Causality and Filling the Ignorance Gap
There is an old adage: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” In the science denial arena, however, this adage seems to have been recrafted to something like: “What you don’t know is an invitation to make up fake science.” Before it was dis¬covered that tuberculosis is caused by a rather large bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis it was widely believed to be the result of poor moral character. Similarly, AIDS was attributed to “deviant” lifestyles, like being gay or using intravenous drugs. When we don’t know what causes something, we are pummeled by “experts” telling us what to believe. Vaccines cause autism. ECT causes brain damage. GMOs cause cancer. Interestingly, the leap by the public to latch onto extreme theories does not extend to all branches of science. Physicists are not certain how the force of gravity is actually conveyed between two bodies. The theoretical solutions offered to address this question involve mind-boggling mathematics and seemingly weird ideas like 12 dimensional strings buzzing around the universe. But we don’t see denialist theories about gravity all over the Internet. Maybe this is simply because the answer to the question does not seem to affect our daily lives one way or the other. But it is also the case that even though particle physics is no more or less complex than molecular genetics, we all believe the former is above our heads but the latter is within our purview. Nonphysicists rarely venture an opinion on whether or not dark matter exists, but lots of nonbiologists will tell you exactly what the immune system can and cannot tolerate. Even when scientific matters become a little more frightening, when they occur in some branches of science, they register rather mild atten¬tion. Some people decided that the supercollider in Switzerland called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might be capable of producing black holes that would suck in all of Earth. Right before the LHC was scheduled to be tested at full capacity, there were a few lawsuits filed around the world trying to stop it on the grounds that it might induce the end of the world.