E=mc2 is a liberal conspiracy

[joebuck20]

At least according to Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis).

http://gawker.com/5608853/emc2-is-a-liberal-conspiracy

[Jackknifed Juggernaut]

Well, in fairness to Jesus, I don't recall hearing about any other gods that understood the TOR either. Unless you consider Einstein a god, which I'm sure many do.

[Really Not All That Bright]

The truth has a liberal bias, remember.

[Lare]

Of course the people living then had the instruments necessary to measure this.

Conservapedia defines "action-at-a-distance" as "Action at a distance consists of affecting a distant body instantaneously. At the atom level, this is known as "non-locality." In non-confusing terms, that indicates the ability to cause something to happen instantaneously in another location (i.e., faster than the speed of light). Since Jesus could, reportedly, do this, thus Einstein is wrong. Schlafly's evidence is John 4:46-54, in which Jesus reportedly cured someone's son just by saying it had happened.

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.
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.
"Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders," Jesus told him, "you will never believe."
The royal official said, "Sir, come down before my child dies."
Jesus replied, "You may go. Your son will live."The man took Jesus at his word and departed.
While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living.
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."
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.

Because, see, "at the seventh hour" would have been measured by two people, one with Jesus, one at the official's son's sickbed using synchronized timepieces who would then communicate, somehow, to each other exactly when the words were spoken and when the healing happened.

[Yossarian]

Jesus rose from the dead after three days. DID EINSTEIN???

[jjimm]

And there was me thinking it was phallocentric and sexist because:

Originally Posted by Some crazy-ass feminist

it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us

[Captain Amazing]

Schlafly doesn't like the theory of relativity because of the word "relativity", which he conflates with the word "relativism" But, you know, there are a lot of idiots out there who believe idiotic stuff.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Captain Amazing

Schlafly doesn't like the theory of relativity because of the word "relativity", which he conflates with the word "relativism" But, you know, there are a lot of idiots out there who believe idiotic stuff.

Apparently he's read Paul Johnson's Modern Times, which does draw a causal link between the Theory of Relativity and 20th-Century moral relativism. Whether there's anything to that is debatable.

Johnson stresses that Einstein himself had the "proper scientific attitude," stating he would not consider his theory even provisionally proven until at least two of three verification experiments he proposed produced data in agreement with his predictions (they did), and seeing no implications at all for his theory in ethics or politics.

[Chessic Sense]

Love this comment:

Wait a minute, Jesus had mass, and Jesus is the light! The theory stands!

[Lare]

Originally Posted by Chessic Sense

Love this comment:

I thought the church had Mass. Usually on Sunday mornings.

[shiftless]

Here we have people who claim that God can break the laws of physics claiming that the laws of physics are wrong because God can break them. Whaa? If we can going to call any statement of fact wrong because God isn't bound by that fact, don't we have to throw out all information as useless?

Circular Jesus logic means nothing is true unless your religious leader tells you so. What a happy place to be if you are a religious leader.

[Knowed Out]

OK, so if Jesus can heal people from a distance, how does that negate the ToR? The kid was maybe a few miles away (say 5), and light travels at 186000 miles per second, so Jesus's healing energy would have gotten there in .000003 seconds. It would never have occurred to anybody back then to account for such a small amount of time, so maybe that's why the verse isn't "The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour plus .000003 seconds."

[Malacandra]

Originally Posted by shiftless

Here we have people who claim that God can break the laws of physics claiming that the laws of physics are wrong because God can break them.

And that's exactly it. If the invalid was healed at the exact same instant Jesus said it, without even a lightspeed delay, all that means is that God can violate the lightspeed constraint just as he can bring the dead back to life. It doesn't invalidate the general principles that nothing can act faster than light and the dead stay dead.

[woodstockbirdybird]

The Onion should just start plagiarizing Conservapedia for its headlines.

[Steve MB]

Conservapedia is a perfect example of Poe's Law -- it's impossible to distinguish between the trolls and the sincere nut cases.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Yossarian

Jesus rose from the dead after three days. DID EINSTEIN???

With a little help . . .

The rest of that evening I'd just as soon forget.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Steve MB

Conservapedia is a perfect example of Poe's Law -- it's impossible to distinguish between the trolls and the sincere nut cases.

And guess what! Conservapedia has its own entry on Poe's Law.

[elucidator]

There was a young Christian named Bright
"The Lord is much faster than light!
He was living on Easter
But they nailed up his keister
On Friday, still three days away!"

[Really Not All That Bright]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

And guess what! Conservapedia has its own entry on Poe's Law.

Oh, dear God.

[shiftless]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

And guess what! Conservapedia has its own entry on Poe's Law.

Thanks for the link. It's like stepping into topsy-turvy world.

[Euphonious Polemic]

Originally Posted by elucidator

There was a young Christian named Bright
"The Lord is much faster than light!
He was living on Easter
But they nailed up his keister
On Friday, still three days away!"

"away" does not rhyme with "Bright" or "light"

Limerick fail.

[woodstockbirdybird]

Originally Posted by Euphonious Polemic

"away" does not rhyme with "Bright" or "light"

Limerick fail.

"On Friday, three days from tonight!"
Actually, that sucks. But it rhymes.

[Really Not All That Bright]

It kind of reads like a proof of Poe's Law itself. How meta.

ETA: the Conservapaedia page, that is.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by shiftless

Thanks for the link. It's like stepping into topsy-turvy world.

On that note, check out today's This Modern World.

[notsoheavyd3]

Originally Posted by shiftless

Here we have people who claim that God can break the laws of physics claiming that the laws of physics are wrong because God can break them. Whaa? If we can going to call any statement of fact wrong because God isn't bound by that fact, don't we have to throw out all information as useless?

Circular Jesus logic means nothing is true unless your religious leader tells you so. What a happy place to be if you are a religious leader.

Umm, these are the same people that claim evolution can't happen because that would break the 2nd law of thermodynamics. When it is then pointed out by that argument then no living thing can grow (IE increasing order) then they claim that living things can break the 2nd law because they're alive. (But still can't do evolution because that'd break the 2nd law.)

[elucidator]

Originally Posted by Euphonious Polemic

"away" does not rhyme with "Bright" or "light"

Limerick fail.

English majors! Is there no end to their perfidy, misfeasance, villainy, and pusillanimous pulchritude?

Its the Moldavian variation of the limerick, with the rhyme scheme A,A, B,B, and WTF. So there! Besides, check back next week and you'll see I fixed it yesterday.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by elucidator

English majors! Is there no end to their perfidy, misfeasance, villainy, and pusillanimous pulchritude?

Its the Moldavian variation of the limerick, with the rhyme scheme A,A, B,B, and WTF. So there! Besides, check back next week and you'll see I fixed it yesterday.

Of course! Who can forget the classic:

Oedipus and Jocasta would pucker
And out if her clothes he would shuck 'er
'Till he got a surprise
And he tore out his eyes
The pitiful, sad, Freudian archetype

[Alienhand]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

And guess what! Conservapedia has its own entry on Poe's Law.

Sometimes I forget just how wonderful that website is.

[tr0psn4j]

Stupid Einstein! We should have burned him for his heresy.

[elucidator]

They would have, but he was smart enough to know when to split.

[Chessic Sense]

Originally Posted by elucidator

They would have, but he was smart enough to know when to split.

Is that a "Nazi" joke or an "atom" joke? Either way, it's funny.

[elucidator]

Gone fission.

[Merijeek]

Originally Posted by Yossarian

Jesus rose from the dead after three days. DID EINSTEIN???

He once had a wicked bad hangover that lasted three days.

That count?

-Joe

[BrainGlutton]

From the Conservapedia page on the Theory of Relativity:

Lack of evidence for Relativity

The Theory of relativity assumes that time is symmetric just as space is, but the biggest early promoter of relativity, Arthur Eddington, coined the term "arrow of time" admitting how time is not symmetric but is directional. The passage of time is tied to an increase in disorder, or entropy. The Theory of relativity cannot explain this, and implicitly denies it, specifically allowing for theoretical time travel (e.g., wormholes) and different rates of passage of time based on velocity and acceleration.

Claims that relativity was used to develop the Global Positioning System (GPS) are false. A 1996 article explains:

"The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein's general theory of relativity would seem to require - transformations to and from the individual space vehicles (SVs), the Monitor Stations (MSs), and the users on the surface of the rotating earth, and the geocentric Earth Centered Inertial System (ECI) in which the SV orbits are calculated. There is a very good reason for the omission: the effects of relativity, where they are different from the effects predicted by classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory, are too small to matter - less than one centimeter, for users on or near the earth."[14][15]
This article, which was published in 1996, goes on to propose relativistic corrections that might be used to design more accurate GPS systems. Clocks on board GPS satellites require adjustments to their clock frequencies if they are to be synchronized with those on the surface of the Earth.

Tom Van Flandern, an astronomer hired to work on GPS in the late 1990s, concluded that "[t]he GPS programmers don't need relativity." He was quoted as saying that the GPS programmers "have basically blown off Einstein."[16] Asynchronization can be easily addressed through communications between the satellites and ground stations, so it is unclear why any theory would be needed for GPS. But other obscure physicists having no connection with GPS design claim that Van Flandern is wrong about GPS, and insist that relativity provides the best explanation for its timing adjustments.[17]

Some internet articles claim that GPS timing differences confirm the Theory of Relativity or its Lorentzian counterpart (which uses a preferred frame of reference). GPS clocks run slower in the weaker gravitation field of the satellites than on ground stations on Earth, with the effects predicted by general relativity far outweighing the effects predicted by special relativity. However, the articles claiming that the slower GPS satellite clocks confirm relativity do not address the effect, if any, of the weaker gravitational force under Newton's theory on the GPS satellite clocks.

Currently, GPS satellites are synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time by radio signals from the ground; therefore, they cannot currently be used to test general relativity.[18]

There are claims that the effects of relativity have been observed with the frequency shift of the signal being sent back to Earth several times as various spacecraft have dipped into the gravity wells around massive objects such as the sun (see image at right)[19] or Saturn[20]. A satellite called Gravity Probe B was put in orbit about the Earth to examine the effects of frame dragging and geodetic warping of space[21][22], but the results were inconclusive. Note, however, that Newtonian mechanics also predicts deflection of light by gravity, and in the initial theory of relativity it predicted the same amount of deflection.[23] Adjustments to the theory of relativity resulted in a prediction of a greater deflection of light than that predicated by Newtonian mechanics, though it is debatable how much deflection Newtonian mechanics should predict.

None of the NASA spacecraft incorporates predictions of relativity into their own timing mechanisms, as Newtonian mechanics is adequate even for probes sent deep into space.[24]

A decade of observation of the pulsar pair PSR B1913+16 detected a decline in its orbital period, which was attributed to a loss in energy by the system. It is impossible to measure the masses of the pulsars, their accelerations relative to the observers, or other fundamental parameters. Professors Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse, who discovered the binary pulsar, found that physical values could be assigned to the pulsars to make the observed decline in orbital period consistent with the Theory of General Relativity, and for this they were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics, which is the only award ever given by the Nobel committee for the Theory of Relativity.[25] In 2004, Professor Taylor utilized a correction to the derivative of the orbital period to fit subsequent data better to the theory. At most, assumptions can be made and altered to fit the data to the theory, rather than the data confirming the theory.

The perihelion of Mercury's orbit precesses at a measurable rate, but even after accounting for gravitational perturbations caused all other planets in the solar system, Newton's theory (assuming a precise inverse-square relationship for distance) predicts a rate of precession that differs from the measured rate by approximately 43 arcseconds per century. General relativity was developed in part to provide an estimate for this rate of precession that better matches observations.[26] [27] [28] Newton's theory can also explain this perihelion by factoring in the gravitational pull due to other planets or making tiny adjustments to parameters in the gravitational equation.

General relativity predicts twice as much bending in light as it passes near massive objects than Newton's theory might predict.[29] This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing. A large number of instances of gravitational lensing have been observed, and it is now a standard astronomical tool.[30] [31] [32] Note, however, that the extent of bending of light predicted by Newton's theory is open to debate, and depends on assumptions about the nature of light for gravitational purposes.[33]

In 1972, scientists flew extremely accurate clocks ("atomic clocks") around the world in both directions on commercial airlines, and claimed to observe relativistic time dilation; the eastbound clock gained 273 ns and the westbound clock lost 59 ns, matching the predictions of general relativity to within experimental accuracy.[34] However, the inventor of the atomic clock, Louis Essen, declared that the experiment was inaccurate.[35] Dr A. G. Kelly examined the raw data from the experiment and declared it inconclusive.[36] The Nobel Committee chose not to honor this experiment for the significance that was claimed.

Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities.[37]

<snip>

Political aspects of relativity
Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.[45] As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.[46] Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.[47] Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.[48]

Physicist Robert Dicke of Princeton University was a prominent critic[49] of general relativity, and Dicke's alternative "has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."[50] Despite being one of the most accomplished physicists in the 20th century, Dicke was repeatedly passed over for a Nobel Prize, and in at least one case Dicke was insulted by the award being granted to others for contributions more properly credited to Dicke.

There has been little recognition by the Nobel Prize committee of either theory of relativity, and particularly scant recognition of the Theory of General Relativity.

Government Support for Relativistic research

The Theory of Relativity enjoys a disproportionate share of federal funding of physics research today.[51] In at least one case that research has been unsuccessful. The $365 million dollar LIGO project has failed to detect the gravity waves predicted by relativity.[52]

[Malacandra]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

Of course! Who can forget the classic:

Oedipus and Jocasta would pucker
And out if her clothes he would shuck 'er
'Till he got a surprise
And he tore out his eyes
The pitiful, sad, Freudian archetype

And in more adventurous vein:

There was an Albanian monk
Who slept on a hard wooden bunk;
He dreamed naked Venus
Was sucking his finger
And woke up all covered in perspiration.

[Knowed Out]

So, it looks like Conservapedia thinks liberal professors managed to hoodwink entire colleges to mistake the ToR with Moral Relativity, and thus teaching all that quantum physics stuff dismantled all their students' moral structures.

Maybe Einstein is seen as the progenitor of this moral collapse because of quotes like this:

Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair.

So, maybe, MAYBE, that's the rationale behind the OP's link. (I keep trying to figure out why kooks think the way they do. What does that make me?)

[begbert2]

Originally Posted by Knowed Out

So, maybe, MAYBE, that's the rationale behind the OP's link. (I keep trying to figure out why kooks think the way they do. What does that make me?)

Eternally frustrated, I'd say, if "because they're kooks" doesn't satisfy you.

[Beware of Doug]

Originally Posted by Knowed Out

So, it looks like Conservapedia thinks liberal professors managed to hoodwink entire colleges to mistake the ToR with Moral Relativity, and thus teaching all that quantum physics stuff dismantled all their students' moral structures.

Maybe Einstein is seen as the progenitor of this moral collapse because of quotes like this:

Or it could just be because he was a kike. They tried that with Freud, too.

[cuauhtemoc]

Originally Posted by BrainGlutton

From the Conservapedia page on the Theory of Relativity:

This cannot be real, can it? Is Conservapedia like Wikipedia, where the general public can edit the articles? Because my mind won't let me believe this entry is sincere. It has to be a prank, right?

[Max the Immortal]

Originally Posted by shiftless

Thanks for the link. It's like stepping into topsy-turvy world.

I suppose it's more coherent than Timecube. At least by a little bit.

[Captain Amazing]

Originally Posted by cuauhtemoc

This cannot be real, can it? Is Conservapedia like Wikipedia, where the general public can edit the articles? Because my mind won't let me believe this entry is sincere. It has to be a prank, right?

The general public can edit the articles, because it is a wiki, but you need a user name to edit, and if you make an edit the admins don't like, they'll revert the edit and ban you. So, if the text is still in the article, that means the admins approve.

[Yllaria]

Originally Posted by Yossarian

Jesus rose from the dead after three days. DID EINSTEIN???

Well, his brain went for a ride 42 years later. Does that count?

[Rand Rover]

This thread shows the need to have a national conversation (or at least an SDMB conversation) on what a "conservative" is. The dude in the OP, while the founder of a "conservative" website, seems to be motivated in this regard by simple religiosity. Lots of religious people are conservatives, but that doesn't mean that any idea thought up by a religious person is a "conservative" idea.

[Duke]

I don't usually comment on the Google ads at the bottom of a thread, but I couldn't help but notice this thread's ads included one for "Lesbian Personals."

[Onomatopoeia]

Originally Posted by Rand Rover

This thread shows the need to have a national conversation (or at least an SDMB conversation) on what a "conservative" is. The dude in the OP, while the founder of a "conservative" website, seems to be motivated in this regard by simple religiosity. Lots of religious people are conservatives, but that doesn't mean that any idea thought up by a religious person is a "conservative" idea.

Wow. A conservative exists that even Rand Rover won't defend. Was that a rip in the fabric of space/time I just heard?

But seriously, to your point, and I know this is a complete hijack, so I apologize in advance, how can one objectively define a conservative when conservatives themselves don't, can't, or won't agree on a definition? Hm...probably deserves its own thread.

[BrainGlutton]

Originally Posted by Rand Rover

This thread shows the need to have a national conversation (or at least an SDMB conversation) on what a "conservative" is.

Here you go.

[DanBlather]

This does basically mean we have to line up all the conservatives and shoot them, right? There is absolutely no reasoning with them.

[Really Not All That Bright]

Well, it's all relative.

[elucidator]

Hey, not all the relatives! I'm from Texas, and some of my kin are just to the left of Otto von Bismarck.

[Knowed Out]

Originally Posted by begbert2

Eternally frustrated, I'd say, if "because they're kooks" doesn't satisfy you.

Maybe I should start looking at you closer then.