re: #133 ObserverArt

Watched Mr. Climate Denier interview with Bill Maher. If you need proof he is just a contrarian he fumbles bad on the Galileo bit.

When Maher points out that wasn’t a science theory but a religious position. Mr. Climate Denier then says it was a theological argument that was long held that was proven by the hero Galileo.

Really weak dude, but I suppose you thought a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference between religion and theology. Only your smug ass knows those big words.

And he really blows up his own argument by making Galileo heroic against the staid monolithic opinion. He has the advantage to judge something that happened so long ago. And he wants to compare it to something that is happening right now that is still being fought over. We are early in the politics of it, so there is no sense of hero because the hero in this won’t be judged until the monolith is changed and climate science denial is gone.

In a sense he puts Galileo back in the position of being silenced by the church. This time the church is the conservative mindset and the scientists very likely are the heroes…yet to come. He basically is denying Galileo in his argument since he is arguing at the point Galileo was also being blown off as bad science.

Denialists and alt-science types love them some Galileo, and alternatively Nicola Tesla, too. They elevate both men as heroes fighting against the rigid Establishment that was dead set to silence them.

They skip over the historical facts. Galileo had concrete evidence for the Copernican theory (TBH it was not ironclad evidence, but it was damned good), and the Church even admitted as such. Galileo was not punished for spreading an alternative scientific theory. He was punished for spreading heresy and resisting the Pope’s specific instructions not to popularize the Copernican theory. The Church, according to the historical record, was willing to accept Copernicus’ model as valid (he was a canon, after all), but the Church wanted to control the news, as it were. Galileo was subverting the authority of the Church by ridiculing Aristotelian theory and thereby Church dogma in his books. So, he was punished.

As for Tesla, some of his ideas were grounded in real science. Quite a lot of others were nonsense, or unworkable. His proposal of wireless electrical power transmission would have involved sending gigawatts of microwaves (or whatever) through the air. Convenient, yes, but highly inefficient, as most of the energy would be wasted.

Tesla’s problem was not Big Energy, but his own inability to stay financially solvent.