Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Science Deniers and Repliers
May 10th, 2012
After I posted last week about the prospective student who thought the Big Bang Theory had fundamental problems, one of my students hunted down this list of the top 30 problems with the big bang. Now, don’t get excited about that list. It’s about a decade old and out of date on many important developments and incredibly biased. The author Tom Van Fladern is apparently now deceased and won’t be updating it, although I remember reading his posts on Usenet back in the 1990s. He was a smart guy, but biased against establishment astronomy/cosmology and had some weird ideas that he just couldn’t see were plain wrong even though the mistakes were pointed out to him repeatedly. I don’t know if I’d call him a total crank, but he was pretty cranky. He’s one type of science denier, and his motives were likely contrarianism and distrust of established authorities. There are a variety of repliers out there to this kind of contrary position, from textbooks to websites. Let me point out one, Ned Wright’s cosmology FAQ list and tutorial. That’s a good place to start for some basic instruction about the big bang theory and includes some replies to the claims of alternative cosmology proponents like Van Flandern.
Now, there are criticisms of the Big Bang from other quarters, primarily young Earth creationists (YECs) who think the universe is only a few thousand years old and not nearly 14 billion. Their criticisms are total jokes compared to Van Flandern’s. These sorts of people prefer to spend their time attacking other fields like geology and its technique of radioactive dating, but especially evolution.
One of the worst websites for that is Answers in Gensis (AiG), which is a huge joke, scientficially speaking, but one that fundamentalists don’t get and don’t laugh at. There are many websites out there dedicated to calling AiG on their shit, like this one or this one. Again, I’ve seen this science denying nonsense going back 20 years to my days reading Usenet, and I particularly like the newsgroup talk.origins FAQ list as a reply.
So we have deniers who are motivated by their own egos and contraryness, those who are motivated by their untenable religious beliefs that are in conflict with science, and we have a few others still. Some people have biases built on their politics and/or their economic interests. Couple those attitudes with confirmation bias, and we have motivation for denial of anthropogenic climate change (AKA global warming). Libertarians, Republicans with a hate-on for Al Gore, and business interests like Big Oil (e.g. Koch Industries), who don’t want government regulation or taxes, or who just don’t want to believe anything that liberals believe…these guys are another variation of denier, and many of them also denied the association between smoking and lung cancer. They like to present themselves as intelligent skeptics, but they’re usually some combination of mendacious and/or ignorant. One egregious example of a denier webiste that butchers many basic and accepted scientific ideas is junk science. I posted a nice compliation of denier talking points and replies a few weeks ago, and repeat the link to skepticalscience here. What’s shocking to me is that there 173 (!!!) common denier “refutations” to global warming and they’re almost all trivially wrong.
There’s also the anti-vaccine science deniers, who seem primarily to be concerned but ignorant parents jumping on another bandwagon, perhaps with some conspiracy theorists mixed in. Here’s one nice reply.
There are other kinds of woo out there, generally not actively anti-science but they do contribute to ignorance and a general anti-science environment: astrology, reincarnation, talking with the dead, flat Earth belief, other religious nonsense and superstition. They’re easier to debunk, if that’s even necessary, as they tend to be fringe issues few make political. They’re harmful, too, especially since they’re tolerated as being relatively harmless, but they undermine a reality-based world view.
Did I miss any other major area of science denial currently making the rounds?
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Mike,
I think that one of the more insidious things we are seeing is a philosophical and very anti-science point-of-view that is being touted as skepticism. This is the idea that all scientists and their theories are so biased and defensive that they have no interest in finding better theories, but in defending existing ones. This general idea of “the guys in the Ivory towers” tends to break an argument down into “Well, if your only evidence is a scientist, I’m afraid I can’t trust that.”
It used to be that being smart, having a degree, and doing research was a good thing, but these deniers are actively trying to turn that on its head. Being ignorant is good and being educated is bad!
The NASA letter was a good example of this. When I pointed out that a letter signed by the guy who did maintenance was not as valuable as a cosmologist, they blowback is always “that’s an argument from authority.” Well, duh. That’s exactly what it is. Why is that a bad thing?
Insightful, Jake.
The idea of the institution of science is that we can appeal to authority, because the information science generates is the most reliable there is. Furthermore, the way it was generated is transparent. The appropriate response to “argument from authority” is to quote a peer-reviewed paper by the authority and ask what’s wrong with it? Did they make a mistake, or offer a flawed interpretation? Sometimes that’ll be the case, but it’ll rarely be more erroneous than the objection.
I can’t redo every experiment in every field to form my knowledge base. I trust scientists, and know I can!
Anti-Western-medicine myths still abound, especially when it comes to cancer treatment. Things like herbal remedies (laetrile is still out there), and belief that chemotherapy is so harmful, it will kill you before the cancer does.
Right now, there’s an anti-SmartMeter campaign in our neck of the woods, along the lines of cellphones-give-you-cancer. Lots of confusion about radio frequencies and ionizing radiation.
Deborah, you’re right. I mentioned vaccines above, but after I signed off I remembered that in some places homeopathy is a big deal and a big problem. That’s another example of alternative medicine that might be negatively impacting people’s lives and even leading to deaths.
I hadn’t seen anything about the anti-SmartMeter campaign, but I’ll keep an eye out now. I should do a general post about “radiation” sometime. It’s a confusing issue to many.
Along the lines of weird shit like the flat earth theory, there are people who are also convinced that the Earth is hollow, and that there is a giant hole in the north pole that opens up into the world of the hollow-earth.
They use evidence like the fact that some birds migrate north, and some people take it as far as to say that Hitler and some Nazis (there’s almost too many weird, mystical beliefs about the Nazis to find in one lifetime)escaped there and are possibly still alive.
Then they go on about how the government is involved, and how the area is off limits. There are even some people bullshitting fake images that show a giant hole in the earth, and claim that NASA has been altering the images. It’s scenarios like this that makes me a little disappointed in humanity.