One of the great things about science is how it strives to wipe away any of the subjective interpretations that fanatic ideologues try to impose on its findings. There aren’t liberal and conservative positions on, say, the speed of light. There is just the speed of light. It doesn’t change based on the political or religious views of the observer.
So it’s a good rule of thumb to ignore anyone who tells you that they’re going to tell you the (insert political or religious viewpoint here) take on one or another scientific finding. That should be a red flag indicating that the person telling you that cares more about coming to a particular conclusion than they do about getting closer to the truth.
The recent CERN announcement about the Higgs boson has led to a few fanatics trying to promote their ideological agenda by trying to counter it.
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Smash the state… into subatomic particles that are DEFINITELY NOT THE HIGGS BOSON
Libertarian News weighed in first. They’ve got some crank named Michael Suede blogging for them about how the Higgs boson doesn’t really exist. He starts off by quoting some mainstream news outlets that are paraphrasing CERN scientists, highlighting how they aren’t claiming they have the Higgs boson with 100% certainty.
This isn’t surprising to normal people. In science, you never know with 100% certainty that you’ve gotten to the absolute truth. You’re always dealing with probabilities. But ideologues don’t like probabilities. They actually value the pose of absolute certainty over an honest assessment of the facts.
Why all the hedging of bets if they have a “5 sigma signal” (99.9767% probability)?
Because 99.9767% probability isn’t 100%. It is 99.9767%. Presumably Suede would rather CERN pretend that 99.9767% and 100% are the same and that .0233% is equal to 0%. It’s a good thing we aren’t trusting this kind of important work to fools like him.
And what’s even more amazing is how Suede completely changes his criticism in the very same paragraph where he whines about CERN physicists being overly cautious about their findings in the face of such a high probability:
The truth is quite simple – the physicists have no idea what they are looking at.
So one minute they’re “hedging their bets” because they’re not pretending to be infallible and the next they’re clueless. Those claims aren’t compatible, but that doesn’t matter because Suede’s just being a mindless contrarian here. Consistency doesn’t matter to conspiracy theorists. The only thing that matters to them is that the “official story” is wrong.
And what Suede and his friends at Libertarian News are pushing here is definitely a conspiracy theory. Modern physics would have to be almost entirely wrong in order for his counter-argument to work. That includes General Relativity, since Suede seems to still believe in the aether.
The reason we can use satellites for our GPS devices is because their calculations are fine-tuned using General Relativity. But the way Suede tells it, that couldn’t possibly be true. All the world’s physicists must be lying to us, and it’s really the aether that’s keeping our satellite systems accurate.
And they’d be doing that, why again? You might have wondered what the point someone who is primarily concerned with politics could be hoping to make by trying to prove physics wrong.
For one thing, kooks will be kooks. It’s no secret that libertarian circles are awash with conspiracy thinking and pseudoscience. And in this particular case, the organization behind this finding is publicly funded. This makes them “statists.” That’s one of those emotionally fueled Ayn Rand terms the far right likes to throw around to describe anyone remotely connected to a government. As if the fact that a government funds a group of scientists tells us any more about their findings than another group of scientists being funded by corporations.
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Pakistan’s fatwa on the Standard Model
On the other hand, Pakistan is not even really bothering to offer a lame alternative to the Standard Model of physics. They’re just re-writing history.
Adbus Salam was Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize winner. He was a physicist who helped contribute to the theoretical work that was recently verified by CERN. He also worked on his country’s nuclear program and was hailed as a national hero.
Note the use of past tense there, he was hailed as a national hero. That’s no longer the case. Salam identified with the Ahmadiyya movement within Islam. A religious thinker named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed to have fulfilled Koranic prophecy started it in the late 19th century.
The Pakistani Taliban and other hardlined Sunnis in power in Pakistan obviously don’t think much of Ahmadiyya. To them, they’re heretics. So in what seems like a kneejerk reaction to Salam’s recent vindication, the government has removed references to him from school textbooks.
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These are the kinds of things that happen when you let ideologues have too much of a say in scientific matters. They know that science is the best tool we have in determining reality. So if they can make the findings derived from its methodology appear to line up with their favored ideologies, that’s a huge win for them.
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Atheist Hobos 