“It is understandable to a capable schoolchild.”

February 28, 2016 1:25 PM

The People Who Believe Electricity Rules the Universe
. . . “Science is returned to the people—the garage tinkerer, the practical engineer, and the natural philosopher,” Thornhill told Motherboard.
posted by Countess Elena (40 comments total)

Every person I interviewed for this story was thoughtful, curious, and skeptical. They spend their free time learning. They don’t want to accept; they want to investigate. I get that. I happen to love dark energy, and also data. But when a scientist says, “Just trust me,” it’s the job of any other scientist (or science writer) to say, “I don’t,” and to go digging for more, like the Thunderbolts do. […] It’s my universe, too, Williams, the other letter-writers, and the Thunderbolts group seem to say. And I also want to make sense of it.

It's certainly a good, human impulse to have sympathy to, and attempt to understand, the psychological motivations of cranks; but then on the other hand there's carrying that sympathy to the point of handwaving relativism about the truth-value of their crankery, and this piece's conclusion really steps quite happily and obliviously over that line. There's no reason to fudge the meanings of words like "skeptical" or "make sense" or "learning" this badly. And a sentence like "I happen to love dark energy, and also data," that makes such a "love" sound like it's understood by the writer only as a truth-neutral, purely cultural affiliation, makes me at least as worried about her worldview's epistemic grounding as theirs.
posted by RogerB at 1:48 PM on February 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

This "David" person, anyhow, was someone I wanted to hear more about:

Now he tries to de-convert others in the Thunderbolts forum, a process that he calls his “work.” […] “Deprogramming someone is kind of like the thrill of catching a large fish,” he said.

This kind of anonymous, largely unrecognized and unrewarded, everyday, voluntaristic trolling-for-good is a niche pursuit that is both so laudable and so interesting, I really wish more online cultural historians would research and write about.
posted by RogerB at 1:59 PM on February 28, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh man, I had a friend bring this crap up to me and ask me about the theory's veracity a few years back. It was impossible-to-understand gibberish, and I'm not even a physicist.
posted by Existential Dread at 2:00 PM on February 28, 2016

I don't even think these people understand what electricity is much less how electricity replaces gravity.
posted by GuyZero at 2:16 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Marc Royal, a 47-year-old music producer," better known as T.Power (here's his bandcamp).
posted by hilker at 2:28 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

I went to a talk by one of these people a while ago in London, and while it was entertaining and thought-provoking, it didn't actually make much sense. I talked to the chap afterwards, and he was quite cheerful in agreeing with this take - he saw his role, and the purpose of the 'theory' in general - as almost a Situationalist-style attempt to shake people out of passive acceptance of the status quo. He believed in what he said, but the actual truth of it wasn't that important to him compared to the holding of it.

I don't know what the correct name for this, I suppose you could call it a personal philosophy, as it's not quite contraryism, but I've encountered it in various fields, including politics, economics and religion. It has its dangers as bad things can happen when you voluntarily decouple from best-effort reality seeking, but it also has a genuinely useful role to play in keeping things supple.

As my historian friend says when discussing irksome gadflies - "He's wrong, of course he's wrong. But you can't force historians to be right all the time. Where would any of us be?"
posted by Devonian at 2:29 PM on February 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

I wonder if this is easier to put up with because this is an alternative worldview that has little to no policy or personal impact? If a person believes vaccines cause autism, or that the Fukushima reactor disaster means California is drowning in radiation, those beliefs have consequences.

But while I'm fascinated by science, the nature of dark matter and quantum particles don't factor in my decisions.
posted by mccarty.tim at 2:41 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think people especially like grade school electricity explanations because it's some of the most advanced science without too much abstract thought or math. Electricity is usually invisible, but you can easily build a flashlight and see the charge in a battery become light. And it can become magnetic, which appears to defy gravity. And the positive and negative notation brings up the philosophical implications of balance. Suddenly, you think of other "natural" binaries (ying and yang, black and white, male and female, etc).

It's no wonder cranks always go to magnets or electricity.
posted by mccarty.tim at 2:50 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Velikovsky was an author known mostly for his controversial “comparative mythology” books, which recast and reinterpreted ancient history. In Worlds in Collision, he said that Jupiter ejected to Venus around 1500 BCE. From there, the newborn planet flew close to Earth, causing all sorts of catastrophes. When Venus came back around a half-century later, it stopped Earth’s spin (briefly), making for a long night.

The resulting disasters, Velikovsky claimed, showed up in mythology around the world. Astrophysicists pointed out that this Jupiter-born Venus idea violated theories about orbits and gravity. But Velikovsky had gone rogue: He suggested gravity didn’t cause orbits. Electricity did.

Velikovsky was absolutely wrong in every detail of his explanations for the evolution of the Solar System.

However, he was surprisingly right in his emphasis on the role of great catastrophic events, and that was very much against the general tenor of the astronomy of his day (1950), which was almost entirely in the grip of a kind of gradualism which parallels the rigid uniformitarianism of early scientific geology.

For example, we now believe the Earth-Moon system was formed when, 4.47 billion years ago (note the amazing precision of that number), a Mars-size object made a direct hit on the proto-Earth, melting the solid parts of both bodies in very short order, their combined spin causing the resulting body to separate into a dumbbell shape etc.; we think Jupiter did eject a large planet from the Solar System; we think that Uranus is lying on its side with its axis of rotation pointing almost directly at the Sun because of a huge collision with another planet-sized body, and so on -- oh, and by the way, Velikovsky's 1500 BCE is the date preferred by archaeologists for the catastrophic

Minoan eruption of Thera, also referred to as the Thera eruption or Santorini eruption, was a major catastrophic volcanic eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 6 or 7 and a dense-rock equivalent (DRE) of 60 km3 (14 cu mi),[1][2] which is estimated to have occurred in the mid-second millennium BCE.[3] The eruption was one of the largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history.[4][5][6]

posted by jamjam at 2:52 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

The thing that gets me here is that the various space sciences, out of any of the advanced sciences, is really radically open. NASA is required by law to make all their data publicly available. Nearly every astro paper that gets published is up on the arXiv, full text, no login or registration needed. Publicly available data sets are everywhere. There's nothing stopping them except a dislike for math and an unfamiliarity with the terms.

But these dudes have decided that "data I don't want to look at" is the same as "you don't have any evidence"
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:53 PM on February 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

A well-written account of a brand of crackpottery I'd never heard of—thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 2:58 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

However, he was surprisingly right in his emphasis on the role of great catastrophic events, and that was very much against the general tenor of the astronomy of his day (1950), which was almost entirely in the grip of a kind of gradualism which parallels the rigid uniformitarianism of early scientific geology.

On the other hand, it's not very useful to be right on a fact for the wrong reason. It's kind of like being a different kind of wrong that just happens to look right.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:08 PM on February 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Puritans vs. Scientists, in a nutshell. (not to be confused with Puritan-Scientists)

Yep. If you can't accept that you don't know everything, you're not doing science.

True science is not discovered by somebody shouting "Eureka!" It is done by somebody looking at the results of an experiment and going "that's odd..."

These idiots have their religion, which observation clearly disagrees with, and well, you're never going to convince a religious nut. So, don't even try.

Just mock them. That's what they deserve, and really, they'll actually be thankful for the attention.
posted by eriko at 3:17 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

On the other hand, it's not very useful to be right on a fact for the wrong reason

Rather telling I think, that you have that exactly backwards.

Velikovsky was wrong on every fact, but somehow was more in touch with a mode of thinking a lack of which and a complete unwillingness even to entertain the idea of vitiated the astronomical theories of the time.
posted by jamjam at 3:18 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

It seems horribly unfair that, in order to get a seat at The Science Table, you have to first undergo years of specialized education and training, wherein you're expected to blindly accept everything you're taught as simple fact, whether or not it seems right to you at the time. But the universe is just mindbogglingly complicated and unintuitive--in order to even begin to understand it, you have to be taught not just what to think but how to think. The process is hard and boring and frustrating. It takes a long time and not everyone has the patience, humility, and neural hardware for it.

But here's the thing: the scientists that built our modern theories were really, no-shit smarter than you. They spent years bashing their heads against really tough questions, trying to fit every conceivable hypothesis to the data. Through trial and error and occasional moments of brilliance, they managed to painstakingly construct a set of rigorous conclusions that are self-consistent, demonstrably true, and quite often very useful.

You cannot refute or build upon those theories until you properly understand them. And if you cannot properly understand them, you do not get a seat at The Science Table.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:51 PM on February 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Velikovsky is like a human prion who has figured out a meme that turns (religious) engineers' brains into Swiss cheese. All of these clowns should be forced to work through the Newtonian mechanics of Velikovsky's scenarios in longhand.
posted by benzenedream at 3:57 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Velikovsky was wrong on every fact, but somehow was more in touch with a mode of thinking a lack of which and a complete unwillingness even to entertain the idea of vitiated the astronomical theories of the time.

Eh, I dunno. If your process is wrong, if your starting assumptions are wrong, whether or not you can identify some "correct conclusions" after the fact isn't very useful, since you couldn't identify them at the time. Whether Velikovsky was anticipating a new paradigm is about as useful to science as claiming that Jules Verne predicted the nuclear submarine because he wrote a novel about a submarine that could stay underwater a long time.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:01 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

years of specialized education and training, wherein you're expected to blindly accept everything you're taught as simple fact, whether or not it seems right to you at the time

I mean, or you could have good, honest, inquiry-based science teachers instead.
posted by RogerB at 4:02 PM on February 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

wherein you're expected to blindly accept everything you're taught as simple fact, whether or not it seems right to you at the time.

I've long suspected that one reason that the "scientists" you see buying into crank ideas seem to be disproportionately in the applied sciences (esp. medicine and engineering) where you really can memorize procedures and fomulae without bothering to absorb the underlying process, rigor, and critical thinking that generated those processes in the first place. This isn't saying that engineering and medicine can't be rigorous (or even that most engineers and doctors aren't), but that there is a "end process" understanding in the applied sciences that can just kind of jump over the development of the tools and leave the practitioners open to any similarly convincing idea.

Also, it's not necessarily true that scientists of the past were smarter than you. Often enough, they happened to be working at a time when instrument development gave them access to new data (Kepler relying on Brahe's observations, Crick and Watson having the advantage of new tools (and Franklin's notes), etc). That doesn't mean that they didn't do good work, either, they just didn't need to be magical pony geniuses to spit out the discoveries.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:10 PM on February 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

I've been a fan of physics since the 1970s... and I'm just starting to understand how electromagnetism actually works.

You can explain how electromagnets actually work using electrostatic attraction and special relativity, and nothing else... which is amazing to me.

Then you learn that electrostatic attraction isn't the result of a "field"... it's the result of virtual photons borrowed from the vacuum via Heisenberg Uncertainty, interacting with the electrons and protons. Feynman diagrams are a necessary step to understanding this, unless you've got an amazingly masochistic fetish for advanced math.

... all said, I know I'm only starting to get it... I now get why only a few people understand enough of the whole picture to add value at the edges.

PS. Did you know water can sustain up to negative 14,500 psi? Yeah... physics is weird, and fun, and nobody knows it all, but that's ok.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:18 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Aside from solar-system samples, all we get from space are pictures and plots—evidence that immaterial photons hit some telescope’s detector.

Nope, now we get plots that come from gravitational waves too. No photons.
(Also neutrinos and cosmic rays and... sigh)

Also:
wherein you're expected to blindly accept everything you're taught as simple fact, whether or not it seems right to you at the time.

Yeah, no, you really aren't. You're expected to have an understanding, to grok, to speak the mathematical language that science is written in. Only premeds are expected to regurgitate and that's mostly because many of them refuse to do anything else.
posted by nat at 4:20 PM on February 28, 2016

Sadly the gravitational waves were detected via the intermediary of using photons. We don't have a direct gravitational wave detector.
posted by GuyZero at 4:43 PM on February 28, 2016

Sure, in the sense that they used an interferometer; but lacking a sensory apparatus that detects gravitons, and also lacking a system of transporting signal that isn't electromagnetically based at some level (be it circuit or light or whatnot)...

But I'd argue that LIGO is pretty direct, really. The photons are only used to measure the waves..
posted by nat at 4:53 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Will Storr's The Unpersuadables surveys and personally examines some purveyors and adherents of beliefs which are, according to our best current understanding, mistaken. It's an interesting exploration of disturbing phenomena.
posted by 0rison at 5:31 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I mean, or you could have good, honest, inquiry-based science teachers instead.

You're preaching to the choir regarding critical thinking skills. I wasn't trying to suggest that science education is or should be about the blind acceptance of fact-based information, just that it can feel that way to a novice. Understanding a scientific theory requires the building of a conceptual framework. You can't understand everything all at once; you have to grasp the individual pieces first, and often times the how has to precede the why, because the latter can only be understood in the context of the former.

Also, it's not necessarily true that scientists of the past were smarter than you.

Whenever I start to feel clever, I think of John Dalton, who worked out a good deal of atomic theory, including the relative weights of the elements, using little more than deduction. Most scientific progress is accomplished via the slow and tedious grind of everyday scientists toiling in obscurity--I'm usually the first to sing their praises. But I think it's worth remembering the pioneers and the giants, if only to keep yourself humble.
posted by dephlogisticated at 5:52 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Christ, these people are the Sovereign Citizens of the science world.

he saw his role, and the purpose of the 'theory' in general - as almost a Situationalist-style attempt to shake people out of passive acceptance of the status quo. He believed in what he said, but the actual truth of it wasn't that important to him compared to the holding of it...It has its dangers as bad things can happen when you voluntarily decouple from best-effort reality seeking, but it also has a genuinely useful role to play in keeping things supple.
Devonian

I disagree strongly with this. They have no genuinely useful role because all they do is gum up the works of actual truth-seeking with meaningless bullshit. It's not a good-faith attempt at improving people's understanding, it's self-aggrandizement by people who have constructed a self-image of an iconoclastic rebel that dares to wake the sheeple.

These people aren't even gadflies. There's a difference between "Have you considered this?" and proclaiming you've found the Truth. Socrates didn't just go around spouting crazy shit as truth to rattle people's cages, he forced people to explore and defend their positions by questioning them in good faith. He didn't tell someone what, say, courage was, when he found someone who claimed to know what it is he just asked them about their claims until he was able to show that they rested on faulty assumptions, used poor reasoning, etc.

This "I'm just making you THINK, man, I didn't necessarily really mean what I said" act is just a way of insulating yourself from being called out on your bullshit and relieving yourself of the need to actually investigate the truth of your claims. Robert Anton Wilson did this a lot too.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:04 PM on February 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Then you learn that electrostatic attraction isn't the result of a "field"

You can't eliminate field theory from quantum field theory. What you are getting at here is ultimately a metaphysical theory about the ultimate nature of reality vis a vis fundamental particles and quantum mechanics, which is separate from the actual mathematical theory which depends upon quantizing field Hamiltonians ie. classical fields. You can build QED from Feynman diagrams but this is a formal equivalence. IMHO, one of the big problems with modern physics is physicists who believe they can solve metaphysical problems "scientifically."

which leads to:

Sadly the gravitational waves were detected via the intermediary of using photons. We don't have a direct gravitational wave detector.

quantum field theory and general relativity are mathematically incompatible. I think this is fairly well established at this point. If you take the interpretation that gravity is a result of the curvature of space-time by matter, then measuring distance in space is about as direct a measurement of a gravitational wave as I could imagine. the idea that there *must* be a graviton is not a consequence of physics as it's currently understood, but more importantly it's really not clear what you mean by direct, when the measurement is clearly "classical". this kind of quantum reductionism really isn't correct in general, but especially when there is no quantum theory.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:06 PM on February 28, 2016

Also, the world will be surprised when Velikovsky and the Thunderbolts turn out to be Baron Zemo and the Masters of Evil.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:24 PM on February 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I just want an app that for articles and forums by the Thunderbolts people, will replace all instances of "electrical" and "electricity" with "witchcraft".

I'm pretty sure it will make the same level of sense.
posted by happyroach at 6:30 PM on February 28, 2016

I used to enjoy arguing with cranks. Used to.
posted by Standard Orange at 6:37 PM on February 28, 2016

Kind of like the Citizen Scientists of UKIP! [looks up, shades eyes to see citizen scientists holding flag high to catch the breeze...]
posted by sneebler at 7:34 PM on February 28, 2016

Make Physics Great Again
posted by johnnydummkopf at 10:01 PM on February 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

. I talked to the chap afterwards, and he was quite cheerful in agreeing with this take - he saw his role, and the purpose of the 'theory' in general - as almost a Situationalist-style attempt to shake people out of passive acceptance of the status quo.

Sooo...trolling?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:00 PM on February 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

> years of specialized education and training, wherein you're expected to blindly accept
> everything you're taught as simple fact, whether or not it seems right to you at the
> time

I mean, or you could have good, honest, inquiry-based science teachers instead.

Yup. First year physics for physics majors would fall apart without demos, derivations, lab courses, etc.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:49 PM on February 28, 2016

Utterly dismissing any conceivable usefulness for the idea of cosmic plasma filaments and their associated magnetic fields, on the basis that bunch of Velikovsky fanbois consider these things to be the explanation for everything, might well be a baby/bathwater response.

Actual working physicists have also been known to hypothesise along these lines, and although no such hypothesis has as yet proved to fit available observations as well as conventional cosmology does, I would be astonished to learn that the idea of very-large-scale plasma currents could end up making no useful contribution to our collective understanding of the state of things.
posted by flabdablet at 12:12 AM on February 29, 2016

Sangermaine, I had to bite my hand to stop myself from laughing hard enough to wake up other people. Thank you.

On topic, I think that Velikovsky accidentally being close to the date of the Minoan eruption is actually detrimental to science. It adds another, unnecessary layer that a new theory must pass, as there will be people who dismiss it out of hand because it agrees with something a popular crank proposed.
posted by Hactar at 12:19 AM on February 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

A brief acquaintance with these people does not prepare you for just HOW crazy their ideas are.

"Electricity is a major and underappreciated force in the cosmos" is one thing, it sounds like something scientists could reasonably argue about.

"Saturn until recently used to appear to hang stationary in the Earth's sky over the North Pole and shone like a second sun, and this astronomical configuration collapsed within recorded human history and rearranged itself to the present state, all of which we learn via comparative mythology" is a whole nother ballgame.

I learned about these guys from the fortean site The Anomalist, whose author is a big fan.
posted by edheil at 6:52 AM on February 29, 2016

If you've read the Neal Stephenson book Anathem, you may recall a section where rules-breaking academics are punished with having to memorize the details of long-discarded theories (among other similar academic punishements) to the level of a real-world doctorate, despite them being so out of date and disproven that they are little more than a historical footnote for any one working in the relevant field. Talking with an Electric Universe believer, reading their posts, reading this article gives me a feel for how that must feel; knowing they're just wrong but not willing (and probably unable) to correct them. It just feels wrong.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:40 AM on February 29, 2016

I've watched a good half of the official movie and they're so freakin' smug and ignorant (Cosmology is not "the queen of sciences" you idiot!) that I can't do the second half.

I think the number of people drawn to this movement, and others like it, does tell us something about human needs, and how they're not being met. But I don't feel ridicule is a good response — we're all living in a human network, and mass movements searching for meaning can completely trample down the society that our real science takes place it. Wait 'til President Trump re-appropriates the entire NASA budget to chrome plate the Washington Monument.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:00 PM on February 29, 2016

I've long suspected that one reason that the "scientists" you see buying into crank ideas seem to be disproportionately in the applied sciences (esp. medicine and engineering) where you really can memorize procedures and fomulae without bothering to absorb the underlying process, rigor, and critical thinking that generated those processes in the first place

I wonder, as a mechanical engineer, if it isn't because the people choosing those fields aren't more geared towards a motive of money and well-being than real, honest to god science in the first place. I certainly was as were many if not most of my fellow at the time when classes were taken. Whereas, and I'm assuming, that physics and math majors are, um, looking at things a bit differently from the very beginning.
posted by RolandOfEld at 4:05 PM on February 29, 2016