Science Isn't Dogma, You're Just Stupid (Response to Formscapes)

Hey everyone, you may remember some debunks  I’ve made regarding Electric Universe and other pseudoscience in the realm of astrophysics.  While they don’t create as big a stir as my content exposing creationists, they do result  in some butthurt contrarians making videos whining about how indoctrinated I am. One such  video has surfaced recently, and I’d like to dissect it for you, so let’s get started. The video is called “How Science Became Unscientific”, released last month on a channel  call

ed “Formscapes”. It’s a small channel and the video didn’t really get a lot of views,  so I would normally ignore it just like I would any random flat earther. But in this case I  wanted to respond because it’s such an immaculate example of the precise brand of anti-science  rhetoric that is rampant in society today. It’s a manipulative epistemological poison that has  the potential to kill off the human race, and it’s alarming how popular this type of narrative  has become, even among moderatel

y educated people. The basic premise is that real science, the kind  that has given you the computer and internet and satellites that are allowing you to watch this  video right now, is dogmatic, an ideology, a tyrannical worldview wielded by the powers  that be to indoctrinate us, while ignoring newer, better theories from super awesome rogue  trailblazers. The part of the video where he talks about me is towards the end, regarding my very  first debunk on Electric Universe. But there is quite

a lot of build up, so let’s leave that for  the cherry on top and start from the beginning. Wow, lots of ancient stuff! I can see how  he fell for the Thunderbolts charlatans. Let’s get a quick sampling of his general vibe. It’s simply not realistic to expect a two hour long video to convince most people that their  most basic convictions about the world might be deeply distorted. Those convictions serve a very  real and significant psychological purpose in establishing a person’s sense of groun

dedness  and certainty about the world that they are a part of. And letting go of those convictions is  far from easy or trivial for very good reasons. For many people this video will probably feel  like I am attempting to shatter the core beliefs which ground one’s sense of religious faith. This is how cult leaders talk. They feed you the narrative that everything you know is a lie,  so that you are receptive to the script of lies they are about to unload. And the first part of  this script is

about a guy named Robert Maxwell, the one-time owner of Pergamon Press, a popular  platform for scientific publications, and the only purpose here is to manipulate the viewer. It is through Robert Maxwell’s business career in publishing that the world of academic journalism  as we now know it would come into being. This was a very lucrative business model, as Maxwell’s  clients were predominately state-funded institutions such as libraries and universities.  Ultimately it was taxpayers who front

ed the bill for such exclusive access to these academic  publications, even though the general public itself was not granted public access to them.  And through this monpolization of access, Robert Maxwell and his family were able to become wealthy  affluent. Maxwell was well known to live an immensely flamboyant lifestyle, sailing the world  in his luxury megayacht named the lady Ghislaine, named after his youngest daughter, Ghislaine  Maxwell. Over the course of subsequent decades, Robert woul

d expand his interests into the  realm of international politics, developing relations with Eastern European totalitarian  regimes and becoming involved with Israeli state intelligence services. In 1991 Maxwell would  skip a scheduled meeting with the Bank of England to cruise in his yacht among the Canary Islands,  and during this time he would be reported missing, later to be found dead floating in the  Atlantic Ocean. Following his death investigation would come to reveal an immense  entangle

d web of fraud, financial malpractice, and theft which would result in the utter  collapse of his business empire. What is significant for our current purposes is that  Robert Maxwell was the man who was, in many ways, responsible for how academic science came to be  shaped after the end of the second world war. As he notes, Maxwell enriched himself by running  scientific journals, then eventually fell out with the law and died a suspicious death. A picture of  his famous daughter, Ghislaine Max

well of Jeffrey Epstein fame, is flashed to add more drama to  the implied conclusion: scientific publishing is a racket, associated with embezzlement and child  sex trafficking! Any reasonable person would ask: why fixate on Maxwell? Did Maxwell create the  scientific publishing industry? Of course not. It has existed for centuries and there are many  other, far more important publishing houses than Pergamon Press. Did he have a disproportionate  influence on the way publishing is done? Not by

any stretch of the imagination. But Formscapes  reduces the entire industry to one man in order to instill in the naïve viewer the impression  of widespread corruption in the science world. It’s a sleazy manipulative tactic. Then he  explains how science is published today. Academic institutions require their researchers  to publish research, and academic journals are able to actually charge researchers for  publishing their papers. This system works, because under most circumstances the  resear

chers themselves aren’t required to actually dip into their own pockets to  make such payments to the journals. Rather, research grants typically include provisions for  such publishing fees, meaning that it is you and I who actually pay for the racketeering practices  which were instantiated by Robert Maxwell and those who followed in his footsteps. There are elements of truth here, but the conclusions are fallacious. Scientific  publication involves research, paid for by research institutions.

This is refereed by  scientists who perform this service for free, then entrusted to a journal which publishes the  work, and charges a fee for people to read it to recover publication costs. The claim that  the published work is not freely accessible is more or less correct. The first problem is  that the primary literature is typically not available to the general public. Of course  hardly anyone is willing or able to read a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Physics. But  Formscapes pretend

s that science is elitist as it hides behind exclusive and expensive portals.  The second problem is that universities and other research organizations don’t have enough funds  to subscribe to the expanding bulk of journals, so we are left with a Darwinian race for  survival. The best journals are subscribed to, and the others are ignored or accessed only  when researchers want to purchase one specific article. It is not an ideal world, but it works.  To suggest that this shows corruption in sci

ence, or even that this constitutes a racket, is  extremely irresponsible. The process of reliable scientific publication costs money to provide, so  it costs money to consume. It’s like complaining that Netflix isn’t free. They need money to make  the content, so they charge you to watch it. Nevertheless, they are legitimate problems, and  to address these problems, free-access journals have arisen. Here scientists and publishers work  for free to disseminate their knowledge. But many of these

journals are of mediocre quality and  poorly refereed. Even in the major journals, the expensive ones, some articles are freely  accessible. The author is usually required to pay a small fee to make their article accessible  to everyone, and this is happening more and more. In any case, publishing houses, which carry out  the important task of organizing the review, refereeing, and publication of our best science  have a right to earn a living, just like doctors and janitors and teachers and eve

ryone else. It’s  how society works. Finally, the video claims that an author has to pay a fee to the journal before  their work is published. This is not true. Could you or I publish a paper in a scientific journal  cost-free? Yes, of course: there are plenty of journals which do not charge. However, any paper  will be scrutinized by referees and has to meet stringent criteria of novelty and quality. To  claim otherwise is a blatant lie. After this idiotic claim of racketeering, the video claim

s  the majority of scientific papers are fraudulent, and there is a replication crisis: scientific work  is getting more and more difficult to reproduce. At this point we have all probably heard the  murmurs of what has come to be dubbed the “replication crisis” within academic research. The  notion of replicability is generally considered to be of central significance within the apologetics  of academic science. Idealistically speaking, replication is believed to serve as a means  of ensuring t

hat the findings produced by scientific research do actually point towards the  regularities of nature which science strives to reveal. If a finding cannot be replicated, then  that of course casts doubt on whether the original research actually uncovered such a regularity. Again, this is very manipulative because it is based on a kernel of truth. As science becomes  more sophisticated, it becomes harder to reproduce, and it is something scientists actually  take seriously. The malice lies in pr

esenting this problem as a major crisis in science. Speaking  from the little research experience I have, chemistry procedures are hard to reproduce. A  chemical reaction may contain a dozen variables, and sometimes one of them is not controlled  because it is not clearly identified and this may result in discrepancies. This phenomenon is  well recognized, so it’s not a dirty secret. Many experiments are never reproduced because they  do not create any particular interest. If the interest exists

because of some broad industrial  application, the procedures are repeated by many labs and eventually any discrepancy is solved  via well-planned analytical procedures. That’s chemistry. Now imagine a science like biology,  where experiments may contain dozens or hundreds of variables. Or clinical psychology, where  thousands of individual factors may affect the quality of the results. Why is it surprising that  scientific data are difficult to repeat? Important science eventually gets clarifi

ed, and less  important, flawed experiments remain innocuously in the literature, perhaps until someone decides,  100 years later, that they were important, and they are eventually cleaned up or refuted.  Humans are not perfect. Science is not perfect. Imperfection does not make science invalid. Essentially, this whole narrative only works on people who have never done science and have  never read any primary scientific literature. They have absolutely no clue what it is to do  and publish scien

tific research, so they are unencumbered by reality in weaving this ridiculous  story about how all published science is false or agenda-driven. This is a shortcut for science  deniers with zero ability to refute real science, as it’s much easier to just pretend that the  scientific commnunity is invalid at its core. In order to substantiate this, some screenshots  of cherry-picked fringe essays are flashed, as though the entire body of scientific knowledge  can somehow be rendered invalid just

by shouting “fake news”. This idea of most research being  wrong is preposterous clickbait. Chemists develop new reactions, and publish summaries of their  methodology. Zoologists discover new species, and publish their findings. Molecular biologists  sequence genomes and map biomolecule interactions, and publish their results. Astronomers discover  objects in the night sky and publish images of them. The overwhelming majority of scientific  output is not even remotely controversial. It’s just “

here’s some stuff we did, throw it  on the pile of human knowledge”. Science deniers try to paint all of science as a  conspiracy, because then they don’t have to prove anything wrong. They can just  point to the conspiracy they fabricated, which is what this guy does for two hours. Here is  his ridiculous attempt to give a concrete example. If for example I am a sociological researcher,  who is conducting research which investigates a possible correlation between political beliefs  and life exp

ectancy, I could very easily produce which seems to show such a correlation  simply because of inadequate controls. If the majority of the people surveyed are people  who live in a specific geographical location, or who predominately belong to a specific economic  class or ethnicity, then it could be that my research findings come up to misleadingly depict  a correlation between political beliefs and life expectancy when in reality the patterns detected  by my research are due to factors which I

have simply failed to take into consideration. So he makes something up about sociology, which is not a physical science, and he just  lists a bunch of things that sociologists have to control for when doing research, as  though they somehow don’t know about them and totally do those things. He is pretending that  sociologists don’t know how to do sociology. Reality is of course extremely complicated,  and due to the fundamentally relational nature of reality, it is never actually possible  to

completely isolate the factors which we wish to study scientifically, which means that  there is always going to be a risk of such false positives no matter how rigorous we try to be. He says that because reality is “relational”, it is “never actually possible to completely  isolate the factors we wish to study”. This is totally moronic. If you’re studying an ideal  gas, the variables that describe it are moles, pressure, temperature, and volume. Hold two  constant, measure the isolated relation

ship of the other two. This is an example from high  school chemistry. When molecular biologists do experiments to ascertain something about gene  expression, or any number of other biological processes, there are painstaking measures in place  to control every possible variable with different plasmids that have varying combinations of  resistance to one antibiotic or another, presence or lack of a particular gene  of interest, internal control vectors, empty vectors, and so forth. Scientists ar

e  clever and know how to isolate variables. But for now we simply need to be aware of the  fact that even the most thorough and stringent research can and does fall victim to such false  positives, and therefore even if we were able to entirely eradicate fraud and malpractice, it  would nonetheless inevitably be the case that many research findings would still fail to replicate. There is something so enchanting about listening to someone who doesn’t understand science,  improperly describe the

scientific process, upon a backdrop of stock footage featuring  actors who are cosplaying as scientists. Wow, we looked in a microscope and now I’m pointing  to some random meaningless image on my laptop! But the narrator said we didn’t properly  isolate a variable! And nobody can possibly replicate this! Nobody else can look through  a microscope like we did. It would be funny if it wasn’t so offensive. And now we get to  what is supposed to be the payoff of all this. A great deal of public and

professional confidence  in scientific research hinges upon the assumption that the research findings which are reported  as factual are findings which have been successfully replicated. Beginning with a series  of controversies which emerged during the 2010s, however, this confidence would come to be damaged  in an utterly catastrophic manner. The replication crisis can be traced back to research published in  2011 by the Cornell University social psychologist Daryl Bem, within which Bem alleg

ed to have  produced experimental evidence suggestive of extrasensory perception. Unsurprisingly Bem  was viciously criticized for this research, and in an effort to discredit his findings, Bem’s  critics highlighted what they regarded as serious methodological flaws in his research. Essentially  these criticisms amounted to the claim that the statistical methods used by Bem in analyzing his  data were inadequate. Yet as Bem pointed out in his response to his critics, the supposed flaw in  his r

esearch was in fact common practice within psychological, medical, and sociological research  in general. If Bem’s parapsychological findings were to be thrown out on those methodological  grounds, then an enormous amount of psychological, medical, and sociological research would need to  be thrown out as well for the exact same reasons. That’s right, all published science is wrong and  dumb, which means that pseudoscience that can’t manage to get published must be right. This  guy Daryl Bem pre

tended to have evidence of ESP. Of course scientists pointed out what was  wrong with his methodology, but the narrator baselessly pretends that he was unfairly  debunked. There is no attempt to elaborate or actually discuss the study, because he has no  clue, and his viewers don’t care. In actuality, what happened is precisely what I described  earlier. Publishing ESP results is a bold claim. So bold that many people tried to reproduce  the results. Reproducibility in a social science like psyc

hology is much more complex than with  a simple chemical reaction, so a lot of studies tried to do it. Absolutely nobody could, so it  was labeled bad science. Formscapes wants to label this process corruption, but it’s the opposite  of corruption. It’s precisely how science works. Sometimes extraordinary claims get published. Even  in fields like chemistry or physics. Fedyakin’s polywater sensation in 1961. Benveniste and water  memory in 1988. Fleischmann and Pons’s cold fusion in 1989. These

are glamorous examples that the  press sometimes runs with in an irresponsible way. Because of the extraordinary nature of the  claims, they were scrutinized, demonstrated to be irreproducible despite countless attempts, and  thereby invalidated. If extraordinary claims were to represent real, viable phenomena, reproduction  of results would occur, they would be deemed revolutionary, and scientists would pursue them  eagerly, as has also happened many times in the history of science. It’s not th

at hard to wrap  your head around a scientist chasing their own ego in presenting themselves as the harbinger of  scientific revolution. Even highly respected and eminent ones, hence the so-called Nobel disease.  In stark contrast, the idea that scientists would collectively hide new discoveries because  they contradict current paradigms is just an asinine narrative to excuse delusional behavior. Here he is again just pasting clickbait titles from magazines as though they adequately address  sci

ence, while mixing in some pandemic-related paranoia for good measure. This is very deliberate  as he is now going to pivot to medical science. The phrase “trust the science” is sometimes  repeated like a kind of shibboleth or mantra. Nobody who advocates for science has ever said  “trust the science”. This is a dumb trope used exclusively by science deniers who try to  pretend that science requests blind faith. It doesn’t. People who learn and understand  science know how it works and therefore

are aware of the reliability of empiricism, as  well as the degree to which various principles in science are at this point essentially  irrefutable. This whole schtick is just a meme. Professional journalists use terms like  anti-science or science denial as labels to slap on whatever group needs to be designated  as the villain within whatever political narrative is being evangelized this week. Yes, people who deny the validity of science are called science deniers. It’s  just literally what

you are. There are no “science evangelicals” or “science apologists”.  They’re just people who understand science and try to explain it to those who deny it,  so that humanity doesn’t destroy itself. In spite of how oft repeated and  ubiquitous this attitude towards science is, the reality seems to be that  we cannot and should not trust the science. Yes, you should learn basic science  so you can understand it, instead of baselessly denying it all over the internet. The very ideal of science is

an attitude of unbiased inquiry which does not pay reverence  to established dogmas or doctrines. The great promise of science is that of knowledge which one  is able to uncover through one’s direct engagement with nature, rather than knowledge which is  bestowed from on high by authority figures and institutions. The very concept of scientific  practice would seem to be diametrically opposed to the notion of pious adherence to a corpus of  established beliefs which are officially endorsed and

authorized by an institutional bureaucracy. This is another pathetic angle they take. They pretend to have reverence for science while  denying science. Look at Galileo, who defied authority to change the way we look at the cosmos!  First, Galileo didn’t develop heliocentrism. That was Copernicus followed by Brahe and Kepler.  And Galileo helped to overturn religious dogma, not some imaginary scientific dogma. Geocentrism  was not dogma. It was just the best model we had until a certain time whe

re better telescopes were  built and more sophisticated measurements could be made. He made astronomical observations  and performed computations, just like modern astrophysicists. The “unbiased engagement  with nature” is indeed how science is done, and yet we will see him deny this obvious  fact countless times as we move forward. Within this notion of trusting science we can  begin to see that the very idea of science has come to split into two primary currents. On  the one hand there is the

notion of science of a continual practice of investigation. Actually  engaging with the natural world and thereby coming to reveal the inner workings of nature. On the  other hand we have the notion of “the science”. More stock footage, this time of fake students  in a fake classroom, which again perfectly exemplifies the artificiality with which the  narrator pretends to know what happens in real science classrooms. Chemistry students don’t  recite dogmatic axioms about chemistry. They go in th

e lab and do chemistry. They run reactions,  and learn analytical techniques to ascertain the identity of what they produce. Physics students  don’t just sit there and take dictation. They do physics. They replicate landmark experiments  from pioneers in physics and derive these laws for themselves. This notion that science education  equals indoctrination is the most transparently idiotic narrative imaginable, exclusively peddled  and believed by people who have never taken a single science cou

rse in their entire lives. Science understood as a body of facts which we are authorized to believe, or even obligated  to believe, by a priesthood of professional academics whose sociological function is  to tell us what is and is not a defensible belief. Ultimately “the science” is in essence  a fundamentally doctrinal form of spirituality. This is another pathetic aspect of this narrative.  People have been doing science for centuries. In particular the 20th century saw unbelievable  progress

in every scientific field. As such, an enormous mountain of knowledge has been  produced. If you want to learn science, you have to learn about what people have already done. That  means learning facts pertaining to the history of science that has led to our current understanding.  That’s just how it goes. Pretending this process is somehow dogmatic is like pretending that  learning a foreign language is dogmatic. Look at these priests, all reciting the same script  about what these strange wor

ds mean! None of them are free thinkers, they just regurgitate their  indoctrination! They all give the same definitions because that’s what the words mean. This is how  you learn a language. And it’s also part of how you learn science. You learn facts about what we  have already uncovered about the physical world, and the context in which we learned it. If  you’re too much of a lazy crybaby to do that, just admit it to yourself and keep quiet.  Because science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. B

eneath the specific empirical claims made by  actual researchers, or the facts and theories which are formally sanctioned by textbooks, we  find within the core of “the science” a very specific complex of metaphysical assumptions  about what the world must be like and what can or cannot quality as true or real. It is  furthermore a system of belief which conditions the way we think about what sorts of opinions  can be considered respectable, and thus the structure of “the science” comes to condi

tion the  relationships between belief and social capital. Those who are well-informed and well-educated  believe certain things, and therefore such beliefs come to serve a sociological function  as a signifier of social respectability. And this is where he pivots, knowing that he’s  totally incapable of refuting actual science, so he starts to blabber about metaphysics. He has  to generate a false dichotomy. There is reality, which he refers to as a “belief system”, and  then some fabricated al

ternative which he can use to promote his fantasies and try to put them  on level ground alongside reality. In actuality, people who get an education actually learn things.  That’s the social capital. They’re educated and can apply their knowledge to actually create  and achieve things. People who get engineering degrees can build machines. People who get  chemistry degrees can build molecules. People who don’t study these subjects can’t do these  things, and just whine about it on the internet.

Many scientists aren’t exactly all that eager to  publish findings which might call into question, for example, the adequacy of Darwinian natural  selection in actually explaining the nature of life, even though there are many reasons to  believe that natural selection does not give us a complete understanding of how life  evolves, whence life originated, or how speciation actually occurs. Yet to question the  Darwinian paradigm would be to risk affiliating oneself with creationists or other st

ructures  of belief which have been deemed anti-science. He finally decides to make specific scientific  references and immediately humiliates himself. Surprise, surprise, he’s an evolution denier.  He starts regurgitating the apologist script about how natural selection doesn’t explain  everything, when every biologist from 1900 onward would tell you that themselves. There are  many evolutionary mechanisms, not just natural selection. This moron knows about none of them. He  just spews “neo-Dar

winian” like he’s an intern at Discovery Institute. We’ve beaten this to death in  my Discovery Institute debunks, so let’s move on. But if we understand the controversy in  terms of doctrine, ideology, and notions of sacred knowledge, then the motivations at  work here begin to become much clearer. The letter of protest against the New Trends in  Evolution conference was not about science, it was about “the science”. The conception of  science as a body of sacred doctrines. Whether one affirms

questions or denies such sacred knowledge  is much more a matter of moral commitment to a particular ideological structure than it is  a matter of evidence or rational arguments. Yes, if we look at it in the context of  ideology, we see that only ideology could be responsible for pushing anti-science  rhetoric as real science. Part of this ideology involves pretending that the fruits of  empirical science are an ideology. A denial of evolution is a denial of the field of biology,  so biologists

will point out this absurdity, and charlatans will call that “adherence to  doctrine”, because they have zero ability to actually discuss science. Remember,  science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. Often times the rhetoric and apologetics  of “the science” tends to take the form of an implied distinction between real science  and pseudoscience. We are often assured by scientific media outlets and science popularizers  that there is a clear and definitive difference between science and pseudosci

ence. Science can  be true or false but pseudoscience is said to be somehow worse than false. Pseudoscience  is said to violate the rules of science and therefore it is not even worthy of consideration  alongside the real respectable science which is said to follow the ritualistic procedures  of science in the correct orthodox manner. He basically just defines pseudoscience and  then baselessly scoffs at the definition. Yes, pseudoscience is charlatanry masquerading as  science. Like Deepak Chop

ra, whom he flashes from this famous clip where Sam Harris shits  all over him to thunderous applause. He pretends that people use the term to pseudoscience to  brand science they don’t like, when in reality, science deniers just use words like dogma  and indoctrination to brand real science THEY don’t like. Educated people can indeed  explain in great detail why something like homeopathy is pseudoscience, and have done so  countless times. Science deniers just ignore it and spew their anti-esta

blishment script. Do those ideas allow us to make sense of things that previously seemed mysterious? Do the ideas  allow us to see things which previously went unnoticed? If yes, then we continue to use those  ideas, at least until we find ourselves at an impasse, at which our ideas are no longer adequate  and therefore are in need of reevaluation. If not, we simply go back to nature and back  to the drawing board, and try again. This is subtle but important. He’s pretending  to value the scient

ific process, and shows stock footage of a telescope, and photosynthesis, and  is admitting that we can do science that produces useful knowledge. But then he says that when an  impasse is reached our ideas need reevaluation. What is this impasse? And what does reevaluation  mean? Usually by “impasse” they are referring to something totally fabricated that science  doesn’t seek to explain because it isn’t a real thing. And by “reevaluation” they mean  throw away an entire field of science that d

oes successfully explain and predict many things.  This is what frauds do with astrophysics. They want to inject their pseudoscience into the  scientific discourse, so they manufacture some kind of crisis, something science can’t  explain, sometimes real sometimes imaginary, and then pretend that their pseudoscience can  explain it, which it can’t, while also ignoring everything that real science does explain. When charlatans try to assert this narrative, they hope that the viewer does not under

stand a  very basic and obvious principle of scientific progress, which is this: No matter what new  innovations occur, no matter what new data arise, no matter how dramatic a paradigm shift, new  science must always explain observable phenomena as well or better than existing science. You can’t  strip away a theory, whether ancient or modern, and replace it with absolutely nothing, something  that fails to explain what the previous theory explains trivially. When you look at the advent  of mode

rn physics, equations in relativity and quantum mechanics all break down to Newtonian  equations in the limit of the slow and large. Newtonian mechanics emerges from these equations  in these limiting cases. I’m not speaking metaphorically, this is literally true. When you  look at the time dilation equation, if you input a velocity that is negligible compared with the  speed of light, it algebraically reduces to normal kinematics. Classical conceptions of momentum  emerge from quantum mechanica

l equations. The old paradigm is contained within the new one.  So modern physics does not negate Newtonian mechanics. Far from it. It is an extension of the  physics we already know, thereby continuing to explain everything we already understood, but then  also elucidating previously cryptic areas like the realm of the subatomic and things traveling near  light speed. Classical physics is still profoundly useful in realms where relativity or quantum  mechanics would complexify things unneccessa

rily, like macroscopic terrestrial motion. For those who don’t like physics and math, here’s an analogy. There’s a crime scene. You have  a dead body, a murder weapon, some footprints, some fingerprints, blood stains, and all kinds  of other pieces of evidence. A detective will try to figure out what happened by determining what  best fits the evidence. According to a receipt, this weapon was purchased by person X. Their  fingerprints are at the crime scene, and they had a motive, so person X is

likely the killer. This  could be right or wrong, but it is objectively the most likely explanation, and if someone wants  to propose an alternate explanation, it has to have at least equivalent explanatory power as what  exists. Let’s say someone suggests that instead, a tiger escaped from the zoo and killed the victim!  Alright, based on what? Is there any specific tiger-related evidence? Did you find tiger hairs?  Tiger footprints? Are there any reports of tigers escaping from nearby zoos? T

he victim was shot by  a gun, how did a tiger do that? How do you explain the fingerprints and blood that match the suspect?  When there is a hypothesis that is supported by evidence, and an alternate explanation  is put forward that is not only baseless, but also has no ability to explain the data as  well as the existing hypothesis, it’s bogus. The detective will call it out as ridiculous not  because he’s being dogmatic, but because he knows how to do his job and he knows when someone is  ful

l of shit and shouting tiger for no reason. The notion of falsification is often casually  referenced in debates about such validity or the lack thereof. But this idea is very rarely  examined in detail by science apologists. More often than not the idea is simply gestured towards  as a way of casually dismissing ideas that aren’t supposed to have a seat at the table. It is said  that real science must be falsifiable and that pseudoscientific claims are those which appear to  be scientific but w

hich are in fact unfalsifiable. He then goes on a long rant about Karl Popper  and falsifiability as though he knows how to falsify scientific claims, and just generally  demonstrates the problem with people who read some philosophy books and then pretend to know  how science works. He predictably refers to Kuhn and the concept of paradigm shift, because  he’s priming the viewer to believe that real science is nothing more than a failed paradigm  that should be abanadoned for pseudoscience, whic

h he implies is a newer, better paradigm,  rather than just some charlatans on the internet. The early explorations of pre-science then  give rise to what Kuhn dubbed normal science, within which the basic explanatory and conceptual  structures of the developing paradigm begin to concretize as a morphologically mature  program of research, with well-defined epistemological horizons which are delineated  by the core metaphors which have now become the beating heart of the paradigm. It is within 

this phase of normal science that falsification tends to become essentially irrelevant. The  core metaphors and thus the core theoretical frameworks which are erected around those core  metaphors have come to be fully entrenched, and as such, conflicting evidence tends  to be simply ignored, hand waved away or accomodated by minor ad hoc adjustments  to the original theoretical frameworks. He pretends that theories can only make ad hoc  adjustments rather than face being falsified, which is ridi

culous. There are countless  examples of theories being discarded after being falsified. When contemplating  the mechanism of a chemical reaction, multiple possibilities may be put forward, and  then studies are done to gather data that can potentially falsify some of the possibilities.  This is how we discern reaction mechanisms. And most importantly, he pretends that because  paradigm shift is a thing that sometimes happens, he can then point at any science he doesn’t  like and just call it an

obsolete paradigm without basis. These are the trap doors that the  science denier uses to cast doubt on the body of modern scientific knowledge, amongst people  who never studied science and have no ability to validate this knowledge for themselves. He  flashes phylogenetic trees as if to imply that evolutionary biology is undergoing some sort of  crisis, which is totally idiotic. The implication is that because taxa can be rearranged, that the  whole concept of the phylogenetic tree should be

abandoned. In reality, taxonomy is a perfect  example of where his philosophical mental masturbation totally breaks down. The tree of life  is profoundly solid. There are broad aspects to its organization that absolutely will not change.  Only if you zoom way in, and look at individual phyla or much smaller taxa for which specimens  have only been collected over the past few decades, then there is more research to be done  regarding morphology and genetics that will help us place smaller clades

where they ought to go,  and indeed these placements are constantly being revised by zoologists, microbiologists, and other  researchers. But these revisions, and the fact that such revision occurs at all, specifically  strengthens the tree of life. Its principles are being used in conjunction with novel techniques  in genetics to great efficacy by thousands of researchers to produce agreement about the  natural world. This is the precise opposite of the “priesthood protecting sacred knowledge”

  he intends to convey. Science is somehow dogmatic and unchanging but also constantly going through  paradigm shifts. The moron can’t make up his mind. If we are led to believe that there are no  metaphysical or ideological presuppositions which underpin science, then we are much less  likely to raise awkward questions about whether or not those presuppositions themselves might be  distorting our conception of the world. This has thus allowed the apologists of “the science”  to depict science a

s though it were a kind of elite priesthood of individuals who are the  appointed curators of a body of sacred knowledge. He then devolves into a seemingly never-ending  sermon about metaphysics over stock footage of fractals that can be summarized as “but how do  you know science is right when there’s all this crazy magic I want to believe”. He again pretends  that falsifiability is a charade because theories are always revised to evade falsification,  obviously remaining intentionally vague be

cause there have been countless instances in which  theories have been conclusively falsified and abandoned. Spontaneous generation. Miasmatic  theory. Phrenology. The aether. Einstein’s static universe. Phlogiston. Geocentrism.  And it happens all the time today as well, in astrophysics, molecular biology, everywhere. Furthermore, antithetical to paradigm shift, when models are revised to fit new data, this is  also how science works. In 10th grade chemistry we are all supposed to learn about t

he evolution  of atomic theory. From Dalton’s little billiard balls to Thomson’s plum pudding model, to  Rutherford’s nuclear model, to Bohr’s energy levels, to Schrodinger’s conception of electron  orbitals. This is the clearest depiction of the progress of science imaginable. None of these  models were wrong, they were just less complete than the model that came next. Bohr’s energy  levels define the principal quantum number, which is part of the system of quantum numbers  that describe the at

omic orbitals. Even going all the way back, Dalton’s laws of definite and  multiple proportions that he used to substantiate the existence of atoms are still true today.  When subatomic particles were discovered, it didn’t render atomic theory obsolete, it became  more refined. The model improves to fit the data. If someone wants to propose some alternate model  for the structure of the atom today, they have to be able to explain everything that every chemist  has ever done for the past 150 year

s. So if some science illiterate fraud on the internet tried to  do that, any chemist would laugh right in their face, not because they’re being “dogmatic”, but  because their knowledge of chemistry affords them the ability to see how preposterous the fraud  is, and how demonstrably false their script is, totally incompatible with an enormous  interconnected body of knowledge that already exists. Science isn’t dogma. You’re just stupid. Many of the theories which we have looked at on this channe

l in previous videos, such as electric  universe theory, morphic resonance theory, inheritance of acquired characteristics  and even integrated information theory, have been denounced as pseudoscience in such a  way so as to imply that these theories somehow violate the supposed rules of science. And we finally get to the meat of what this guy pushes, electric universe. He can cry all  he wants, electric universe is pseudoscience. It is magic masquerading as science. The people who  push it don’

t actually do science. Certainly not anyone at Thunderbolts, and no, not even SAFIRE.  I’m not going to rehash all my debunks on this topic, so let’s just see where he takes it. Such machine technologies came to directly condition the manner in which science  was practiced, and even condition the form of scientific theories themselves.  The laws of thermodynamics, for example, came about specifically through efforts  to develop and understand the behavior of steam engines. As such, these laws pr

ove they are  useful in the development of such technologies, but beneath the surface we can see that this  metaphor was being extended to nature in general. Scientists came to generalize these laws to  the cosmos as a whole, and essentially came to think of the entire universe as being like  a vast expanding container of cooling steam. First he goes on a long rant about how much  of what we know regarding thermodynamics was developed through studying steam engines,  therefore physicists arrogan

tly view the universe as a machine and misplace assumptions about how  the universe works. This guy clearly has never studied any thermodynamics. Chemical reactions  are not machines, and we study the energy transfer associated with chemical processes. Energy is  a concept that is absolutely fundamental to the natural world, and he knows nothing about it. Given this alleged weirdness of the quantum world, the mechanistic manner of understanding nature  proved to be simply inapplicable. Atoms, mo

lecules, and electromagnetic phenomena, could  no longer be understood as being composed of tiny machines. But in the wake of this inadequacy,  academic science did not simply throw out the machine metaphor. The metaphor had simply become  far too entrenched within academic culture, and moreover, Western countries were beginning to  become even more drastically technologized. And science was beginning to fully assume its role  as a kind of priesthood which would serve to legitimize these social

transformations through  perpetuating the meta-narrative of scientific, technological, and liberal democratic progress. Now we get to the quantum realm, and some pageantry about how the indeterminacy  of this realm somehow invalidates the process of gathering scientific knowledge and  creating technology with it. This is bananas dumb. He is labeling the scientific community as  a priesthood that is defending the creation of technology without bothering to acknowledge that  the mere existence of

technology is proof that our scientific understanding is valid. If our  understanding of the universe was illusory, we wouldn’t have technology. We wouldn’t have light  bulbs and refrigerators. We wouldn’t have planes and satellites and computers. Quantum mechanics  exists, and we also make machines. There is no contradiction here. There is no “sacred mystery”.  Physicists who study quantum phenomena learn about them and come to understand them. People who don’t  study these things, don’t. That

the quantum realm is profoundly counterintuitive, and can rightfully  be perceived as strange by our human brains, doesn’t mean that it is a dimension of magic  and mystery like charlatans pretend it is, in order to sell books and meditation retreats,  as we discussed in my debunk of quantum mysticism. The vast majority of the things which  astrophysicists believe they know about the history and structure of our universe, the vast  majority of the conclusions which are triumphantly proclaimed on

public television by figures like  Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, are such inferences which are built upon the  assumption that our cosmos is driven primarily by gravity, and that gravity operates through  spacetime curvature. Throughout the subsequent history of the 20th century, following the  development of general relativity, astrophysicists would come to make many extremely confident  proclamations about the origins of our universe, the age of our universe, the expansion

rate of the  universe, the life cycles of stars and galaxies, the ultimate fate of our universe and the  existence of unobservable entities such as black holes. Every step of the way, all of  these inferences were depicted as factual, and the general public was repeatedly  assured that these inferences were made with extreme confidence on the basis of  incontestably well-established theories by elite professionals using the most cutting edge  technology available to mankind. All the while, every

single one of these inferences was made  on the basis of a theory that was demonstrably incomplete at best, and at worst simply false. And we now get to his pathetic posturing about how nebulous our understanding of the universe  truly is, how it’s just a bunch of assumptions based on relativity. Cosmology and the age of  the universe, astrophysics and the life cycle of stars, it’s just a bunch of conjecture! It  totally isn’t based on centuries of painstaking observation and calculation. This

really is  the main problem with science deniers like this. Because they never studied any science,  because they have no clue how science is done, they confidently assert their profound ignorance  over the entire scientific community. The mountain of observational evidence that supports figures  like our estimated age of the universe, that being the cosmic microwave background radiation,  galactic recession velocities, observable ratios in elements as well as subatomic particles,  successful si

mulations, it all simply doesn’t exist to them, because they refuse to learn  about it, and they act as though their laziness negates the scientific process. He sarcastically  mocks well-established theories, professionals, and cutting edge technology that are all used to  validate the existence of things like black holes, and just baselessly denies them. He pretends that  scientists wake up every day in a cold sweat, worried about public perception of their work.  It’s totally delusional. Scien

tists do their science. They don’t need the approval of some jerk  on the internet who will never lift a finger to learn about what it is that scientists do. Thousands of professional academic careers came to be built upon a foundation which was  known to be at best incomplete, and yet the professionalization and institutionalization  of science over previous decades had created incentive structures which strongly discouraged  skepticism towards the prevailing paradigm. There was a lot of money

on the line, and resisting the  mainstream meant risking the possibility of being ostracized by one’s professional community, and  therefore risking one’s career and livelihood. This narrative never ceases to perplex me. He  acts as though all the grant money in a field is tied to a specific theory. Grant money is  tied to science that produces results. If that means further corroborating a theory, the money  is there. If that means falsifying a theory, the money is there. Whatever advances scie

nce into  new territory has a shot at practical application, and could thus potentially be lucrative and  worth funding. This narrative of all scientists clinging to a failing paradigm for cash is just so  profoundly idiotic and antithetical to how science works, and how money works, that it discredits  any person who spews it at face value. People don’t waste billions of dollars for pride. Period. As early as the 1930s, astronomers who attempted to calculate the mass of distant galaxies realize

d  that if galaxies are indeed held together by a gravitational force, which operates in  a manner implied by general relativity, then galaxies do not have nearly enough mass to  actually produce the gravitational force needed to actually hold them together. In other words,  if general relativity were correct then we would expect these galaxies to fly apart rather  than maintaining their form, and moreover, they shouldn’t have been able to actually  form in the first place. There is no known phe

nomenon within the standard cosmological which  can account for this discrepancy, and so one might idealistically assume that this would have led  astrophysicists to cast doubt upon the veracity of general relativity. But for reasons which we  already examined, astrophysicists were unwilling to actually do so. And those who were willing to  express skepticism towards relativity cosmology were typically ridiculed as out of touch quacks.  Instead, physicists proposed the existence of dark matter a

s a way to resolve this discrepancy. Then it’s off to the races whining about dark matter, which will surprise nobody. It’s all just  crazy ad hoc lunacy to save relativity! Or it’s science you don’t understand and baselessly  attack just because physicists have enough whimsy to refer to it as dark matter instead of  non-baryonic matter, and this triggers your little pea brain into attack mode. Of course he makes  no mention of all the countless calculations and observations that validate genera

l relativity,  the perihelion precession of both mercury and stars closely orbiting the supermassive black  hole at galactic center, gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, and more, because that  wouldn’t suit his narrative, now would it? If for academic doctrinal science, science which  has come to be understood as an elite priesthood of sacred knowledge, this conclusion is simply  unacceptable. There is simply too much at stake. For many decades now, science popularizers  have repeated an

d reinforced the idea that the knowledge which has been sanctioned by  the elite is knowledge which can be relied upon with certainty. Thousands of professional  careers have been built upon the theories which have come to be regarded as doctrine, and  which have been systematically taught to students and the general public as facts,  not as mere conjectures or possibilities. In the end, this script all rests on this one  completely idiotic notion. That scientists all over the world would contin

ue to do science  that doesn’t work. That grant money would continue to magically appear all over the world  for science that doesn’t work. You have to be an intellectual toddler to entertain this notion.  It’s like pretending that the Wright brothers would keep trying the same failed model over  and over again, never figuring out how to fly, while scoffing at other inventors that  have blueprints for a plane that will fly, but for some reason never actually build it.  This is what science denie

rs want you to believe. Mr. Dave runs a very popular science YouTube  channel, which serves essentially the same sociological function as other forms of science  apologetics and his views are very standard with regards to forms of scientific research which fall  afoul of institutionally authorized doctrines. And now we get to the section about me. Oh goody!  Yes, my channel is nothing but a collection of accepted doctrines! All of these lectures on  organic chemistry, it’s nothing but dogma! Mol

ecules aren’t actually real, you see! Neither  are cells! Or human organ systems! Anyway, as I said, he’s going to have a hissy fit about my very  first debunk on electric universe. So here we go. In this video, Dave tries his hand at dismantling  the theoretical framework of electric universe theory, an alternative cosmological model,  which we have looked at a bit already in previous videos. Electric universe theory is  a theoretical framework which proposes that the primary driving force in c

osmic evolution  and morphogenesis is in fact electromagnetism rather than gravity. Electric universe theorists  essentially abandon Einsteinian cosmology and instead try to model phenomena such as star  formation and galaxy formation in terms of electromagnetic forces, rather than relying  predominately upon the effects of gravity. Electric universe is not a theory. It’s  pseudoscience. A theory is a model that correlates data and makes falsifiable predictions.  Electric universe is a bunch of

bullshit that charlatans spew to make money on the internet.  That all cosmic phenomena are determined chiefly or even partly by electromagnetism is  a non-starter at face value, because electromagnetism is both attractive and repulsive,  while matter exerts an exclusively attractive influence. Gravity. Bulk matter is electrically  neutral. That’s really all you need to prove that electric universe is stupid. But let’s continue. We know for a fact that this equation describes our reality. We use

it to calculate  the trajectories of objects both on Earth and in space, and they are always  corroborated to high degrees of precision. Alright, so I showed Newton’s law of universal  gravitation, explain that it is used to make predictions that are corroborated to high degrees  of precision, and this idiot comes back with “nuh uh”. Where did you see that, exactly? Because  here’s reality. Every satellite in orbit. Every probe that has ever navigated the solar system.  Every comet that shows u

p exactly where we say it will, when we say it will. How do we do  that? Newtonian mechanics. Can you make those predictions, Formscapes? I know you can’t,  even using real physics. But you sure as hell can’t do it without it. We landed a probe on a  comet, for crying out loud. Using our physics, we performed calculations so sophisticated  and precise, that we were able to launch a probe from Earth and make it land on a comet. What is that, Formscapes, blind chance? Can you land a probe on a com

et? Can any electric  universe morons land a probe on a comet? No? Then shut your dumb mouth. Newtonian mechanics  isn’t invalid just because you’re too lazy to learn about it. Maybe one day you’ll find  the courage to do so, and I have plenty of classical physics tutorials that can help  you get started. But until then, try to accept that science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. Furthermore, we understand electromagnetism at least as well as we understand gravity. We  have electricity, we have

an understanding of materials science, semiconductors, batteries,  and other assorted phenomena. So how is that we understand gravity so well, and electromagnetism  so well, but not well enough to realize that one is the other? But, in the end, electric universe  is just another flavor of paranoia and mysticism as I will demonstrate for you here. Now to begin with, we can see that Mr. Dave begins his entire deconstruction on  the presumption that electric universe theory essentially amounts to a

reduction of gravity to  electromagnetism. This is already misleading. Not all electric universe theorists presume that  gravity is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Then he flashes clips from Wal Thornhill and  idiot copycats to pretend that I’m somehow misunderstanding what they say. I’m not, at all.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re saying gravity can be replaced by electromagnetism, or that  gravity has an electromagnetic component. It doesn’t matter the degree or flavor, it’s just  wrong. He

conveniently skips over all the ways in the video in which I demonstrate conclusively  that it’s wrong. He says I’m being “flippant”, when in reality he is flippantly ignoring the  fact that I spent 20 minutes outlining very simple and intuitive ways in which researchers  could easily demonstrate an electromagnetic component to gravity with very simple experiments  that could be done in a middle school classroom. He has no response, so he just pretends I didn’t  do that. He says I’m not willing

to consider any model EU proposes, but there is none. It’s  all just stories of ancient civilizations making cave paintings about lightning in the  sky, or stars as “anodes” and other laughable appropriation of scientific terminology in ways  that contradict basic physics. When I conclusively prove that something isn’t true, and you refuse  to engage with what I said to prove it, at all, you’re the one hiding behind ideology. You’re the  one desperately clinging to the narrative where the under

dog must dethrone the evil authoritarian  dogma. He is totally incapable of engaging with the actual meat of the video, so he doesn’t  show any of it, and retreats to his pathetic script about how we don’t know how gravity works,  and that’s why dark matter and blah blah blah. Come on, Formscapes. Why can’t you do a point  for point response to my video? Acceleration due to gravity changing predictably and measurably  according to mass and distance from the center of the gravitational field, bot

h on Earth and other  celestial bodies. The ability to know where every celestial body will be at any given time in the  future. Zero variation in the freefall behavior of objects with differing magnetic properties. A  profoundly detailed description of the life cycle of stars which matches observations everywhere  in the galaxy, their composition, their behavior. Line spectra. Magnetohydrodynamics. Doppler  imaging. Satellite clocks and time dilation. Why don’t you have anything to say about an

y of  this, big guy? And what about everything I’ve done to invalidate everything these EU nutters have  ever said? When they propose their explanation of a star, I expose inconsistencies like negatively  charged particles somehow streaming both to the star to power it and away from it in the solar  wind. Positive and negatively charged particles inhabiting the same stream in the solar wind  despite having opposite charge. Why can’t you engage with a single concrete scientific point  I make in t

his or any other video on the topic? Because you don’t actually care about science.  You care about stories. You show literally 30 seconds of my video where I summarize the insanity  of electric universe, and pretend that’s all I’ve said in a video that’s nearly half an hour of  hard science wall to wall. “He’s just a dogmatic overlord who is afraid of science!” Exclaims the  coward who never makes even a half-assed attempt to actually discuss a single concrete phenomenon  or experiment. You pre

tend that people like me just say “nuh uh” to pseudoscience, when in  fact it is you and the pseudoscience peddlers you defend that are saying “nuh uh” to real  science. You are completely incapable of engaging with a single concrete scientific argument, and  don’t do it a single time in a two hour video. It's as though you’re pretending that this  round peg doesn’t fit in this round hole, even though I’m showing you that it does, and  insist instead that this square peg would fit much better, n

o matter how many times I show  you that it objectively doesn’t. Instead of acknowledging anything I’m showing you,  you just whine about dogma. But again, science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. Then he launches into attacking someone else, a scientist who calls out delusional  narcissist crackpots for pretending they understand physics better than real physicists. This is a video by another very popular science YouTuber, who goes by the moniker acollierastro.  This video is titled “Physics Cr

ackpots”, and in this video, this person articulates  a very colorful narrative about people who she deems to be crackpots, people who believe they  are capable of actually doing theoretical physics, or at least criticizing standard physics, but  who are, so we are told, really just a bunch of lunatics who have lost their grip on reality. Just like with me, he refuses to actually play a single clip of her saying anything concrete, any  specific example of crackpots, and how we know they’re crack

pots. He just mutes her and speeds  her up, and spews his commentary while pretending she doesn’t say anything. He then moves on to  referencing proven charlatans like SAFIRE project, which again, I debunked to smithereens in another  video. If she is so wrong, why is he so afraid to let her speak, and actually respond to anything  she’s saying? Instead he pivots to another video, where she talks about Avi Loeb, who does indeed  exhibit some crackpot tendencies. Sometimes real scientists do that

too. She doesn’t really say  that crackpots are all amateurs, he just doesn’t actually show her talking. At all. Luc Montagnier  won a Nobel prize for isolating HIV and now he’s a full blown crackpot promoting structured water  and all kinds of other abject nonsense. It happens. Loeb pushes this alien thing for press.  Pretending that he must be right just because other scientists point out the baselessness of his  claims is just idiotic. He even shows clips of her discussing the periodicity of

Oumuamua’s rotation,  which is how we know it’s just a lifeless rock, but it’s sped up and muted. How pathetic. If the evidence really were so firmly on their side, and there really were no major reasons  to doubt mainstream physics or cosmology, then why bother making videos like these? Why not  just demonstrate that the mainstream theories can actually be trusted? If the contradictions, failed  predictions, and unexplainable observations don’t give us good reason to believe that mistakes  wer

e made along the way, then why not? Why reduce onself to making fun of other people  with different ideas rather than actually handling oneself with maturity and authenticity?  Why try to convince people not to take certain ideas seriously, if you really believe that those  ideas cannot withstand careful scrutiny anyway? That is exactly what I do, you idiot. I  make these videos specifically to show the public how the science they aren’t familiar  with DOES work, and how people like you are just

lying about it. The public is supremely  susceptible to bullshit rhetoric like yours, and science denial is a huge problem, so you  then have to be neutralized by me explaining with crystal clarity how you’re dumb and wrong. Sing it  with me! Science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid. Science is therefore the presumption that  we can actually see the truth rather than simply receiving the truth as it is handed down  to us by institutional structures of authority. The further science becomes remov

ed from such  direct experiential contact with the world, the more science ceases to be genuinely scientific  and the more so-called science comes to be no more than yet another ideology conditioned  by entanglements of financial, political, technological, and institutional power. We cannot  and should not trust “the science” understood as a set of beliefs which are legitimized by  an institutional elite. But we can instead trust science. The actual practice of bringing our  ideas into engagemen

t with the world, as a means of revealing the inner nature of the world. And he wraps up with a reiteration of the same idiotic monologue. Don’t trust the  science, which is how we get anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers, and all manner of  other poisonous lines of thinking that could result in the obliteration of the human race.  In the end, people like Formscapes are just delusional narcissists who desperately need to  believe that they have a superior intellect. They want to be super spe

cial geniuses, who  without any training whatsoever, don’t just understand the universe as well as figures like  Einstein, but actually better! They pretend they can point out erroneous thinking in the work of  scientists they don’t have a shred of ability to comprehend in the first place. Give a guy like  this a general relativity textbook and watch him have a panic attack. What’s wrong with this page,  Formscapes? What about this one? Can you show me where the dogma is? Or this one, can you sh

ow me  what’s wrong here? Oh you have absolutely no idea, but it must be wrong because former computer  salesman Wal Thornhill said so? This psychology is an attempt to drag real knowledge down to his own  level of cluelessness, so as to then assert his own delusions above reality. He’s basically a flat  earther with moderate competence in philosophical jargon. And his obsession with metaphysics does  not save him from the power of science. There is some validity to the notion that science is a 

representation of reality and not reality itself, but nevertheless, if you can calculate at  what point a bullet will hit you and kill you, you can save yourself with science. If you invoke  metaphysics and argue that the bullet is just a representation and not actually real, there  will be no time for debate, you’ll just be dead. In summary, this portrayal of science as  religion is as tired a trope as one can imagine. The precise imperfection and revision he  discusses is precisely why scienc

e is so reliable, and that theories change does not negate the  fact that they actually work. We cure diseases, build rockets, and send people to the moon. These  theories that enable us to do these things remain valid even when better ones come along. And  indeed, there is plenty of room in science for new ideas. All the time, scientists propose  new bold theories that challenge the scientific community. If they stand up to scrutiny,  they are pursued further. If not, they are abandoned. Things

like electric universe do not  belong to either category. It is not a theory, which it would have to be in order to qualify for  whatever paradigm shift Formscapes wants it to represent. This desperate attempt at validating  crackpots under the veneer of epistemological revolution is a cancer upon the fabric of society,  propagated by grifters who profit from the naivete of their listeners. This is the real crisis in  modern science. Not that science has lost its way, or become corrupt, but rat

her that science  progresses so rapidly that the world has changed completely over the past century, leaving  so many people oblivious and dumbfounded, resulting in millions rejecting science out  of bitterness for the loss of the blissful ignorance of the period before. Science doesn’t  offer anyone delusions of being special, eternal, or loved by the universe. Real science correlates  data and makes predictions. And the validity of science isn’t measured by whether it gives you  a cool feeling

of being a rogue trailblazer, no matter how much you like how that feels. So, Formscapes, the only thing you made clear in that two hour turdfest is that your singular  tactic is to refer to well substantiated science as “dogmatic”, simply because educated people can  so easily point out how pseudoscience is wrong, you’re just too much of a lazy coward to  engage with it. Because, one last time: science isn’t dogma, you’re just stupid.  Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time.