Simple is not always true
A common feature of paradoxers is a confusion between a simple argument and a correct one.
Our chief consultant writes:
Our astronomer maintains an on-line presence at the appropriate department of a university, which means an email address that interested people can find. Mostly this means invitations to publish in journals of which he’s never heard, or to attend conferences in fields in which he has no expertise: academic junk mail and phishing. Now and then there’s a paradoxer, a type of individual we’ve mentioned before (though not recently). The latter are generally concerned to bring to his attention their own solutions to some or all the problems of modern physics, so incompetently addressed by mainstream scientists. They express themselves with various levels of incoherence, and it generally takes attention and patience to make out what they’re saying at all; so he rarely wastes much time on them. One persistent example, however, shows some interesting features of paradoxers as a class.
This one wants our astronomer’s support to rescind the Nobel Prize awarded to scientists who discovered (or demonstrated) that neutrinos have mass. Our astronomer has no connection with, or influence over, the Nobel Committe; indeed, he doesn’t know who they are (and vice versa). But paradoxers often have the impression that Science is a monolithic entity, to be unraveled completely once they find a loose end to pull on.
His reasoning is, for once, understandably simple: the researchers did not determine the mass. Hence they did nothing at all, and certainly didn’t deserve a prize for it.
Well, a complete explanation of quantum mechanics as applied to neutrinos would be too long and too technical to attempt here. But in summary: there are three known kinds of neutrino. The fact that one can turn into another means that they all have mass, and the masses are all different. Actually determining the masses is a different problem, one that hasn’t been solved yet.
Understanding part of a problem, but being unwilling or unable to follow further explanations, is a paradoxer trait. This is true especially if the further explanations involve a form of indirect reasoning. The “hollow Earth” paradoxer insists that there could be an inverted world, occupying the inside of a shell, the outside of which we live on. The fact that sound waves from earthquakes would behave quite differently from what we observe in that case makes no impression; he insists that only an expedition to the inside can actually settle the matter. The “young Earth” paradoxer, when presented with an argument that the world is more than six thousand years old, is taught to respond: “Were you there?” as if only in-person evidence is admissible.
But in fact an indirect line of reasoning may be more reliable than a set of eyes in place. If you go out and observe the sky over a period of days or weeks, depending on the weather, you will see the Sun and Moon rise in the east and set in the west; the stars do the same, at a slightly different rate; while the generally flat Earth stays immobile in the center. This is all from first-person experience. It is not actually true. But the proof that it’s wrong requires indirect reasoning and arguments that are not simple. Their virtue is that they’re right.
