St00pidest Things Ever Said: Cosmology Physics Theology Roulette Edition

First the scientists said the Earth was not the center of God's creation...

Next they said we were a bunch of monkey progeny...

Now, (well, really, about 100 years ago) they said that time was a relative concept, the speed of light was constant and that energy released from matter was equivalent to that speed of light squared times the mass of the matter converted.

Bastardos! God-hating, cheese-eating, tax-and-spending, terrorist-supporting, French-loving, atheist-pinko-bastardos!

Or so says this week's Michael-Steele-St00pidest-Things-Ever-Said-Tin-Foil-Chapeau winner. He loves long walks on the beach, good homestyle cooking; turnoffs include negative people and rainy days, please give a warm mojowire welcome to Andy Schafly.

Take it away Andy:

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.

[...]

See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson's book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

Let's start with the easy part. Uh, Andy? The "Theory of Relativity" and the "liberal moral relativism" that makes your ass twitch are not really related the way you think they are related.

Oh, by the way wireheads... that name – Andy Schafly – sound familiar? Well, it should. He is the monkey progeny of one of our all time favorites here on "St00pidest Things Ever Said," the Queen Ant Herself, High Kahuna-ess Phylis Schafly.

Yes, before Sharron, before Sarah, before Rush, Glenn and Bill-O, even before Tea Parties and Christian Coalitions, there was Phylis and her movement conservative psychonauts of the Eagle Forum.

Here's the thing. The Conservapedia entry for "Counterexamples to Relativity" is what we're discussing in this context.

Now, from Andy's commentary, as well as his actual work on the entry, it would appear as if he's trying for the "there are scientific questions and problems with Relativity, and therefore God hates fags."

Here's are some of the "30 counterexamples; any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect":

1. The discontinuity in momentum as velocity approaches "c" for infinitesimal mass, compared to the momentum of light.
2. The logical problem of a force which is applied at a right angle to the velocity of a relativistic mass - does this act on the rest mass or the relativistic mass?
3. The observed lack of curvature in overall space.
4. The universe shortly after its creation, when quantum effects dominated and contradicted Relativity.
5. The action-at-a-distance of quantum entanglement.
6. The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54.
7. The failure to discover gravitons, despite wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer money in searching.
8. The inability of the theory to lead to other insights, contrary to every verified theory of physics.
9. The change in mass over time of standard kilograms preserved under ideal conditions.
10. The uniformity in temperature throughout the universe.
11. "The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two [QM and Relativity] conceptions of time don’t gel."
12. The theory predicts wormholes just as it predicts black holes, but wormholes violate causality and permit absurd time travel.
13. It is impossible to perform an experiment to determine whether Einstein's theory of relativity is correct, or the older Lorentz aether theory is correct. Believing one over the other is a matter of faith.
14. The theory predicts natural formation of highly ordered (and thus low entropy) black holes despite the increase in entropy required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Uh, Andy? I have never been more than an armchair physicist, but I watch the Science Channel, too... and if I were in your shoes, you know, wanting to show the Bible was the literal and infallible word of God and that dirty fzcking scientists are all going to burn in hell, I'm not sure I'd be going to the Quantum Mechanics/'Brane Theory card.

And, Andy, no insights have ever been produced from the Theory of Relativity? Are you really that intellectually crippled or just that academically corrupt?

Yeah, current research in cosmology physics is showing the flaws in Relativity, as well as classical Newtonian physics and the Standard Model, which we've all understood for a while was incomplete.

And even Einstein, himself, knew the Relativity was incomplete, which was why he and Niels Bohr would have knock-down drag out physics smack downs and why he was working on a unified field theory up to the time he died.

But I gotta tell you, I'm not thinking that your literal interpretation of the Bible and it's take on creation is going to get a lot scientific support now that Relativity has to contend with 11 dimensional 'Brane Theory and the LHC scratching for Higgs Boson scat in near light speed collisions of protons.

Although, my favorite part of this, and what puts it over the top for STES consideration is his disdain for relativity because he thinks that because he heard somewhere people stop reading the Bible after reading Einstein, that they stop reading the Bible because they were reading Einstein.

Nice logical causal leap, there, Mr. Wizard... outstanding work, really...

The barely literate spewage of examples he claims counter relativity, including Jesus' working of quantum entanglement and the work of another "scientist" who somehow thinks that because the universe is apparently all the same temperature, the Big Bang is false.

Memo to Andy and his fellow "scientist": The 3-degree background radiation found in every direction of the sky is actually one of the strongest physically observable indications of a "Big Bang." Also, Relativity as a theory has been experimentally confirmed on several levels, in spite of your ignorant assertion to the contrary.

The vapid attempt to somehow tie current physics research regarding cosmology and the problems with Relativity into some sort of cultural referendum of Biblical literalness is dumb on a level that one normally ascribes to "Creation Science" idiocy and attempts to "de-liberal" the Bible...

You know, it really does make me wish I was more of a scientist so that I could do the proper deconstruction ass-kicking this nimrod truly deserves...

But of course here's the actual punchline to this whole sad joke:

I have enjoyed personally teaching more than 185 homeschooled teenagers in 13 different courses since 2002. These classes have been open at low cost to everyone, including persons with learning disabilities. My courses covered the material for a full-year public school course in just one semester, meeting only one day a week.

Home schooling... shocked, just shocked.**

Yeah, I'll bet you teach kids with learning disabilities. Only the intellectually handicapped could possibly buy any of the crap you unload on them as true or in any way constituting any sort of "education."

And while I'm thinking about it, you really are just dumb enough to brag about the speed of your "education." A full semester in just one day a week? Well, sure, if you skip all that unnecessary reading, and all those darn facts and that whole critical thinking thing... why I am sure you could knock out a high school education in just six or seven months... eight tops if you include P.E.

It reminds me once of a commercial S9 and I saw while engaged in a round of the TBN drinking game, before he memorialized it as the "700 Club Drinking Game."

The ad in question was promoting Bible based home schooling materials and showing actual examples of the smartness one would be buying for their offspring. During the math example, they were demonstrating addition of a column of four numbers... and they were small enough numbers in the example to easily see the answer they demonstrated was wrong...

And they were oh so proud of it...

mojo sends

**My housemates are home schooling their two kids and I know several other kids who are being home schooled. They are good, smart kids of intelligent, sophisticated parents. I have a regular weekly D&D game with one of these kids, whose company I enjoy and of whom we have all become very fond.

So, no, I am not dissing on home schooling as a whole, but on that subset of home schoolers who think keeping their kids out of the "socialist, Godless public education system" is somehow creating an intellectually superior, educated breed of adult...