Wrong About Everything

Tomorrow's post will be a report of an article takedown from three years ago regarding CERN and how it will destroy the earth on or around September 23, 2015. It's almost three years later and the article is still up (http://www.thedailyreporter.com/article/20150901/NEWS/150909972) and we are still here. Shocking, I know.

The article itself is a prime example of scientific illiteracy and conspiracy thinking. The author never bothers to look up actual information about CERN and uses only YouTube videos by conspiracy theorists to fill in details. Needless to say, it is all wrong. Just by reading this article, I can tell that the author was probably one of those people who forwarded emails that began, "This has already been checked out through Snopes and it's true, so you don't have to check." He probably shares memes all over Facebook, too.

I have preached the importance of fact-checking and spreading misinformation before. While this article is almost three years old, there are still people who believe that Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy the world. The original article makes all of these assumptions about CERN and the LHC (used interchangeably by the author) that could easily be checked by going to Wikipedia. This is why intelligent people won't take conspiracy theorists seriously.

Thanks to celebrities hopping on the anti-science bandwagon, more people have decided to follow them instead of taking the path of science literacy. I suppose it's easier believe in misinformation and falsehoods than it is to actually study and read even the most basic science articles. Yes, science uses "jargon" that the laity don't understand, but that because in science fields, that language is necessary and descriptive. There are articles that cut through the jargon and give simple explanations of scientific concepts.