Who Is Ben Carson’s Mystery Physicist?
Mother Jones
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By now, we all know that Ben Carson thinks the pyramids were built by Joseph as grain silos. I’m sort of curious about where this idea came from, and maybe eventually we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’d like to highlight a different part of Carson’s pyramid speech:
“I recently had a discussion with a well-known physicist. He was talking about the Big Bang Theory and how all this obviously culminated into this wonderful, extraordinarily organized solar system that we now have, which you can set your watch by, where scientists can predict 70 years away when a comet is coming. That’s an incredible amount of organization to have originated from just a large explosion.”
Carson then tells the story of how he supposedly stumped the physicist by asking him how he could reconcile such an “organized” universe with the laws of thermodynamics, specifically entropy, which says that systems tend to move towards disorder.
“Well of course he has no answer for that. They never have an answer for any of these things.”
Huh. Not just a physicist, a “well-known” physicist. And Carson says this guy was floored by his question. Apparently he had never given any thought to whether the Big Bang theory was compatible with the second law of thermodynamics.
Conclusion: either this was the stupidest physicist ever, or else Carson was lying. I think you can guess which side I’m on, but Carson can clear this up in a trice by telling us who this hapless physicist was. I sure hope it’s not someone who’s conveniently dead.
POSTSCRIPT: It’s probably worth noting that conservative Christians are just generally a little gaga over the second law of thermodynamics, which they’re convinced disproves the theory of evolution. You can yell “In a closed system!” until you’re blue in the face, and it makes no difference. They’ve stumped you! There are dozens of more sophisticated versions of this argument, too. Carson is just extending this chestnut a little further back in time.
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