No self-respecting teacher accepts even Wikipedia as a primary source in a term paper, but Wikipedia’s scholarship shines compared to Con-pedia’s reliance on proof by assertion and shaky, non-scholarly reference materials. I will use the present entry under examination, E=mc², as a prime example.

In the first four paragraphs previously fisked, there have been four notes. The first was to a strange footnote about how E=mc² only works when metric units are used. No outside reference is mentioned. The second is to a likewise odd statement that “Many leading scientists (including Lord Rutherford and Princeton Physics Professor Robert Dicke) rejected the Theory of Relativity,” which to some extent was true in, say, 1905, but not so much now. This note has links to Con-pedia articles about Dicke and relativity.

Note three follows the weird statement that the equation is “liberal claptrap,” and offers no basis in fact for the allegation. It merely says, “Citation not needed. See here, point 14,” which link takes us to Con-pedia’s rules and regulations page.

Note four, which is in the paragraph fisked in my previous post, takes us to the first external reference, an article at a PBS NOVA website devoted to a program specifically about Einstein’s Big Idea. Curiously, while Con-pedia boss Andy Schlafly feels free to categorize E=mc² as liberal claptrap, and to state, without evidence, that “PBS is known for their liberal bias on many of the television programs being offered,” he has no qualms to refer readers to not just one PBS NOVA article, but three, as we shall see.

Paragraph 5 of the E=mc² entry says:

The Theory of Relativity has never been able to mathematically derive E=mc² from first principles, and a physicist observed in a peer-reviewed paper published in 2011 that “a rigorous proof of the mass-energy equivalence is probably beyond the purview of the special theory.”[5]

Following the link for note 5 takes us to an abstract of a paper by Eugene Hecht of the Adelphi University (Garden City, NY) physics department. His paper was published in the American Journal of Physics, which is in fact a peer-reviewed journal of the American Institute of Physics and the American Association of Physics Teachers.

For you non-academics out there, an abstract is very brief summary of a much longer paper. Real scholars cite the actual paper, not the abstract. It’s like referring to Cliff’s Notes for a term paper — a bit lazy, shall we say, and certainly unprofessional.

It’s clear that only the abstract is the source for the information in the Con-pedia entry.

Here’s the entire abstract (as cited in note 5):

The equivalence of mass m and rest-energy E0 is one of the great discoveries of all time. Despite the current wisdom, Einstein did not derive this relation from first principles. Having conceived the idea in the summer of 1905 he spent more than 40 years trying to prove it. We briefly examine all of Einstein’s conceptual demonstrations of E0=mc², focusing on their limitations and his awareness of their shortcomings. Although he repeatedly confirmed the efficacy of E0=mc², he never constructed a general proof. Leaving aside that it continues to be affirmed experimentally, a rigorous proof of the mass-energy equivalence is probably beyond the purview of the special theory.

Curiously, Con-pedia chooses to ignore the bolded part of the abstract that says “it continues to be affirmed experimentally.” The paper is in fact not a refutation of E=mc², as Con-pedia tries to characterize it, but an analysis of how Einstein unsuccessfully attempted to derive it from first principles (basic physical laws).

That said, I will confess I have not read the full paper, since it’s behind a paywall ($30 to view or download) and my AAPT membership expired four years ago. Frankly, I suspect I don’t need to, since I doubt anyone at Con-pedia ponied up the $30 to read it either.

I offer this citation as an example of quotemining: searching for random quotations that appear to support a position, while ignoring the context of the quotations. In this case, the context fails to support Con-pedia’s stance, and so, it is ignored.

Con-pedia repeats the citation of an abstract in the very next paragraph.

It has been known for a long time that radiation has a mass equivalence, which was correctly derived by Henri Poincare in 1904,[6] but the equation E=mc² makes a claim far beyond that limited circumstance:

“ The equality of the mass equivalent of radiation to the mass lost by a radiating body is derivable from Poincaré’s momentum of radiation (1900) and his principle of relativity (1904).”
—Herbert Ives, 1952

Note 6′s link takes us to the abstract of a 1952 paper for the Journal of Optical Science of America by Herbert Ives, “Derivation of the Mass-Energy Relation.”

Here is the abstract:

The mass equivalent of radiation is implicit in Poincaré’s formula for the momentum of radiation, published in 1900, and was used by Poincaré in illustrating the application of his analysis. The equality of the mass equivalent of radiation to the mass lost by a radiating body is derivable from Poincaré’s momentum of radiation (1900) and his principle of relativity (1904). The reasoning in Einstein’s 1905 derivation. questioned by Planck, is defective. He did not derive the mass-energy relation.

Copy ideas, much, Con-pedia?

The gist of this paragraph is that Einstein’s equation is nothing new, doesn’t require reliance on that nasty Theory of Relativity with those variable time and space dimensions, and Poincaré said it first. Nah Nah Nah.

Setting aside the shoddy practice of citing an abstract, instead of an entire paper (which I doubt no one at Con-pedia actually read), we should check into the credentials of the cited author, Herbert Ives. Not being familiar with Ives, I resorted to “Liberal-pedia,” which the rest of the world knows as Wikipedia, to find out more about him.

Ives was a scientist and engineer for AT&T in the early 20th century, who apparently made it somewhat of an hobby to disprove, by logical argument, the theory of relativity. He even designed an experiment, now known as the Ives-Stillwell Experiment, to disprove one prediction of Special Relativity, time dilation.

It didn’t work. That is to say, it proved Einstein was correct.

Demonstrating the power of cognitive dissonance, Ives insisted that the positive results of the experiment disproved relativity, while most physicists found that the experiment in fact exactly verified time dilation. The Wikipedia entry includes a quote by one of Ives’ friends, physicist H. Robertson:

“Ives’ work in the basic optical field presents a rather curious anomaly, for although he considered that it disproved the special theory of relativity, the fact is that his experimental work offers one of the most valuable supports for this theory, and his numerous theoretical investigations are quite consistent with it… his deductions were in fact valid, but his conclusions were only superficially in contradiction with the relativity theory—their intricacy and formidable appearance were due entirely to Ives’ insistence on maintaining an aether framework and mode of expression. I… was never able to convince him that since what he had was in fact indistinguishable in its predictions from the relativity theory within the domain of physics, it was in fact the same theory… some who have not penetrated to the essence of Ives’ theoretical work have seized upon it as overthrowing the special theory of relativity, and have used it as an argument for a return to outmoded and invalid ways of thought.” [Bolding by me.]

As in Conservapedia, which apparently didn’t bother delving into Ives’ work enough to find that he had experimentally validated at least one aspect of special relativity.

The next section in theis Con-pedia entry is entitled “Description for the layman,” which in fact describes nothing at all. As in the previous examples, it is further proof of Con-pedia’s lazy scholarship. This very brief section includes this tantalizing morsel:

Ten top physicists were asked to describe in laymen’s terms E=mc²:[7]

And then offers three obscure and non-helpful quotes. What happened to the other seven? you ask. Read on.

A casual reader might assume that Con-pedia had itself solicited such unhelpful comments, but if you click on the note 7 link provided, you would discover that those are actually pull-out quotes from interviews at the aforementioned PBS NOVA website. In fact, Con-pedia didn’t interview any of those people. They all were all interviewed for Einstein’s Big Idea, which was all about E=mc².

If you take the time, (which I doubt anyone at Con-pedia did, since Andy is too busy rewriting the Bible to take out the liberal bits and nullifying modern science), you can click on each interview, and hear each of 10 physicists offering brief, understandable and helpful interpretations of E =mc2. You know, like for the layman. Or, you can even read the interviews. (Again, I doubt Con-pedia’s scholarship went that far.)

And what of the seven pull-out quotes Con-pedia omits? Some would actually help the lay reader understand the equation’s meaning, but might (alas!) contradict Con-pedia’s false interpretation of the law. For example, here is the quote from Nobel Prize winner Sheldon Glashow:

“When an object emits light, say, a flashlight, it gets lighter.” (Because the energy of the light carries away a minute amount of mass.)

Or, this from the published author and physicist Michio Kaku:

“E=mc² is the secret of the stars.” (Because that’s how they can burn for millions or billions of years; a lot of mass means a whole lotta energy.)

Or, this from Nobel Prize Winner Frank Wilczek:

“Ninety-five percent of the mass of matter as we know it comes from energy.” (Because of the binding energy of nuclei.)

Were I sincerely trying to explain E=mc² to a lay audience, I would skipped the three vague quotations used by Con-pedia and used these three. But then again, I am interested in making the equation understandable and not making it some kind of arcane liberal conspiracy.

Interestingly enough, while Conservapedia condemns PBS as a “liberal” organization, and therefore suspect, the entry has two more citations to the PBS NOVA website.

Much further in the entry, after it covers some actual science, with equations, numbers and stuff, Con-pedia has this curiously worded statement:

Some claim that the best empirical verification of E=mc² was done in 2005 by Simon Rainville et al., as published in Nature (which is not a leading physics journal).[12] The authors state in their article in Nature magazine that “Einstein’s relationship is separately confirmed in two tests, which yield a combined result of 1−Δmc²/E=(−1.4±4.4)×10⁻⁷, indicating that it holds to a level of at least 0.00004%. To our knowledge, this is the most precise direct test of the famous equation yet described.”

For someone who has just cited the American Journal of Physics (geared mostly toward educators), the Journal of the Optical Society of America, and PBS NOVA, criticizing Nature as “not a leading physics journal” is a bit of a jawdropper. Nature, which been published since 1869, in fact is one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. Getting published in Nature is a really big deal in the science world.

Several famous physics discoveries were published first in Nature: the wave nature of matter, the discovery of the neutron, nuclear fission, and pulsars, among others. Nature also published initial papers about the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, the ozone hole over the South Pole, the human genome project and the first cloning of a mammal.*

One can assume that Con-pedia is trying to imply that an article in Nature is somehow suspect because it is not a “leading physics journal,” the journal’s long history notwithstanding.

And what is this “some claim that” bullshit? Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, which means anything published it in — there have been a few exceptions in its long history — is bound to be reliable. The paper in question has no less than 11 collaborators, each of whom would be making sure that his good name was not attached to some “liberal claptrap.” There’s no “claiming” about it; it’s rock-solid experimental science.

Some claim that the circumference of a circle is pi times the diameter, if you get what I mean.

The link for note 12 was not working for me, but I found the the full abstract (which Con-pedia once again cites without apparently bothering to read the damned article) and well as the complete article — a PDF version of which is here.

World Year of Physics: A direct test of E=mc2

Simon Rainville1,2, James K. Thompson1, Edmund G. Myers3, John M. Brown4, Maynard S. Dewey5, Ernest G. Kessler, Jr5, Richard D. Deslattes5, Hans G. Börner6, Michael Jentschel6, Paolo Mutti6 & David E. Pritchard1

One of the most striking predictions of Einstein’s special theory of relativity is also perhaps the best known formula in all of science: E=mc 2. If this equation were found to be even slightly incorrect, the impact would be enormous — given the degree to which special relativity is woven into the theoretical fabric of modern physics and into everyday applications such as global positioning systems. Here we test this mass–energy relationship directly by combining very accurate measurements of atomic-mass difference, Deltam, and of gamma-ray wavelengths to determine E, the nuclear binding energy, for isotopes of silicon and sulphur. Einstein’s relationship is separately confirmed in two tests, which yield a combined result of 1-Deltamc 2/E=(-1.4plusminus4.4)times10-7, indicating that it holds to a level of at least 0.00004%. To our knowledge, this is the most precise direct test of the famous equation yet described.

Short version: Einstein was right.

The “World Year of Physics,” incidentally, was 2005 and marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein’s first paper on special relativity.

Of the other three references listed at the end of this paper, one refers to a Basic Books survey of 20th century science, the Nobel Prize Organization and the Nobel prize lecture by laureate John D. Cockcroft. Nothing especially shoddy there, but not exactly prime-cut scholarship, considering the entry purports to disprove one of the key conclusions of special relativity.

The rest of the Con-pedia article deals with more technical matters, which as far as I can tell, would support the validity of the equation. But Con-pedia pooh-poohs all that science-y stuff and says, by way of condemnation, that Einstein had it all wrong.

Most lay readers, however, would likely just read the first half of the entry, which is (a) wrong, (b) misleading, (c) poorly researched and cited and (d) wrong. Fractally wrong. My EFL students in China could have done a better job writing a research paper. Some have, in fact.

All this from a resource that blithely calls itself “the trustworthy encyclopedia.” (Caution: Link takes you to main page of Con-pedia. Material therein may cause heads to explode.)

If you really believe it’s trustworthy, give me a call. I got a lead on some great land in the Everglades.

————
* Interestingly enough, Nature‘s contributors and editors were early and vigorous supporters of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, including the proposition of common descent. Given Con-pedia’s denial of evolution as yet another atheist liberal conspiracy, that would make Nature part of this great global plot to sap the moral fibre of everyone on the planet, along with the “liberal” parts of the Bible.

My paragraph-by-paragraph fisking is, alas, necessary, since the entry is so wrong on a fractal level. The closer you look, the wrongness continues to even finer levels.

The entry begins by claiming E=mc² is meaningless, liberal claptrap, and an attempt to unify matter and light. (It isn’t, and doesn’t.) Then, the principal author, Con-pedia founder Andy Schlafly, veers into the murky realm of Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge in an attempt to show that E=mc² is simply impossawobble.

In the third paragraph, Con-pedia completely mangles the definitions of mass and energy, which any engineering graduate like Andy Schlafly should have internalized just to pass Physics 103/104 (or whatever freshman course EE majors had to take at Princeton), and shows a pretty weak understanding of even basic physics.

(Advice to Con-pedia writers: one should at least brush up enough on basic physics so as not to look like a complete blithering idiot.)

The fourth paragraph is the focus of this latest installment. It states, with jaw-dropping conviction:

For more than a century, the claim that E=mc² has never yielded anything of value. Often it seems to be used as a redefinition of “energy” for pseudo-scientific purposes, as by the lamestream media. There have been attempts to find some justification for the equation in already understood processes involved in nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons, and in the speculation about antimatter.[4]

As before, let’s go a-fisking sentence-by-sentence.

For more than a century, the claim that E=mc² has never yielded anything of value.

First off, a “claim” is an opinion or a legally contestable declaration of truth. E=mc², on the other hand, is a physical law, which has been tested and verified by experiment repeatedly since 1905. There is no doubt that E does in fact equal mc², to within 0.00004%. That’s not a claim; it’s a scientific truth.

Now, we can debate the last half of this sentence. It is true that E=mc² did not directly enable the scientists of the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb. Ernest Rutherford and other physicists had already suspected there was tremendous energy bottled up in atomic nuclei, without resorting to Einstein’s relation. However, the equation does allow us to calculate the energies released in atomic and nuclear reactions. (In fact, this very Con-pedia entry does so after the atrocious introduction.)

The US Navy seems to trust the veracity of the equation, as this photo shows. That’s the crew of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Enterprise spelling out liberal claptrap on the flight deck in 1964. Damn socialists!

The equation also provided a clue for stellar physicists trying to figure out how the Sun and other stars can burn for millions or billions of years. A little mass goes a long way, according to the equation. So, we know that the Sun is about halfway through its 10-billion year life span. Astronomers have known the mass of the Sun and its energy output for at least two centuries. Working backwards, we can convert the observable energy into mass “lost,” using E=mc². Given the current mass of the Sun (2 x 10³⁰ kg, if you really want to know), we can easily calculate its approximate life span.

Particle physicists, nuclear engineers, and maybe even radiologists, rely on E=mc² on a daily basis, as well.

Often it seems to be used as a redefinition of “energy” for pseudo-scientific purposes, as by the lamestream media.

Frankly, I have no idea what Con-pedia is getting at here, unless the author spends too much time reading New Age-y type books and websites, which is extremely doubtful, given Con-pedia’s strictly Christian slant. The “lamestream media,” in case you haven’t heard the term before, is a common right-wing slur for the “mainstream media,” like the New York Times and CNN. You know, the kind of media that try to present real facts and not right wing delusions as facts. Since E=mc² is a real fact, the MSM are well within their rights to present it as a reportable fact.

There have been attempts to find some justification for the equation in already understood processes involved in nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons, and in the speculation about antimatter.[4]

One does not “justify” the use of E=mc² in such processes. One simply uses it. Likewise, I don’t need to justify using F = ma (Mewton’s Second Law) when designing a jet engine. I just use it, because it’s part of physics and necessary for the calculations. As stated above, the Manhattan Project did not need E=mc² to create the A-bomb, but it sure helped.

As for antimatter, there is no speculation that it exists. It just is. Ask any particle physicist working at Fermilab, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, Oak Ridge Labs, Brookhaven or CERN, among others. It’s now a common practice to “smash” protons and anti-protons together to see what shakes out.

In fact, E=mc² is the key to understanding the surprisingly fluid boundary between matter and energy. In high energy states (such as near black holes, or in particle accelerators), particles and anti-particles are constantly being created from that high energy and then annihilated back into energy as they encounter each other.

Political aside: a recent opinion piece proposed that a Romney meeting an anti-Romney would result in a gamma-ray photon “decaying” into an electron and a $20 bill.

So, as we can see here, Con-pedia once again gets the physics wrong, confuses opinion with scientific fact, and generally misleads its audience with a total hash of what most sane people consider verifiable science. After reading the first three paragraphs, are we at all surprised?

OK, this post is short, to atone for the overly long previous one. The next installment ends this torture by exposing the overall shoddy scholarship of Con-pedia.

Eppur si muove.

Up to this point, it is already clear that the principal author of the entry, Andy Schlafly (the mastermind of Conservapedia), really has no idea what he is talking about. High school students could have done a better job.

While few sensible people would consider Con-pedia a reliable source of anything useful, other than a chuckle or two, some naive, overly religious homeschoolers (or politicians!) might indeed be using Con-pedia as a credible resource. It is far from it.

Instead of a straightforward, factual, accurate explanation of a physical law, Con-pedia instead gets the physics all wrong, falsely claims only liberal politics ensures the equation’s persistence, and conflates religious belief with scientific discovery. Multiple levels of fail.

So, let’s see what else the entry gets wrong.

Paragraph 3 says:

Mass is a measure of an object’s inertia, in other words its resistance to acceleration. In contrast, the intrinsic energy of an object (such as an atom) is a function of electrostatic charge and other non-inertial forces, having nothing to do with gravity. Declaring the object’s energy to be a function of inertia rather than electrostatics is an absurd and impossible attempt to unify the forces of nature, contrary to Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge.

Did anybody at Con-pedia take physics in college? There’s errors here layered with misconceptions, with a nice cherry on top.

Mass is a measure of an object’s inertia, in other words its resistance to acceleration.

Yes! This sentence is at least correct. But, it’s not the whole story.

There are actually two definitions of mass in physics. The first, the inertial one, comes from Newton’s First Law (the Law of Inertia) and the Second Law (F = ma). For a given force, a heavier (aka, more massive) object is harder to speed up or slow down. This holds true even in space. So, at least Con-pedia gets this definition correct.

There is another definition, which comes from Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, F = G m₁m₂/r² r̂.

This equation says two objects attract each other that depends on their masses (the m’s), the distance between them (the r in the bottom) and a universal constant (big G). The negative sign and the r with the hat over it tell us the force is attractive and acts along a line connecting the centers of each object. Note that we can rearrange this hefty equation, and end up with something that looks like F = ma. Nice of Newton to be so consistent, eh?

This equation gives us the gravitational mass of an object. For physics to be self-consistent, the value of an object’s inertial mass has to be the same as the gravitational mass, and indeed, it is, to remarkable accuracy. [Physicists have been testing this equivalence for centuries. It's an experiment often done in freshman physics labs, too.] Einstein, in the General Theory of Relativity, just went ahead and stated the two “masses” were in fact exactly the same, then set about showing how and why.

In contrast, the intrinsic energy of an object (such as an atom) is a function of electrostatic charge and other non-inertial forces, having nothing to do with gravity.

Wrong to the power of n, where n > 2. The energy of an object may depend on its motion (kinetic energy), position in a vector force field (potential energy) and, as Einstein explained, its mass. Later, physicists realized the forces holding nuclei together also “trapped” energy inside matter.

Electrostatic charge can affect another form of energy, the object’s electrostatic potential energy (See Coulomb’s Law), but charge itself is not a force. It’s a property of matter. Further, potential energy is not “intrinsic,” but depends on interactions with other objects or vector fields. Charge is not a “non-inertial force,” either. There is no such thing as a non-inertial force, anyway. All forces obey Newton’s Laws, and all objects have mass, and therefore inertia. (See Newton’s First and Second Laws.) So, by extension, all forces are “inertial.” Finally, the last clause of this sentence is patently wrong, because gravity by definition determines an object’s gravitational potential energy.

Declaring the object’s energy to be a function of inertia rather than electrostatics is an absurd and impossible attempt to unify the forces of nature, contrary to Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge.

Did someone say “straw man fallacy?” Einstein did not say an object’s energy is a function of its inertia. He said its energy is related to how much matter (“stuff”) is there. Inertia is an inescapable physical property of matter. Mass is a measure of both the quantity of matter and of inertia, mass does not equal inertia. As a reminder (see my first post on this subject), E=mc² states that matter and energy are basically two sides of the same coin, and it results from the laws of conservation of mass and of energy. In any interaction, the total amount of mass and energy must remain constant. Einstein realized that for both quantities to be conserved in all situations, there had to be some interchange between the two.

Since I’ve already dealt with BSF and its “prediction” about unification theories (which in any event, E=mc² has only, if any, a peripheral connection to), I will refer you to the previous post.

Let’s review so far.

• Does Con-pedia understand the meaning of E=mc²? No.
• Have physicists confirmed the validity of E=mc²? Yes, many times over.
• Does Con-pedia acknowledge that? Only weakly.
• Does politics influence whether an equation in physics is valid or not? No.
• Does Con-pedia acknowledge that? No. (The anti-inertia lobby has been trying without success to get the first law overturned for centuries, however.)
• Does Con-pedia understand even basic physics? No.
• Does E=mc² purport to unify matter and light? No.
• Does Con-pedia understand that? No.
• Can the Bible be used as a science text? No.
• Does Con-pedia understand that? No.

I could call it a day right here, and consider my job as done, but there are three more paragraphs I want to fisk. And I have some general comments on the sloppy scholarship in this entry. Stay tuned.

As I explained in the last post, E=mc² does not purport to relate all matter to light — in fact, light does come from matter — but it suggests that matter and energy are essentially the same thing. The author of the Conservapedia entry, Andy Schlafly, clearly does not understand this basic fact of physics. I’m not sure he really understands Scriptural analysis, either, as we shall see.

Paragraph 2 of the E=mc² entry goes like this:

Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge predicts that a unified theory of all the laws of physics is impossible, because light and matter were created at different times, in different ways, as described in the Book of Genesis.

Before I analyze this statement, which incidentally is offered with no further explanation, I need to introduce some terms.

• Cherry picking: selecting only that evidence which apparently supports one’s argument, while ignoring all contradictory evidence.

• Quote mining: selecting quotations from a source, usually out of context, so as to support one’s argument, or to denigrate the opponent’s argument by creating a “straw man” position.

• Prooftexting: selectively choosing portions of a text, usually out of context, so as to support one’s argument, though the document as a whole has no bearing on the argument.

Conservapedia (and pseudo-historian David Barton) are guilty, guilty, guilty of all three of these logical fallacies. BSF is one prime example. Conservapedia and its fearless leader, Schlafly, expect us to swallow the assertion that the Bible successfully predicted most of modern science, based on his creative interpretation of carefully selected passages.

The following comes from the BSF entry.

Biblical scientific foreknowledge is how the Bible shows a comprehension of scientific knowledge far ahead of its time. Biblical scientific foreknowledge illustrates what is possible.

Bible deniers — such as atheists and evolutionists — engage in liberal denial about the many truths in the Bible. Their irrational closed-mindedness against the Bible obstructs the advancement of science.

Biblical scientific foreknowledge has another benefit: it facilitates improvements in the translation of verses that describe scientific-related events, such as Jesus’s Calming the Storm and the reference to the universe in Hebrews 1:10.

Say what?

As I recall from my history classes, there was this period of time in Europe when the only books studied in any depth were the Bible and the lives of the Church Fathers. You remember, “the Dark Ages.” Then, literature from ancient Greece and Rome found its way back into Europe around the 13th century, leading to the startling realization that smart people (pagans, even!) lived long before Jesus was a glimmer in his father’s eye. Eventually all this study of the classics lead people to wonder that maybe the Bible, and the institutions that depended on it — the Church, the scholastics, the monarchy and aristocracy, and all authority in general — were all a lot of hooey. This crazy-ass thinking led to stuff like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

None of which is even whispered about in the Bible, which rather favors a more top-down style of human resource management.

Nor does the Bible say anything about airplanes, telephones, automobiles, television, wristwatches, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, nail clippers, DNA, hydroelectric dams, contact lenses, the existence of galaxies outside our own, and a myriad of other things we now take for granted. (Coffee! No one drinks coffee in the Bible. I could reject its predictive ability just on that alone.)

In fact, if scholars had relied on the Bible as the final arbiter of things scientific, instead of rejecting it during the Scientific Revolution, we might not have had any our current scientific and technological advances. So, I find it hard to believe that anyone with any sense can state unequivocally that scriptures written 2,000 to 3,000 years ago can be used as a science text.

Of course, some people do.

We can look back at Scripture — or really any ancient text– knowing what we know now, and say, sure, what they say sounds a little bit like quantum physics or aliens from outer space. Anyone remember von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods or Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision? Or more recently, The Mayan Prophecies? But if we didn’t know anything about quantum physics or modern cosmology in the first place, we still wouldn’t know it by reading the Bible. It’s not a science text. There are no equations, no deductive proofs, no evidence, and no repeatable experiments. (Go ahead, blow that horn and see if my walls fall down. Yeah, and make the sun stop moving across the sky while you’re at it.)

What Schlafly does with his Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge claptrap is to take his pitifully weak understanding of modern science, and scour the Bible to find passages that he avers predict the modern science that he so artfully misapprehends. Likewise, David Barton scours documents from colonial and post-colonial America to find anything, anything at all, to support the contention that the Founding Fathers intended the USA to be a “Christian nation.” ["Look!" he says. "Here's a form letter signed by President Thomas Jefferson that uses the phrase, 'in the year of our Lord.' So, Jefferson wanted a Christian nation. I rest my case."]

Science relies on logic. There is none of that in Conservapedia’s BSF section. It’s just one logical fallacy after another: quotemining, prooftexting and cherry picking. And a whole lotta creative interpretation.

The entry for BSF is quite long, as it deals with practically every branch of science and mathematics, so I will limit my fisking to only the physics section. It goes on for quite a bit, so bear with me.

Modern Physics
Grand Unified Theory (GUT): BSF says it can’t be done, because Genesis says God created first light, then matter on different days. So there. [There is no explanation of why it is impossible. We're just told that it is.]

The entry claims correctly that billions of dollars have been spent pursuing verification of the theory’s predictions, such as the Higgs boson. The construction budget for the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is about US$9 billion. The annual operating budget of CERN, which operates the LHC, is about $1B a year. So, at least that one teeny part is right.

Otherwise, this section misunderstands both the purpose of the GUT and the relation between matter and light. In fact, light comes from the hopping around of electrons in matter. This connection between light and matter has been an accepted part of physics for the last two centuries, hardly a controversial discovery.

Light and color
Somehow, the separation of white light into its constituent colors has something to do with the intense light being emitted by the transfigured Jesus. I await the connection between the Transfiguration and Pantone, although I suspect Adobe will get there first, copyright it and charge several hundred dollars for the right to use it.

Action-at-a-distance
Jesus turned water into wine with a gesture, and healed a very sick person in another town without visiting him. Isaac Newton said gravity works across empty space. See the connection? No, I don’t either.

When Newton derived the law of universal gravitation, he lacked a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth and Moon, for example, pull on each other. Newton was reluctant to publish, but did anyway, admitting that he really had no idea how gravity gets from one place to another. Detractors accused him of witchcraft, but since his equation works exceedingly well, they eventually put out their torches and left him alone.

Scientists are still not comfortable with the idea of action-at-a-distance, which sounds too much like magic, so physics proposes intermediaries to carry forces around. Einstein’s General Relativity states that gravity is a consequence of matter warping space-time, which affects other matter nearby. The Standard Model hypothesizes a carrier particle for gravity, the graviton, which as yet has not been detected.

The entry suggests that quantum physics has found that a-a-a-d does indeed occur, and following the self-referential footnote link brings us (after three clicks) to a very brief and equivocal discussion of quantum entanglement, and again, no further explanation.

Quantum mechanics
Given that Conservapedia is none too clear on the relation of light and matter, we might expect the waters to be even muddier when it comes to quantum physics. We are not disappointed.

Observation of wave function. In quantum physics, this means that photons or electrons, for example, exist as as superpositions of all possible states (a particle or a wave, as an example) at the same time. It is only when we look at them in some way that the state (wave function) collapses into a specific value.

Riffing on this idea, Conservapedia says the water and wine mentioned in John 2 existed in a superposition of states, and the liquid only became wine when the people drank it. There are just a few problems with this notion. First, it contradicts Conservapedia’s own proposal that Jesus turned the water into wine directly (see above). It also completely misunderstands what superposition of states means. Schroedinger’s cat was a thought experiment, not an actual fact. Quantum mechanics deals with the atomic and subatomic world, not macroscopic objects like cats and wedding libations.

Similarly, Conservapedia argues that the storm which Jesus calmed was in a chaotic state, and his observation of the storm made it collapse into a orderly state. This confuses two separate branches of science. Chaos theory deals with large scale, complex multivariable systems (weather or the stock markets, for example). Quantum theory deals with specific variables in submicroscopic systems. Not much relation there.

Matthew 16:19 is also supposed to refer to a collapsing of states into a single bound state, but frankly I can’t see the connection.

The Uncertainty Principle: The Heisenberg UP is likewise misunderstood as our not knowing what will happen until it does happen (Matthew 13:24-30 reference). Well, duh, is all I can say to that. Then, this section says the UP suggests that matter can be formless until somebody pays attention to it. (Genesis 1:2) This sounds suspiciously like something Deepak Chopra — hardly a Biblical authority — would say. In fact, the UP states something quite different: at the quantum scale we cannot measure all variables with the same precision. For example, if we measure the momentum of an electron with great precision, it’s impossible to determine its position with the same exactness. Thus, there is a certain “fuzziness” at the quantum level, which is one reason why Einstein rejected the theory early on.

Wave-particle duality: This section begins with a whopper: “Particles are subject to gravity; waves are not. Wave-particle duality, first discovered in the 20th century, allows for a particle to sometimes be subject to gravity and sometimes not.”

This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ advice that learning to fly like Superman merely involves forgetting to fall. In fact, we can’t turn off gravity. Gravity affects both waves and particles. Gravity bends light. We’ve known that since it was first observed in 1919, three years after Einstein predicted (and calculated) the bending. Gravity also affects the frequency of light waves indirectly by slowing down time.

Then, we are expected to believe that Jesus walking on the water demonstrated wave-particle duality as Jesus (particle) and Holy Spirit (wave). (And what does the Father get to be? Chopped liver?)

Quantum tunneling: This is another subatomic effect, whereby a particle (say an electron) crosses an energy barrier when it is not supposed to. In a sense, it’s a bit like a ball rolling uphill all by itself. More appropriately, we could say the electron is a subway rider without his token, jumping over the turnstile.

Conservapedia says Jesus used quantum tunneling to enter a closed room to appear to the Apostles in John 20:26. Once again, it confuses the quantum world with the macroscopic world (as does Deepak Chopra). A wall is not an “energy barrier.” Jesus, even in his non-corporeal form, was not a single subatomic particle, but presumably a collection of them. (Transfigurons?)

Now, I did see Superman pass through a wall on TV a long time ago. He did it by making his atoms slip in between the wall’s atoms. The Flash does it, too. Seems much easier than quantum tunneling through brick walls, but when I try I just get a bump on my head.

Classical relativity (meaning relative velocities)
Romans 10:6-7 is supposed to demonstrate that there are no absolute reference frames, and that relative velocities are all that matter. I thought that verse was a metaphorical way of saying the righteous should not question either the possibility of heaven or hell, or Jesus’s visits to both places. But I’m a liberal Bible denier, so what do I know?

By the way, I thought conservative Christians preferred absolute truths and condemned relativism.

Modern relativity
For a website that scoffs so much at Einstein’s relativity theory, it’s no surprise that it finds no support in the Bible for it. However, the statement “The Theory of Relativity denies the possibility of action-at-a-distance,” is misleading. In fact, classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory also deny action-at-a-distance. It’s one reason why scientists reject the possibility of telepathy or remote healing, or much of anything Deepak Chopra says.

Second Law of Thermodynamics
A self-contradiction in a single entry! Genesis tells us that dark/chaos can never overcome light/order, yet the Second Law states that order tends to disorder, heat goes toward cold, light turns into dark. Then, Conservapedia says that Hebrews 1:10-11 tells us that entropy will lead to the death of the universe. Sounds like chaos wins. (CONTROL needs to call Maxwell Smart on the shoe phone.) Maybe light and order only win after the Second Coming, but the entry offers no clarifications.

The nature of air
Here we are expected to assume that the writer of Job knew air had mass, based on a single word, “weight,” from the King James Version. However, another translation, the New International, uses the word, “force,” to show that God intended the wind to push things around. Perhaps this discrepancy is why Conservapedia/Schlafly is attempting its/his own translation of the Bible to get rid of all the “liberal” parts.

That’s it for the physics section of BSF. My brain is now totally fried. I’ll return to the E =mc² entry after a suitable recovery period.

Here is what Conservapedia’s Andy Schlafly has to say about Einstein’s famous equation, an equation which I hasten to add has been verified repeatedly in the last century.

E=mc² is a meaningless, almost nonsensical, statement that purports to relate all matter to light.[1] In fact, no theory has successfully unified the laws governing mass (i.e., gravity) with the laws governing light (i.e., electromagnetism), and numerous attempts to derive E=mc² in general from first principles have failed.[2] Political pressure, however, has since made it impossible for anyone pursuing an academic career in science to even question the validity of this nonsensical equation. Simply put, E=mc² is liberal claptrap[3] .

When an encyclopedia article begins with such breathtaking, mindnumbing stupidity, it’s hard to know where to start writing a critique of it. It’s fractally wrong, as the poster above says. At first, I thought I’d just let it slide, since no halfway intelligent human would bother using Conservapedia as a resource, but it’s been nagging at me for several days. So, I’m going to give fisking it a go, and try to exercise my physics muscles after four years of disuse.

E=mc² is a meaningless, almost nonsensical, statement that purports to relate all matter to light.[1]

No. No. No. It says nothing of the sort. My former Conceptual Physics high school students could do a better job explaining it. It says, the energy (E) latent in matter is equivalent to the mass of that matter (m) times the speed of light squared.The value c² is just a number, like π in the equation C=πd, which relates the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or the current exchange rate between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan. Those equations (or conversions, if you will) do not imply all circles have the circumference pi, or all Americans need to carry yuan in their wallets.

If I wanted to calculate how much energy is “stored” as matter in this steel paperclip on my desk, I just need to take its mass and multiply it by the speed of light squared. A paperclip has a mass of about 1 gram = 0.001 kilogram. If I could somehow convert all that matter into energy, the result would be 9 x 10¹³ joules (90,000,000,000,000 joules). That’s about 21.5 kilotons of TNT or 25,000,000 kiloWatt-hours. For comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima released the equivalent energy of 15 kilotons of TNT.(Wikipedia) The typical American home uses about 936 kWh each month, so one paperclip of energy would be enough to power about 26,700 American homes for a month, if we could somehow release that energy without vaporizing a medium-sized city in the process. (eHow)

In fact, the equation is sometimes referred to as the statement of the equivalence of matter and energy. It provides the key to understanding nuclear reactions and processes, such as how the sun can “burn” for billions of years without running out of fuel and how to produce electricity from elements like uranium and plutonium.

Moving on, let’s correct footnote 1, which says in part, “The equation only holds true if SI units are used, hence E is measured in joules, m in kilograms and c in metres per second. In other systems of units an additional constant of proportionality would be required.”

Um, no. The equation is true for ALL systems of units, not just the metric units commonly used in science. The only thing that would need to change is the value of c, which is about 3 x 10⁸ meters/second or 186,000 miles/second, depending on the system of units being used. There would be no need for another constant of proportionality, unless you were mixing your units for some strange reason.

As an aside, I should mention that matter and light are in fact related in another more basic sense, in that light comes from matter (to be more precise, from the electrons hopping around inside atoms).

In fact, no theory has successfully unified the laws governing mass (i.e., gravity) with the laws governing light (i.e., electromagnetism), and numerous attempts to derive E=mc² in general from first principles have failed.[2]

The first part of this statement is in fact largely true, though I would quibble about the phrasing. Physics recognizes four basic forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. The last three have been “unified” in the electronuclear theory, but as yet there is no experimental evidence supporting the theory. Gravity remains the odd man out.

The second half of the statement is puzzling, and the article sheds no light on its meaning. If it means efforts to derive E = mc² from Newtonian physics (or pre-Einsteinian physics) have failed, it’s more a criticism of the principles used than the equation itself. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was a game changer, and as footnote 2 correctly states, many well regarded physicists rejected it at first. However, the reference to Robert Dicke as a detractor is dumbfounding, since his research confirmed many aspects of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which was a generalization of Special Relativity, from which E = mc² results. It’s hard to believe how Dicke could reject E = mc² while still researching other aspects of relativity.

Political pressure, however, has since made it impossible for anyone pursuing an academic career in science to even question the validity of this nonsensical equation.

Conservapedia (or Andy Schlafly) seems obsessed with the notion that politics somehow determines the success or failure of scientific theories. While we can truthfully say that radically different theories have been rejected in the past, once there is sufficient evidence supporting those theories, scientists eventually give up their resistance and embrace the new theories. Einstein himself scoffed at quantum mechanics early on, but later admitted it was probably right.

Relativity — putting it simply — just plain works. So far, there has been no compelling evidence that any part of the theory is wrong, and no compelling replacement for it. At this point, anyone suggesting that E = mc² is wrong should be laughed out of the lecture hall.

Simply put, E=mc² is liberal claptrap[3].

This last statement is a complete non sequitur, and the rest of the article does nothing to support it. The footnote merely states, “Citation not needed. See here, point 13.” Point 13 in the list of differences between Wikipedia and Conservapedia says: “We do not encourage the insertion of distracting “stub templates” in entries. Wikipedia has numerous distracting templates on entries.” So, I don’t see how the footnote even relates remotely to the “liberal claptrap” statement, unless it’s wordy way of saying, “offered without proof,” or stating an axiom of Conservapedia, that “liberals” and anything else that Andy Schlafly dislikes are bad.

The next paragraph of this entry deserves its own fisking. I don’t want to make these entries too long, so I’ll deal with the idea of Conservapedia’s “Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge” later.

For a more detailed treatment of the equation, I’d recommend the [evil, liberal claptrap] Wikipedia version here. It avoids reliance on proof by assertion.
——————–
Works cited

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
Ehow, http://www.ehow.com/about_5166858_much-electricity-average-home-use.html

Wikimedia image of large hawk-cuckoo

Here he is:
[See post to listen to audio]

(I recorded him from my bathroom window with my Nokia E63, then used Audacity to amplify and convert to mp3. The fainter sounds are from the student dormitory just below mine.)

He generally calls all night, but after four years I’ve learned to tune him out. I’m sure he roosts in the big tree outside my bathroom window, but I’ve never seen him.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until Friday night that I actually remembered to ask someone what bird makes that call. I happened to be at a friend’s house when I heard another cuckoo calling outside their window. I’m not a birder. Since it doesn’t sound like the familiar cuckoo call of clock fame, I had no idea what it was.

There are several species of cuckoos all over the world, and each species has a distinctive call. The call of the male common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is the one imitated by cuckoo clocks, and from which we get its English name. After some online research, I identified my neighbor as a large hawk-cuckoo (Cuculus sparverioides), known in Chinese as 鹰鹃 yīng-juān. According to BirdLife.org, the species is common all over southern and southeast Asia.

Here’s a video of a large hawk-cuckoo calling in Nepal. Sounds just like “mine.”

Cuckoos eat insects mostly, but also eggs and chicks of other birds. It’s a brood parasite, meaning the female cuckoo lays her eggs in another bird’s nest. Perhaps that behavior explains why it is not a endangered or threatened species.

—
For samples of other cuckoo calls, go here.
For a list of Chinese cuckoos with the nomenclature, here is where you want to go.

The Web is ablaze with the latest outrage: a very scene of a young Asian girl drinking from a large penis-shaped cup. It’s the end of civilization as we know it!

For the record, the scene is part of a longer skit in the Australian shock comedy show Angry Boys, now being aired on HBO. The girl’s “mother,” played by the show’s star, Australian Chris Lilley (a man), is supposedly Japanese and sells products in Japan with a penis motif, while also marketing her son as a gay skateboard star.

Here’s a promo image from BBC Three showing the cast. The little girl (Cindy), played by child actress and model Deni Lindholm, is the one seen sipping for a fraction of a minute from a pink cup shaped like a penis.

Conservative bloggers and websites have been ranting how it’s child porn, how the girl’s mother should have the kid taken away by Child Protective Services (or murdered), how HBO is undermining the very fabric of American culture, yadda yadda yadda.

Is it tasteless? Well, yeah, and that’s the point. The “Japanese” mom is going all out to make money, without considering the effects her ambition has on her kids. Is the episode pornographic? Well, no. The kid is drinking from a straw, you know — not very anatomically correct.

People! Chill out. If you find it offensive, don’t watch the show. Or don’t look at the picture, which these self-same conservative websites have been plastering all over the ‘Net with lurid headlines about “shocking” child-porn photos and “HBO is sexualizing children.”

All of which makes me believe these people are reading more into the scene than is really there.

The show was aired in Australia and the UK in 2011. I’ve tried to find similar outrage about the episode Down Under or across the Pond, but no luck so far. Maybe Aussies and Brits have a better sense of humor.

IKEA once ran a commercial in Europe featuring a little boy playing with his toys … and mommy’s vibrator, with the simple advice” “Tidy up.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VtzSDI8u2o

It was never shown in America. I wonder why.