In a world where people can be ignorant and/or paranoid enough to believe that the moon landings were faked, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Earth is genuinely flat, there must, of course, be people nuts enough to think the recent discovery of gravity waves is a hoax. Some of them think it’s just another layer in the “round Earth conspiracy” — because nobody would believe the world was round without the confirmation of an otherwise unremarkable to the general public corner of Einstein’s theories, right? The most reasonable of them think the aLIGO team just screwed something up, but the reason they didn’t announce their findings until this month (even though the signal was captured in September) was because they were trying to prove that they hadn’t. So, if they have screwed up, and gravity waves aren’t really a thing, there’s going to be a lot of embarrassment to go around. Anyway, Gizmodo has a brief on some of the different camps on the conspiracy web, which you can spend some of your day shaking your head about.
That is, if the Antonin Scalia conspiracy theories aren’t enough for you.
Happy Monday, everyone.
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Richard Ford Burley is a writer and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.