Conspiracy theorists

A friend was telling me about a once respected friend that had now believed in some conspiracy theories, he was rather disheartened about his old friend.

I got me thinking about how to disprove the science and fact taught in schools.

The ordinary man in the street cannot disprove whether or not a man landed on the moon, whether bacteria or atoms exist, whether climate science is true, does smoking cause cancer; what makes a person question "know facts"?

These things are taught in schools and universities, surely they must be true? Is the only thing taught in schools, that is untrue, the existence of a God?

An ordinary person has never seen an atom or measured how far away the moon is.

Indeed. Pretty much everything in our lives requires some trust in the source. We witness hardly anything with our own eyes and even when we do we don't actually see what's there, we see our brains interpretation of it. Hence why optical illusions work.

And you know what? Isn't it great?!? Everyone sees the world differently, not just metaphorically, but literally and as a result we've got 7bn different view points and solutions and somewhere in the middle of all that lot we'll have perfection.

And you know what? Isn't it great?!? Everyone sees the world differently, not just metaphorically, but literally and as a result we've got 7bn different view points and solutions and somewhere in the middle of all that lot we'll have perfection.

We do have various bias in different forms of media, but these days all the information is out there. Not easy to break a perceived view.

We do have various bias in different forms of media, but these days all the information is out there. Not easy to break a perceived view.

Yes we do. But as we didn't witness those events ourselves we are still relying on someone elses interpretation. For example, do you KNOW 100% that there is a war in Syria? No, you don't. And neither do I, and neither do around 6.99bn of the population. Only those who have been in Syria and seen it can know and even then, they may be seeing things that conform to their world view, so they might be seeing people walking around with guns as a war when it's not as so on. All gets very deep very quickly this...

A friend was telling me about a once respected friend that had now believed in some conspiracy theories, he was rather disheartened about his old friend.

I got me thinking about how to disprove the science and fact taught in schools.

 

The ordinary man in the street cannot disprove whether or not a man landed on the moon, whether bacteria or atoms exist, whether climate science is true, does smoking cause cancer; what makes a person question "know facts"?

 

These things are taught in schools and universities, surely they must be true? Is the only thing taught in schools, that is untrue, the existence of a God?

 

An ordinary person has never seen an atom or measured how far away the moon is.

But none of these that you suggest are in fact difficult to do, and any student of GCSE science should be able to do these things. You are taught how to question and test facts as well.

But none of these that you suggest are in fact difficult to do, and any student of GCSE science should be able to do these things. You are taught how to question and test facts as well.

And many come up with different answers, I guess the younger students are more likely to believe what they are taught.

Bit early in the day for drinking.

And many come up with different answers, I guess the younger students are more likely to believe what they are taught.

Which is why it's so important that young children learn how to question, rational thought, following logic and interpreting evidence from as young an age as sensible.

I remember my higher education being the one that really stimulated me. It was more about being taught how to learn for yourself and understand a subject rather then being fed facts and then being expected to remember them.

Interestingly I had a lot less time for conspiracy theories after I finished university then I had before. I used to be a serious X-files fan, and bought into a load of conspiracy theories, now that time of my life seems to be a little quaint.

I remember my higher education being the one that really stimulated me. It was more about being taught how to learn for yourself and understand a subject rather then being fed facts and then being expected to remember them.

 

Interestingly I had a lot less time for conspiracy theories after I finished university then I had before. I used to be a serious X-files fan, and bought into a load of conspiracy theories, now that time of my life seems to be a little quaint.

That more or less happened to me but it was psychedelic woo rather than alien conspiracy (some crossover there of course). In one sense I was a bit disappointed that these fabulous realities turned out not to be, but the flip side was that 'so-called reality' became a great deal more interesting and implausible.

An ordinary person has never seen an atom or measured how far away the moon is.

Eratosthenes worked out that the earth was spherical and calculated the earth's circumference using sticks, shadows and a bit of maths. Not bad... for the third century BC.

(Though of course, there's always the possibility that there never was a person called Eratosthenes and that the earth is really flat. "They" don't want you to know the truth.)

Anyhoo, once you've worked out the circumference of the earth (do you need to borrow some sticks?) you can work out the distance from the earth to the moon.

How to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon

No electronics or computers required ("they" might have hacked into them don'tcha know).

Have fun!

If you want to take a gander at atoms, why don't you build yourself a cloud chamber? It's not very complicated [LINK]

The cloud chamber played a crucial part in the splitting of the atom and the development of the atomic bomb (assuming of course, that there are such things as atomic bombs).

C. T. R. Wilson returned to Cambridge and began to try to make clouds artificially. In order to do so he designed himself a cloud chamber. The chamber worked on the principle that a drop in pressure would cause condensation of moist air. A glass container with a piston inside it was connected to a glass globe via a valve. The air in the glass globe was pumped out, and at the same time moist air was let into the glass container above the piston. When the valve between the glass globe containing the vacuum and the underpart of the glass container was opened, the air below the piston rushed into the glass globe, pulling the piston sharply downwards in less than a hundredth of a second. In the space above the piston, the sudden downward movement caused a drop in pressure of the moist air, which, as a result, condensed to form clouds. At the time, everybody thought that the condensation of water into clouds happened because the tiny droplets coagulated on to fine particles of dust in the air, and that this was what caused rain to form. But when one day Wilson used an electric charge to attract away all the dust particles which might have been present in the air within the container, and had done this for long enough to be sure that the air was absolutely free of dust, the impossible happened: condensation still took place. Months of testing showed that condensation had nothing to do with the presence of dust after all. Yet the faster the drop in pressure in the container, the denser the fog Wilson produced. At this juncture Wilson concluded that the condensation must be due to some particle too minute for him to detect, and there he let the matter rest. He was not to know that in those tiny cloud streaks across his chamber he had triggered a scientific time bomb that was to explode with unimaginable force years later.

 

Back in 1912 he [Wilson] had taken photographs of the streaks of condensing droplets in the cloud chamber, and had shown these to Ernest Rutherford, a colleague at Cambridge who was working in the field of atomic physics. The photographs showed the streaks and, at certain points, secondary streaks moving away from the main track at a tangent. Rutherford took one look at the photographs and became immensely excited. They showed what he had deduced less than a year before: the scattering of subatomic particles of alpha radiation.

 

Burke, James (2012-02-21). Connections. Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

So, photograph those streaks and you're away. If Wilson could do it in 1912, it should be no problem for someone living in the Space Year 2016.

 

The ordinary man in the street cannot disprove whether or not a man landed on the moon, whether bacteria or atoms exist, whether climate science is true, does smoking cause cancer; what makes a person question "know facts"?

 

In that case, did you watch you mother and father conceive you? No? How do you know you exist?