Post 2: Wherein I Get To Rag On Cracked

Samuel here.

Here is an easy-to-digest audio file narrated by Mr. Suave (yours truly), just because I care! [I will record this file the moment my housemates aren't sleeping or working. So it should be up by May.]

Here is a link to the original Cracked article.

Now, there is nothing I dislike more than when Cracked is wrong about stuff, because they are so loveable. If it were up to them to compose this sentence, it would be a funny and memorable analogy. Unfortunately, they're wrong about stuff really often, and frequently it's because they are prone to spectacular feats of exaggeration. This article is no exception, and I would like to provide a point-by-point response. Note that I'm way more prepared to be wrong about this stuff than I am about political theory, so feel free as usual to leave a comment telling me that I'm not very bright.

1. Coronal Heating Problem.

So Cracked completely and unambiguously misrepresents the status of this problem. This article pretty thoroughly describes a plausible explanation that is decently widely accepted. The idea is that super hot jets of plasma radiate out into space from inside the sun, heating the corona (not the vacuum around space, as Cracked puts it, which is literally nonsensical). We didn't know about this until fairly recently because they are insanely speedy, which makes them very difficult to detect.

2. Gravity on a Microscale

Yeah, that's a real problem. It's also been the central focus of physics for the last 97 years. I agree this belongs here, but it's not exactly news to anyone who, say, watches The Big Bang Theory.

3. Flyby Anomaly

Let's ignore that "there are multiple instances where NASA's Galileo, NEAR, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft have experienced an unexplainable increase in speed over massive distances" is deceptive; it's a tiny increase in speed that occurs at a point close to the Earth, not an increase in speed over massive distances, and let us also ignore that they linked to one article from 2008 as proof that there exists no useful theory. While it remains unexplained (except maybe by some pretty fucking weird conjecture), it is just patently absurd for Cracked to claim that it's a Scientific Discovery That Laughs in the Face of Physics. It really isn't. A measured anomaly that departs a tiny bit from the expected value sounds to me like how discoveries begin, not like the huge Fuck You to physics that they make it out to be. It is awesome for physics when things don't go quite as planned. That's how all the interesting stuff starts. So I find it misleading and strange that Cracked would treat it as some mindbogglingly amazing departure from our models. Probably it's just a small tweak that really doesn't threaten anything at all about modern physics.

4. Law of Conservation of Energy

I really like the contents of this one, and it definitely belongs in here. But to say that "The science behind this gets pretty complicated" is a really huge understatement. A more appropriate description would be something like "the science behind this is one of the two or three most complex pieces of practical mathematics ever tackled by a human being." It's about as well understood as a Catalan in Zimbabwe. It seems hopelessly arrogant to me to claim that it provides a permanent threat to the Law of Conservation of Energy.

5. Quantum Zeno

This one is well-described and absolutely does belong on this list.

6. Relativity Whatever

I was deathly afraid that this would come up. Not only is this an essentially debunked finding, but the conclusion that the Cracked article draws from it is just dumb.
i) Relativity works. If it didn't work, you wouldn't be able to place phone calls or access the internet; satellites are specified to correct for relativity. Relativity works. I heard this guy say that general relativity as a theory, without any tweaking, is essentially bankrupt in terms of the findings it produces, and that given the premise that either relativity or quantum mechanics must go, it will probably be relativity. But in the short term, in the here and now, relativity works.
ii) You can't claim that time travel is a real possibility based on one unexplained experiment, no matter how many times it was conducted. Unless it's an experiment where you sent someone back in time.
iii) Someone pretty reasonably explained why this happened, and it has literally nothing to do with relativity being wrong. This is the generally accepted solution to the CERN anomaly.

5. and 2. are legit. 1., 3., 4., and 6. are great examples of why writers need to actually understand what they're writing about before they compose their works. Cracked consistently puts together absurd and misleading articles with way off-the-mark conclusions, and no one ever calls them on it. They should. Cracked sucks.

Anyhow, please leave me a comment to tell me how you liked this post. Once you've done that, please help me fulfill my interminable craving for human attention; phone your friends, tweet your grandmother, smoke signal your alien overlords, and tell them there's this dude on the internet and he's really really mad.

Until next time, keep on trucking.