordinates -- which have to take relativistic effects into account.  If you decide that you "don't have enough faith" to accept relativity, your navigational systems will gradually drift out of sync with the Earth (i.e., with reality), and your multi-million-dollar tanks will end up driving directly off of cliffs.

So you need exactly zero faith to accept relativity.  Or evolution, or cosmology, or plate tectonics, or radioisotope dating, or any of the other scientifically sound models that Green and his ilk tend to jettison.  All you need to do is to take the time to learn some science.  What does take faith, however, is accepting that anyone who has as little knowledge of the real world as Mark Green does has any business running an entire branch of the military.

Anyhow, there you have it: our "alternative fact" of the day.  It's almost as good as the "alternative fact" of the day before, which came straight from Dear Leader Trump, to wit: Andrew Jackson was a good guy with a "big heart" who "was really angry about what he saw happening with the Civil War."  Oh, and the Civil War could "have all been worked out," and that "people don't ask the question" about why the Civil War started.

Except, of course, for the thousands of historians who have been writing about the causes of the Civil War for decades.  And Andrew "Big Heart" Jackson was responsible for the forced deportation of fifteen thousand Native Americans from their ancestral homes, in one of the biggest forced relocations ever perpetrated, and in which a quarter of them died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

Oh, yeah, and I don't think Jackson was particularly angry about the Civil War, given that he died sixteen years before it started.

So it'd be nice if our leaders would stop saying things that turn the United States into a world-wide laughingstock.  I'm planning on going to Ecuador this summer, and I'd really like it if I don't have to tell the Ecuadorians I meet that just because I'm an American doesn't mean I'm an ignorant, raving loon.  Thank you.

Moral relativity

Once you accept a given non-evidence-based belief system, be it homeopathy or fundamentalist Islam, I see why that would require you to disbelieve in certain realms of scientific understanding.  If you are embracing something based on faith, and it comes into conflict with rationality, one or the other has to go.  It's time to surgically remove the source of the conflict.

I do, however, find it curious how selective the surgery can be.  The same people who object to biological science's understanding of evolution are frequently the same ones who are perfectly willing to take medicines and undergo medical procedures, all of which were developed by the same scientific framework that generated the theory of evolution.  It's a little hard to see how science can be so far right in one way, and then lead you so far wrong in another.

Be that as it may, I do get why the jettisoning of fact-based science happens.  But sometimes the specific bits that get rejected are a little hard to fathom.

Most of you have probably heard of Conservapedia, the crowd-sourced wiki project begun in 2005 by Andrew Schlafly to counter the "liberal bias" he found in Wikipedia.  His idea was that everything in the project would be written and supported from conservative and Christian ideals.  As a result, the page on Barack Obama is entirely negative; the page on climate change states that, basically, it isn't happening; the page on Jesus unquestioningly accepts his divinity; and so on.

All in the name of "eliminating bias."  Oh, and did I mention that its motto is, "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia?"

But so far, none of this is all that surprising.  It's hardly to be marveled at that conservative Christians embrace conservative Christian viewpoints.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago onto two pages on Conservapedia that really, truly, mystified me.

Because apparently they find the Theory of Relativity, and Einstein's mass/energy equivalency formula (E=mc²) to be "liberal claptrap."  (Direct quote from the page on E=mc².)

And I'm thinking, "Okay.  I can see rejecting evolution, cosmology, and plate tectonics, because all of those strongly support the antiquity of the Earth.  But what in the hell is the problem with Einstein?  All that Einstein has done is to show that matter and energy can be converted back and forth, and how objects behave when they are traveling at a high rate of speed."  Neither one, I would think, would be first on the list of Theories Conservatives Shouldn't Like.

Apparently they are, though.  The Conservapedia folks go to great lengths to say how both of them are suspect, that any "dissenting views" by scientists who doubt Einstein are "suppressed as heresy," and how neither relativity nor E=mc² has ever been experimentally verified (in fact, they state in several places on the page for the Theory of Relativity that it has been "rejected," "is not entirely successful or proven," and contains "clear contradictions").

Amusingly, on the page for E=mc², they then follow up this criticism with a bunch of evidence that completely supports its validity, and state outright that in an experiment done all the way back in 1932, mass/energy equivalency was supported to an accuracy of ±0.5%.  I guess that's not enough to count as "verification," for some reason.

Only at the end of the page on the Theory of Relativity do we get an inkling of what is going on here.  Einstein's ideas, they say, promote moral relativism:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.  As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.  Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.  Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

So, yeah.  A mathematical system describing how matter behaves at extremely high speeds has anything to do with abortion law.

In any case, I decided to do a little digging, and find out what they hell they could possibly be talking about regarding the Tribe article showing that the General Theory of Relativity was pro-choice.  And I found the source; a paper from the Harvard Law Review in 1989 called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics," in which Tribe used Relativity as a metaphor:

The Roe v. Wade opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry.

So, now I'm thinking, are you people just idiots?  Or what?  When conservatives branded Bill Clinton with the nickname "the Teflon president," did you throw away all of your non-stick cookware?  Do you think that a "puppet government" is run by Pinocchio, Charlie McCarthy, and Howdy Doody?  When reporters call North Korea "the Hermit Kingdom," does that mean that we should immediately round up and imprison all of the hermits?  Or possibly hermit crabs?

Do you think that rainbows literally taste like Skittles?

You know, in this blog I've deliberately taken up the cause of clear thinking, and tried to do battle with those who promote ridiculous ideas and pretzel logic.  But sometimes, honestly, the muddy water seems to run too deep.  If you are that delusional, that much of a blithering moron, I just don't know that there's anything I, or anyone else, can do about it.

Einstein showed that morals are relative.  I mean.

Time is running out

Today I was going to tell you about the conference of exorcists meeting in Poland to tackle the worldwide problem of vampires, but a much more pressing issue has arisen that I need to discuss while I have the time.

The issue is that time is speeding up.  I'm sure we've all noticed this.  It's becoming harder and harder to get everything done that needs doing, and there just seem not to be enough hours in the day.  Well, according to a story that popped up in my news feed today... there aren't.

The article, entitled "Is Time Speeding Up?", begins with the following paragraph:

Time is actually speeding up (or collapsing).  For thousands of years the Schumann Resonance or pulse (heartbeat) of the Earth has been 7.83 cycles per second.  The military have used this as a very reliable reference.  However, since 1980 this resonance has been slowly rising.  It is now over 12 cycles per second!  This means there is the equivalent of less than 16 hours per day instead of the old 24 hours!

Okay.  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"  The Schumann resonance is an atmospheric phenomenon, an electromagnetic resonance caused by lightning discharges in the ionosphere.  And even if the frequency of the resonance is increasing (which I could find no credible evidence of in any case), there's no way we could know if it's been stable "for thousands of years," because it was only discovered in 1952.  And anyway, why would this have anything to do with how fast time is passing?

Then I decided to do a little research, and it turns out that this is only scratching the surface of the "accelerating time" theory.  There was one article from a guy whose proof that time is speeding up was that all the clocks in his house are running fast.  Another guy, Terrence McKenna, whose name keeps coming up in threads on this topic -- so he must be an expert -- says that the rate of increase in time is such that it will become on infinite on...

... wait for it...

December 21, 2012.

Admit it, you knew there'd be a Mayan calendar reference in here somewhere.

By far my favorite post I saw on the topic came from a guy who evidently thinks that time is like a giant cosmic game of tetherball.  (You can read his entire post here.  I recommend drinking a couple of shots of tequila first.)  He gives this convoluted explanation of a ball hanging on a string tied to a rotating pole, and as the string winds around the pole, the ball spins faster (i.e. time speeds up), and the string gets shorter and shorter and the ball spins faster and faster and then finally SPLAT the ball hits the pole.

At that point, he says, "Weird shit happens."

Very scientifically put, and of course the poster thinks that the Great Temporal Tetherball Collision is going to occur in December 2012.  Afterwards, he claims that the ball will start to spin the other way, and the universe will be reborn, and will be "nicer."

Well, that sounds like a happy thought.

Interestingly, the whole subject has even permeated discussions on physics forums.  In one thread I looked at, once again titled "Is Time Speeding Up?", there were a bunch of woo-woos who blathered on for a while about the expansion of the universe and how time would have to speed up to "compensate" for the expansion of space, and so on, and finally one reputable physicist responded, in some exasperation, "Most of the responses above are gibberish.  No one has even asked the question, 'Speeding up relative to what?'  General Relativity established that time passes at different rates in different reference frames, but these posters seem to think that time as a whole is speeding up -- which is a meaningless proposition, since there is nothing outside of time against which you could detect such a change."

Well.  I guess he told them.  Of course, it won't make any difference, because people who think this way are never going to believe some dumb Ph.D. in physics when they've got the whole internet to rely on.  Besides, this physicist is probably a reptilian alien Man-in-Black from the Planet Nibiru who is part of the Bilderberg Group and works for HAARP, and is trying to spread disinformation.  You know how that goes.

So anyway, I guess that's today's heaping helping of pseudoscientific absurdity.  I think I'll wrap this up, because (1) if I read any more websites like the ones I had to peruse to write this, my brain will turn into cream-of-wheat, and (2) I'm running short on time.