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Pseudo-Science: How to See Through It
Medium is no safe haven of wisdom. Make sure you don’t fall for pseudo-scientific nonsense.
Recently, I came across an article on Medium whose title claimed that the author proved the existence of God with a mathematical equation. “Probably nonsense, but maybe interesting,” I thought and opened the article. What I read shook my (already slim) confidence in humanity’s ability to think straight.
What the author presented, was not even an equation. All he did was calculate the square of a number and interpret a meaning into the result. A simple case of number mysticism. And then he went on to “connect” this result to a building he claims exists on Mars (of course it doesn’t, because if it did, it would be pretty much the biggest scientific discovery ever and everyone would know about it).
Why am I telling you this? This guy is obviously nuts, so we should simply ignore him, right? Yes. The problem is that not everybody sees that. Mr. God-exists-my-calculator-says has followers. And he is certainly not the only nutcase on Medium.
That’s why I decided to write an article on how to debunk pseudo-science as such. In many cases the authors of pseudo-scientific articles are not as far over the edge as in the above example, so it is sometimes not so easy…
