Science 2.0, being about openness and outreach and participation, can attract its share of kooks. Depending on the whims of the community moderators around that day, goofy, speculative nonsense can even stay on the front page as a blog for a while. It comes with the territory but people who spend money on cameras, lights and lawyers can usually be taken more seriously.
Not always, as PZ Myers found with Expelled filmmakers. Sometimes the anti-science contingent has both money and an agenda.
Caltech theoretical physicist (and husband to Physics of the Buffyverse author Jennifer Ouellette - instant geek cred by association!) Sean Carroll recently got snookered into talking about quantum teleportation and then black ops projects by the CIA involving aliens walking through walls and something called "psychic remote viewing", words which I think I understand contextually but seem to have no actual meaning, sort of like 'jobs created or saved'.
He departed from the interview at that point, of course, but will likely appear on film as part of the insular 'scientific establishment' blocking out radical new ideas. Somewhere in there, someone bonkers will get compared to Galileo. And maybe the Philadelphia Experiment will get 'scientifically proven'.
I have some insight for those filmmakers, based on slight knowledge of thousands of scientists - scientists are arrogant, competitive pricks. Scientists are not circling the wagons around anyone or anything, they work for little money because they'd rather be right than rich and tripping up someone or something famous is even better.
So given a chance, scientists would happily overthrow any Law of Thermodynamics you want and will endorse any Dirac mumbo-jumbo you might like ... it just has to not, you know, be made up. The first guy to do so will get the biggest Nobel Prize ever.
Carroll wonders what everyone does - where engaging woo ends and implying respectability by addressing pseudoscience begins. It's a fuzzy line and everyone has to pick their own spot.
So, Sean, for your arrogance in not playing along, I assume your day is coming and I look forward to your comeuppance on cable television, presumably early in 2011. I, for one, also look forward to bowing before our Quantum Paranormal Overlords - whenever they pop out of whatever extra dimension they are hiding in, that is. But I hope they do it before 2012, because I am expecting Mayan Overlords leading an army of Strangelets to appear from the LHC at the end of that year so I will be all booked up.
