Ricky Gervais: “If we take something like any holy book and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact, and destroyed them all, in one thousand years they’d all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.”
Flat Earthers. Antivaxxers. Creationists (people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old), what they all share in common is denial.
To say the war on science is a new development is misleading. There has always been somewhere in the world where people refused to have their beliefs challenged. That even in the face of evidence, they will never let go of an idea that has become a part of their identity. No matter what’s thrown at them, they will not budge.
Science is the pursuit of truth. It doesn’t matter what the truth is. We don’t care. A person of science just wants to figure out whatever the truth is. If the evidence points in one direction, even if it’s undesirable, then we move in that direction.
This is the way.
What flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and creationists all have in common is that evidence isn’t good enough. They think they need to believe it too, and that’s something else entirely. The desire to believe has nothing to do with science, science is just the medium through which that disposition is revealed. So, what draws people to denial?
A sense of belonging in a community of outcasts?
An insecurity about reviewing research papers, books, evidence and not understanding what they’re looking at?
If I asked a flat Earther to explain the image to the left, they couldn't. If I asked for an explanation as to why the angles are different in Alexandria versus Aswan, they couldn't – not without bringing an elaborate conspiracy theory into play which, again, show me the evidence.
In the mean time, here's mine.
The ancients knew that the Earth was round. We've known about it for a long time. Over 2,200 years ago, Eratosthenes calculated the curvature of the Earth by using two sticks.
Two. Sticks.
Syene (which is now Aswan) is about 500 miles south of Alexandria in Egypt. On the summer solstice, the Sun's rays fall vertically at noon in Syene. Meaning that there is no shadow. Which is probably a cool thing to experience. At that exact time, a stick was also placed on the ground in Alexandria and measurements of its shadow were take. The angle was about 7.2 degrees (or 1/50th of a circle).
Using that information, along with the distance (stadia) between cities, Eratosthenes could calculate the angle of Earth.
Wizardry.
The modern world is moving at a much faster rate than the ancients could have ever imagined. Every day it seems there is a new piece of technology, or a discovery that you scratch your head and wonder, "how did they even figure that out?" And to be fair, it is a lot. It's a lot to keep up with. The faster we move, the easier it is for people to be left behind.
But denying evidence just because you don't understand it, is not how you learn.
Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t know how anything works. And flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, etc don’t know how things work. If they did, their approach to proving scientists wrong would be entirely different. They would break down the evidence with their own evidence to reveal the error of our ways.
But they can’t do that because they don’t understand the tools being used by the very people they’re claiming to be wrong. They have to make it up, or lean on belief instead to make their point. Which sounds ludicrous to those of us who have studied it for years.
It’s like bringing a knife to a nuclear war.