Conservapedia is so much fun to read

Heliocentrism is an Atheist Plot
[Via Balloon Juice]

I had no idea that the Theory of Relativity was a liberal scheme, but thank goodness conservapedia is on it:

There is so much there to love I just don’t know where to start, whether it be the conflation of relativism and the theory of relativity, or the action-at-a-distance by Jesus (WTF?). The footnotes are just as awesome:

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.

This has to be a spoof, right?

BTW- longtime readers will understand the title of this post.

[More]

It has been a while since I have discussed the treasure trove that is Conservapedia. I love how it is all the fault of liberals.

And the talk pages are really worth reading to get an idea of what happens when people argue some of these points. How about this exchange regarding the fact that many of the intuitive ideas we have about forces do not hold under relativity:

I don’t think that’s the source of our confusion. I think the main problem is that, according to Newtonian mechanics and thus according to our mechanical intuition, orthogonal things tend to operate independently. Not only that, but a force exerted on an object is usually independent of the object’s momentum. In relativity, none of these things are true, due to the fact that velocities no longer add like vectors (and thus acceleration no longer incurs a cumulative change in velocity in the usual way.) This is seen as some sort of logical flaw or paradox simply because it contradicts the deeply ingrained intuition that came from the previous theory.–NgSmith Sun Dec 13 18:10:46 EST 2009

Theories that don’t produce anything useful are often a waste of time, or simply false. I realize that liberals tend to downplay accountability — a conservative insight, but theories should be accountable by what value they yield, particularly when taxpayer dollars are spent (wasted) on the theory.–Andy Schlafly 16:55, 7 January 2010 (EST)

I call gps a pretty darned useful invention but it doesn’t work if you don’t take into account relativistic effects. I think that not knowing where relativity is used speaks volumes as to how close minded those trying to disprove relativity, which is different from relativism. (a point completely overlooked by the page) Gaurdro 12:31, 24 May 2010 (EDT)

Andy Schlafly’s response it telling. In fact, he keeps stating that since GPS is corrected by engineers that do not need to understand relativity to make the correction, that relativity is really not useful. Or that nothing useful has ever been built using relativity, even as he is shown the use of synchrotron radiation in medicine.

That, more than anything, seems to be the goal of Conservapedia. Sure, perhaps an engineer does not need to understand relativity to correct a GPS satellite. But someone did want to understand why the discrepancy existed.

Schlafly seems to flat out not care if we understand why something works, why understanding relativity increases our understanding of the world around us. Doing something without understanding sure seems fine with him.

If liberals tend to downplay accountability, then I must add that conservatives, with Andy Schlafly as an example, tend to downplay understanding.

The value of the Theories of Special and General Relativity is immense, as the comment about GPS demonstrates. No other competing theory explains as many of the facts of the world around us, or is as predictive.

Einstein knew nothing about GPS satellites yet knowledge of his theories of special and general relativity is needed to understand why they work properly.

I would be willing to bet that if we followed the physics of the Bible, as evidenced by the action at a distance by Jesus, we would not understand the time discrepancies of GPS, how synchrotron radiation could be used for medicine nor many things we have come to value.

As with most of these types of discussions from denialists, there is no attempt to construct a different model to explain the data we have. There are only attempts to drag down a model because it is religiously inconvenient.

The predictive qualities of a scientific model – the ability to explain and understand things found after the theory is formulated – are some of the important aspects of what makes the theory useful for our understanding of the world around us. What does Andy Schlafly propose to replace this model with?