Evidence of Ignorance

Brian sent me this Bob Park interview, a good rebuttal to the abject ignorance most people, especially in the US, have when it comes to science... 

 

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Bob Park, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland

 

"Here's the conversation I have several times a day with total strangers:

 

Caller: do you use a wired earphone?

 

Bob Park: No.

 

Caller: would it be too much trouble?

 

BP: No.

Caller: Wouldn’t you be safer?

 

BP: No.

 

Caller: How do you know?

 

BP: Quantum physics; all cancers are caused by mutant strands of DNA. Electromagnetic radiation can't create mutant strands of DNA unless the frequency is at or higher than the blue limit of the visible spectrum – the near-ultraviolet. The frequency of cell phone radiation is about 1 million times too low.

 

Caller: Wow! When did this news break?

 

BP: Albert Einstein let it out in 1905*. Robert Millikan, considered to be the world's top physics experimentalist, spent a decade constructing an experiment to test it. It confirmed Einstein's theory perfectly.

 

Caller: I'm shocked! Are you sure this is right?

BP: Virtually the entire modern world rests on it.

Caller: Why am I just hearing about this?

BP: Because Sanjay didn't tell you. We all depend on the news media to keep us informed, and the news media all over the world let us down on this one. And we scientists should have been screaming louder."

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It still amazes me how many people don't realize that many of the scientific "questions" being thrown around in the media have already been settled, many of them decades ago. Cell phone radiation is but one of many. I'd be willing to bet that most people you ask would tell you cell phones can cause cancer, despite the fact that it's physically impossible. Likewise with denial of human-caused climate change, which is not at all in contention in scientific circles, only in the press, mostly as a result of a spin blitz put on by the oil corporations who fear they might be forced to admit their main product has been ruining our planet. A similar propaganda campaign was perpetrated by the cigarette companies for many years.

The anti-vaccination crusade, fueled by people like Jenny McCarthy and Oprah, is right now killing innocent children because their parents have been led to believe, against all evidence, that vaccinations cause autism.

Evolution denial must be my biggest pet peeve of all. Evidence for evolution is so conclusive, so crushingly overwhelming that the very foundation of modern biology would crumble to the ground if anyone ever found a single stitch of direct evidence against it. But they never will.

The fact that there are still millions of people (again, mostly all of them in America for some reason) that deny this kind of evidence can only lead me to one of two conclusions: either they have not been properly taught to differentiate evidence from urban legend, or they have philosophical barriers that will not let them admit facts that contradict their worldview.

The first case can be corrected. We already know how to do it, and we'd better start soon. Other countries are far better at educating young minds to be skeptical and critical of ideas and to properly test them out before accepting them.

For the second case there is probably no solution. The kind of person who cannot change their worldview to fit with new facts as revealed by science will probably never change. But they'd better stay out of the way of the rest of us.

"I prefer the cold, hard facts to my dearest of illusions" - Carl Sagan

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*The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".