Divisible By Pi

…as in the case of this article on Conservapedia. Currently my mind is playing a kind of tug-of-war with itself; as I sit here, I can’t help but try to convince myself that this is absolutely the bottom of the barrel, and that it doesn’t get any worse than this. At the same time, I’m reminding myself that that is exactly what I thought last time something like this happened.

For those of you who like their brains and thus ducked for cover the minute you saw ‘Conservapedia’, the article is titled Counterexamples to Relativity, and is exactly as dumb as it sounds. It begins:

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. Here is a list of counterexamples, and if only one of these is true, then the theory fails…

First up, way to misunderstand the nature of mathematics. Mathematics as a whole does not allow any exceptions, period – an exception in mathematics means that the system you are working with is not internally consistent, which means that your system is likely crap. Besides all that, the theory of relativity is a model of a physical system – and exceptions in a physical model are not nearly as bad as in a field of mathematics. Certainly they’re to be avoided, and a perfect model would have no exceptions – but in an imperfect model exceptions can be avoided if you know they exist, and may even be the key to understanding both how your model is wrong and how to fix it.

More than that, however, I love the idea that general relativity is somehow a liberal idea, as though a physical theory can have a political preference. I’d love to see how they justify this classification…and I can, because it links to a footnote! Let’s see, then…

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.

Oh, joy. Not only did the collective of dimwits who contributed to the article skip out of science classes at school, they evidently also didn’t bother to learn how to reference properly.

After a brief search I was able to track down the Paul Johnson book. It’s called Modern Times, and as I haven’t read it I can’t really comment on it – that it is described as a conservative history of the twentieth century and espouses the opinion that Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression, however, does make me rather wary. I’d love to look up what is said about Einstein, of course…but as there is nary a page number to be seen, I’ll have to scuttle that plan.

I’m not even going to try to search for the article by Laurence Tribe. Law professors tend to write rather a bit, so without at least a clue as to the identity of the article I highly doubt it would be worth my time trying to find it. I like the idea (completely unsupported by evidence, apparently) that there is a correlation between understanding general relativity and leaving Christianity. Could it be an unintended admission that learning about the real world makes one less likely to believe the claims of religion?

The list itself is a hoot. Most of the items comes about from either a basic misunderstanding of relativity or of the actual process of science. Some of them are gems though. My favourite, by far, is item nine:

9. The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54

That’s right, folks – apparently the freaking bible disproves general relativity now. I guess all the physicists should pack up and go home – we’ll be seeing priests at the Parkes Radio Telescope any day now to clean up the intellectual mess all those know-nothing scientists have left behind.

Except…there’s nothing in John 4:46-54 that could actually act as a counterexample to general relativity. Behold:

46 Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. 47 When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.

48 “Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.”

49 The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

50 Jesus replied, “You may go. Your son will live.” The man took Jesus at his word and departed. 51 While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. 52 When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour.”

53 Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he and all his household believed.

54 This was the second miraculous sign that Jesus performed, having come from Judea to Galilee.

Now, don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of stuff in there that goes against what we know about the world. But the idea that Jesus’ CUR2 spell works at a distance doesn’t say crap about general relativity – in order for there to be an issue, the spell would have to work at a distance instantaneously, and that’s not something that is specified in the text. Hell, even if it was specified it’d be pretty dubious – in order to understand why, let’s do a bit of simple physics.

First, what is the distance between Cana and Capernaum? According to Google Maps, the driving distance is 38.2 kilometers:

Although that’s clearly longer than the actual distance, it doesn’t differ by so much that it’ll make a difference in the calculation. Hell, just to make things easier, we’ll estimate the distance as 40 kilometers.

Now, the speed of light in a vacuum is known to be 299 792 458 metres per second, and changing that medium to air does very little to that value. So, using these values we can calculate the time it would take for something traveling at the speed of light to get from Cana to Capernaum.

So, in order to accurately report on whether Jesus healed the man in Capernaum instantaneously or at the speed of light, the servants must have had a clock that was accurate to better than a ten-thousandth of a second. Given that pendulum clocks only date from around the middle of the seventeenth century, I feel pretty safe in assuming that they probably didn’t.

Finally, you’ve got to love the stunning ignorance that some people display:

18. The lack of a single useful device developed based on any insights provided by the theory [general relativity]; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress. This stands in stark contrast with every verified theory of science.

I’ve got a fun little two word response for the folk over at Conservapedia, and it goes a little something like this:

GPS, bitches.

Filed under: Creationism, Physics