The LHC was turned on wednesday morning and it proved to be a success. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Click here to read more about it.
There had actually been a huge speculation all over that the "world is going to end" when turning on the LHC (internet is flooded with such comments). I wonder how such scams take its toll on the people's mind and they tend to believe it hook, line, and sinker...
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In the 1980's i used to read "philosophy" by the structuralists and post-structuralists (deconstruction). Alot of this material dealt with "knowledge" so it is a natural place to look at why conspiracy theories are currently so appealing... so i googled
"knowledge Roland Barthes conspiracy"
and came up with an (academic) essay by
Gary Walton
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/074/walton.shtml
Not having much time, I've only started to glance at it but here's a pithy segment:
"... not only do these narratives offer a kind of limited resistance to the regimes of truth that dominate our culture, they offer traditionally disenfranchised individual information consumers opportunities to participate in the creation of public knowledge(s). Indeed, it is because conspiracy theory narratives have become so popular that we need to take them seriously as narratives. This is especially true when conspiracy theory narrative dons the trope of journalism and attempts to broach the divide separating "illegitimate" knowledge from "legitimate" knowledge."
("Legitimate" knowledge consists of ""official" codes and venues that exist in the public arena for the production of public "truth."" I'd put press releases in here.)
So accepting, and particularly actively promoting a conspiracy or "the world will end" theory, enpowers an individual. Instead of the scientists being the only folk with the power associated with access to "truth", they can also have the power that attaches itself to having the access to "truth".
To much of the public, scientific truth is "theory" - they do not apprehend that fact and observations are part of the scientific package. And they feel "my theory is just as good as someone else's theory", be it a scientific theory or religious belief, or whatever. If their theory is falsified, that is o.k. - their belief/theory was still just as good as the scientists' theory. Because to them the scientist's theory is just a belief as well.
I have a book by Michel Foucault with essays about power and truth in (medical) science, if anyone is interested. :-)
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