Wacko Conspiracy-Believing Nutjobs

      "Peter, can you believe the utter nonsense people believe?"

People call or write me to tell me about some new conspiracy circulating within social media. 

I need to have a little humility. We all believe incredible things.

Trump told Americans that Barack Obama was supposedly

born in Kenya or Indonesia or somewhere other than the Hawaii hospital that had a record of his birth back in August, 1961. In preparation for his presidential eligibility 46 years later, people--someone--allegedly corrupted or tricked hospital staff, two newspapers, and the state of Hawaii to record his birth as happening in Hawaii when it did not. And he was really a Muslim. 

Now it is the Big Lie. Even Fox News routinely calls it "false" when Trump asserts that he won the 2020 election. This charge presumes that Democrats--who cannot get it together to pass an infrastructure bill--could pull off a secret multi-state conspiracy involving thousands of county clerks, hundreds of elected officials, election equipment, auditors, hand counters, and judges--many of them Republicans highly motivated to find fraud and call it out. Not credible.

Or the conspiracies regarding COVID--that it was planned by Anthony Fauci, or Bill Gates, or George Soros. That the vaccination contains micro computer chips so Microsoft can follow people and control them. That the vaccine sterilizes women. That the COVID death numbers are massively faked and everyone is in on it. Or that thousands of people are dying from the vaccines and we aren't being told. Not credible.

Yet a lot of people believe some or all of it, saying in conversation, that it may be true, that they aren't sure what to believe. Trusted sources claim it, so they believe it and aren't taking any chances.

It is crazy, but it is not surprising. People believe crazy, invisible things all the time. Not just gullible people. Smart people. 

Indeed, the smartest .

A scientific understanding of the world presumes that much disease, especially infectious disease, comes from "germs," or "pathogens," or bacteria, or viruses--invisible things that we take on faith to be surrounding us. Few of us have seen germs. We learned about them from parents as we learned to use a toilet and we accepted this as true. That understanding was reinforced by the authority figures in school and by physicians and people we perceive as scientists. We take on faith that these invisible things are somehow removed or neutralized by soap and water, or alcohol, or hazmat outfits, or counteracted by vaccinations. We believe in an unseen world, and much of it is dangerous.

Today's Scientific American  announces the discovery of new sub-atomic particles: Muons.

Despite its remarkable success in explaining the fundamental particles and forces that make up the universe, the Standard Model’s description remains woefully incomplete. It does not account for gravity, for one thing, and it is similarly silent about the nature of dark matter, dark energy and neutrino masses.

A beam of positive pions—lightweight particles made from an up quark and a down antiquark—decay into muons and muon neutrinos. The muons are collected and channeled into an orderly circular path around the magnet, which they will circle, at most, a few thousand times before they decay into positrons. By detecting the direction of muon decays, physicists can extract information about how the particles interacted with the magnet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKxQTvqcpSg

This is a potential new scientific understanding of matter, potentially changing the previous understanding of matter. Properly understood, solid things are really amalgams of tiny things bouncing around, and those things consist of yet smaller things circling others, forming and decaying. We keep learning more about those tiny things, and some of what they do is appear, disappear, and turn into opposites of themselves. It isn't credible but I believe it.

My presumption is that most readers have only the foggiest idea of what is described in the Scientific American article. This is a new presumed discovery but takes place in a century-old re-understanding of some conundrums about the apparent speed of light. The effort to make sense of those conundrums caused people to reimagine reality. The new understanding seemed to contradict every common experience of sense and nonsense. In the realm of 20th and 21st century physics light is both a particle and a wave depending on whether it is being measured, time is fluid, and gravity is an illusion based on the warping of space, and things created in one place appear to change instantly at the source depending on whether someone at a distance and later in time intends to measure them. Strange. 

There are right wing news sites that have serious-appearing people insisting on the truth of wildly improbable things. Scientists, too.

If the above twelve-minute video leaves you confused and wondering if your whole understanding of the universe might be wrong, here is another on the same subject, this one beginning with the mind-bending words,

 "Over the course of your life your feet will age approximately one second more than your head due to gravitational time dilation."            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKD1vDAPkFQ

Here is the physics lesson you might have seen--or skipped--during college: Two hours and 31 minutes on Einstein's special theory of relativity, explained by Brian Greene. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKJuC5CUMgU

I conclude with a simple takeaway: Humans believe things we cannot see, including things that don't "make sense."

Which seems more weird and less possible? That Hillary Clinton, bored by running for President and wanting to earn money, chose to do so by operating a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor? Or that a person who falls off a roof of a building is headed toward the ground because he is bending time.