a brief science abuse roundup
It's been a busy week for the web's pseudoscientists and cranks.
This morning, NASA will send a kinetic impactor into a lunar crater to study how much water we might find on the Moon for future missions. Ordinarily, it would be a neat science experiment for those with an eye towards space. But no. Apparently we can't have that. Instead we need to have a little internet furor about the agency bombing our natural satellite. The jokes and parodies can be funny when done right but the false outrage and concerns about the tides are just so over the top, you can't help but do a double take. My favorite complaint is the mentioned phone call from a woman worried about her menstrual cycle being disrupted after the impact. I'm guessing that was probably Satya Harvey of the "did these scientists talk to the Moon before crashing an experimental satellite into it?" fame. No word yet on whether Alfred Webre called the Pentagon in a huff…
In other space related science abuse, a post about relativistic space travel by yours truly has been hastily appropriated by a swami with some truly bizarre claims about exploring the cosmos. Apparently, there's a scientifically verified planet that represents the pinnacle of the material realm some 40,000 light years away and any mission to this world would take so long that even if the astronauts survive the trip thanks to the time dilation of relativistic travel, they would come back to a planet that doesn't know or recognize them. Therefore, rules the Swami Bhaktivedanta, exploring distant worlds is pointless because those scientific glory hounds wouldn't get the adoration they crave. And as if he wanted to blow up the irony meters of anyone who reads his intellectually vacant blathering, the article begins thusly:
Only those persons with a very poor fund of knowledge claim that they themselves are lords of all that they survey. And what can they survey? They cannot survey even the length and breadth of a small sky in one small universe.
Right. Those poor, stupid scientists. Surely someone who never set foot in science class and spends nearly all his life rehashing something said thousands of years ago with no regard for the real world has the moral authority to declare himself far smarter than those with a scientific education and rule on what they should and shouldn't be exploring. Unlike those poor mortals, he has already surpassed all science so his statements couldn't possibly apply to him…
And speaking of hypocritical advice to people who went out of their way to accumulate real world knowledge, a writer at a huge religious website says that the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has to be given to God. Why? Because this whole evolution thing is irrelevant and all scientists do is discover how terribly smart God is in his creation. Our defender of faith, Mark Herringshaw, channels his blogging efforts into repeating pretty much every theistic cliché out there with all the grace and eloquence of a burnt out college student trying to finish an essay just so he can get it off his hands.
Tell you what, when God can show up and collect his Nobel Prize, we can talk. Yes, I'm familiar with the good old fallacy of every painting requiring a painter. But in science, we need to find the paint, the brushes and the painter himself so we can watch him paint before giving credit. When we can do that with a deity, I'm sure the Nobel committee will be willing to make some sort of note about it.
