
There’s one piece of bad math that I’ve encountered relatively frequently in conversations. It’s
incredibly frustrating to me, because it’s just so crazy – but the way we teach math and physics, far to many people just don’t have enough of a clue to see how foolish it really is.
This comes up in conversations with lay-people whenever a new space probe is launched. It’s generally presented in the form of a question; something like “That TV announcer said something about a point between the earth and the moon where gravity cancels, so there’s no gravitational pull towards either the earth or the moon. How can the moon cause tides if its gravity is cancelled all the way out there?”
I’ve never found a form of this that was sufficiently mockable – in general, people who ask the question know that there’s something wrong with the question; they know that it’s stupid, but they don’t know why. I don’t like to make fun of that: people who ask a question because they know that their ignorant about something, and they’re trying to fix that patch of ignorance – they don’t deserve to be mocked. So I’ve avoided this. Until now: I’ve found the perfect mockable presentation of this problem. And wait till you see the wonderfully insane form I found it in!
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