Fear, or contempt, of knowledge?

Yesterday, the Cincinnati Bengals beat the Seattle Seahawks by a score of 27-24 on the back of a successful field goal in overtime. Normally, I would care less about this than I would just about anything else on the planet, up-to and including Kim Kardashian's opinions on international politics. However, something interesting did come from this game. You see, the Bengals' kicker bounced the football in off the left upright, by only the thinnest of margins winning the game. And cue Neil deGrasse Tyson:

And here I was, thinking that the Coriolis force only related to flushing toilets!

This was something I had not considered, did not know, and it is a delight, isn't it? It is wonderful to have an astrophysicist be able to communicate directly with a lay population on matters that matter to them. The basic message here is, "Physics is important. I bet you didn't consider this little force that can affect the game you love!" I know I hadn't. And now, I cannot help but think about all those sports plays that occur at the very margins - those passes that bounce just off the fingertips, those line drives that just barely make it into the top webbing of the fielder's glove, the fly balls that bounce off the top of the outfield fence and into the stands for home runs. How many of these plays would have been different if not for the Coriolis effect?

This tickled me.

I saw this story on ESPN.com. It wasn't long before the Internet threw a big bucket of ice water on my reverie. I tell my students to never read the comments. Well, I should heed my own advice.

Out of only three dozen comments, we find:

1) Contempt for Dr. Tyson and for the story in general.




2) Armchair physicists that think they know better than a goddamn astrophysicist. They don't.

3) This guy here that says that math doesn't matter, and what really matters is "heart." Just like when people talk about non-things like the human spirit, free will, and the soul, I have no idea how the hell we're supposed to measure "heart," nor how it could possibly affect the outcome of a football game.

4) And finally, complete disinterest.

I know that many people would read this and think, "Well, what do you expect on an ESPN forum? It's barely a step above YouTube comments. Of course the people there are going to be writing terrible, stupid things."

And that is precisely my point. Of course people are going to be writing terrible, stupid things. The conversation should not immediately go to a place of complete helplessness. Collectively, we shrug our shoulders at this kind of thing, but I think that it truly represents a cultural sickness. The sickness is that so many people find knowledge contemptible, that they spurn it, that they would tell an astrophysicist that he is wrong about physics, and get cocky about it despite being absolutely and obviously wrong in their analysis. 

Anti-intellectualism simultaneously scares and depresses the hell out of me.