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Co-Founder of PayPal Peter Thiel: Society Is Hostile To Science and Technology
dcblogs writes Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, billionaire investor and author, says "we live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in a period where people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it. The easiest way to see "how hostile our society is to technology" is to look at Hollywood. Movies "all show technology that doesn't work, that ... kills people, that it is bad for the world," said Thiel. He argues that corporations and the U.S. government are failing at complex planning.
Yes, hostile to tchnology like spell checkers....
Do you have ESP?
When high tech companies offshore cash to avoid taxes, it is no wonder people don't trust the technology. They don't trust the technology companies.
Sometimes movies don't show us technological failings, but human ones. The Minority Report shows us advanced technology (to the point that the UI was praised, and is basically duplicated in shows like Agents of Shield) and shows us human failings.
On the other hand, implementation of technology has become a corporate thing. And as corporations have shown us, they're working in their interests, not ours. They'll release buggy or vulnerable products. They won't patch or fix those problems without being forced to, as such corrections are costs that detract from profit. They'll stand it up and once it's stood-up, if they don't have to have anything to do with it, all the better in their minds.
Unfortunately new things are technology much of the time, and that means that we have to be skeptical. Bear in mind, it's likely that the average readership of Slashdot handles technological and scientific issues better than average, and we still have some doozies of arguments on here. Look at someone that doesn't want to play armchair researcher or enthusiast and see how well they cope. It's not good.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would say that they distrust it, not dislike. It is also expensive to implement over something that has been used for decades and since they see things more short term than long term, the savings aren't seen so upgrading is deemed not worth the cost and training.
-SaNo
This Thiel character has been all over the place these past couple of weeks - talk shows, opinion columns, etc. He is a real techno-cornucopian cheerleader, but does not seem to be a particularly deep thinker.
The man simply doesn't understand the need for conflict in a plot. If you have a movie about a super computer, there needs to be something to work against. The computer takes over or fails spectacularly. This in no way indicates that this is society's view of computers.
People fear and then hate what they do not understand. If you're not interested in how the world works you're not gonna learn, and will just default to anger and scaremongering in your interactions with it, because emotions you do understand.
Our leader removed the minister for science! He has reduced funding for our science organization CSIRO ( The one that invented wifi among many other successes ), condemned renewable energy and promoted coal, destroyed our manufacturing sector and is pushing to make university only for the rich. All in the span of a year, impressive really.
What do you guys think about systemd? We need to talk about this more.
Religion kills and oppresses; no technology needed.
Ideology kills and oppresses; no religion needed either.
Just as plausible as his assertions.
One where technologically capable individuals fight back against brutish peers. The technologists could be portrayed as smart and kind, but socially marginalized and not particularly attractive.
We could call it, I dunno, "Revenge of the Science and Technology People". Truly a story for our decade, it could get the word out that society is hostile towards the people involved in science and technology.
I'm always interested in what a member (chairman?) of the Bilderberg Group's Steering Committe has to say about how they want to see what the world should be like.
People like technology when it works - but notice when it fails. If it works, it becomes assumed as part of life - and no longer noticed; the more one thinks about the internet, the more incredible it is.
Part of the problem is that real science is HARD. Most people can't cope and avoid it at school. They dismiss us as geeks - not least to cover their own failure to master the subject. So there's a built up frustration that comes out when it does go wrong... not healthy - but perhaps inevitable given that most people are not up to mastering the science they depend on to live (and all of us won't master it ALL!!)
Robocop showed *both* sides ... killer robots, and technology used to help a person put an end to corruption.
Technology is *tool*; it be used or abused.
* A fire can be used for light & heat (i.e. camping), or to burn someone.
* A gun can be used to protect or to hurt.
Lastly, Technology is NOT the problem -- people _misusing_ it are.
It's wishful thinking. Technology should have produced a world without want, sickness or fear, where no one need labor for their own survival. Instead all that ingenuity went into devising new ways to oppress and kill our fellow man.
Actually you're exactly what he's talking about. Technology has gone a massive way towards reducing famine and sickness. I mean think about it:
- Some people actually argue that human natural selection has ended because medical technology is so good now that people rarely ever die from natural causes unless they're either very old or neglect their own health (e.g. drug abuse.) Contrast to 150 years ago where virtually any sort of serious injury often included death or dismemberment. People nowadays can be born with serious inherited diseases (e.g. cystic fibrosis) and even have kids where in the past that would have been impossible.
- The green revolution (that is, agricultural technology) has turned famine into a distant memory. The root cause of any starvation these days is almost always a 100% political one (e.g. some local warlord or government is deliberately limiting the food supply.)
In spite of the above, you prefer to subscribe to the Hollywood model where technology is only ever used for bad things. As far want and fear, no amount of technology will ever eliminate as those are just part of human nature. I'd actually be more concerned if we did get rid of those, as the only means of doing so would involve altering the person's mind (mind control is another way of putting it; think like the movie Equilibrium.)
I always misread their slogan, just for an instant.
Theil may be right that society as a whole is hostile to science but he is fundamentally missing the point: society is more interested, accepting and pro-science than it has ever been in the past. Sure, there are lots of nays but they are fewer than there were before. That's what is important. Look at the positive and move forward.
I'd say religion is a special instance of ideology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We definitely hate technology, it's evil! I can't tell you how many of my friends have been burning their smartphones and computers.
No, the real issue is that Science and Tech are just evolving at a pace that it becomes difficult to comprehend the implications of things. It's hard for organizations that move slowly like Hollywood and the government to keep pace. Most people love Tech and Science...
Thank you for agreeing with me.
That is what I always admired about Star Trek. While there were no lack of episodes of all the series where technology was put to evil or misguided uses, at the end of the day, it was still shown to be a deliverer of humanity from hunger, war and disease. By and large technology was represented not as an obstacle to human development, but rather as its great enabler.
But in general, you're quite right, the film industry has long favored dystopian visions; stemming right back to Metropolis (the first and still the greatest of all the dystopian films). Science and technology are the tools of oppression and destruction, and it's the beautiful young heroes who throw the monkey wrench in the machinery.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What people don't like is any science that suggests they have to alter their behaviors.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"...corporations and the U.S. government are failing at complex planning."
Mathematically, the world is a "chaotic" place. It is axiomatic that complex planning will fail. So those not familiar with the field, think of "butterfly effect" or "Black swans".
So inevitable planning failures are blamed on technology.
The best solution, proven empirically, is laissez-faire. I concede that "best" means different things to different people.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
This is the guy behind PayPal talking. Before PayPal, he traded derivatives. After PayPal, he ran a hedge fund. He says "We live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age," said Thiel. "We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it."
He's pointing out that runaway capitalism and finance is the problem. He ought to know.
We used to have a simpler, and more locked-down, financial system in the US. Banks accepted deposits, lent money, and handled cash. They weren't allowed to buy and sell stocks. Trading derivatives was definitely out. Brokers did stock transactions for others; brokerage firms didn't trade much for their own accounts. There were mutual funds, regulated by the SEC. Houses were financed mostly by savings and loan companies, which were mostly local and sent people out to check on building sites.
This worked well until the Reagan years, and the beginnings of financial deregulation. S&L and bank executives wanted the freedom to take more risks with other people's money. Within a few years of S&L deregulation, the savings and loan industry tanked. Within a few years of bank deregulation, the banking industry tanked. There's kind of a pattern there.
The real kicker is, Apple, Samsung and all the cellphone makers are unknowingly building the first generation of replicators. Once enough units have been manufactured, they'll all activate and take over the planet.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Maybe people are catching on to the fact that a lot of what passes for advanced technology these days only amounts to the arrangement of pixels on screens.
Previous waves of technologies liberated us from hard work. The Internet wave, while impressive, has not really been able to do that.
And no, sites that help wealthier people buy services such as cooking, cleaning and driving from poorer people don't count, since the work is still done by a human. I'm talking about machines or devices that physically make work easier, or does work automatically. Like the washing machine. The washing machine is so far probably the best machine, or robot really, that we have invented in terms of how much work it saves per dollar. A 1930's invention, which predates computers. It's sad when you think about it.
I hope the breakthroughs are just around the corner and that soon we will have our self-driving cars and our household robots that do chores and what not. Until then I doubt we will see much excitement from the general public.
Hence the millions of people following fad "scientific" diets.
We just hate PayPal.
the real issue is that Science and Tech are just evolving at a pace that it becomes difficult to comprehend the implications
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both about 100 years old now (really!). Why aren't they taught in high school? High schools mostly teach science that was the state of the art around the time of the US civil war (really!).
We're so culturally bought into the idea that math is hard, that modern physics is full of baffling ideas that normal people can't make sense of, and so we don't even try to teach what we should. Especially if you go on to college: someone who specializes in the works of Shakespeare should know as much about quantum physics as someone who specializes about quantum physics should know about Shakespeare - he should be able to at least give a summary of the most important work.
We've had 100 years now to figure out how to teach the basic rules of the universe we live in to high school students, but we have simply abandoned the idea a "uncool" and "too hard".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wasn't Galileo sufficient enough an example?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Movies also often show people doing bad things. Does that mean our society also hates people? (Letting the sick and poor die is arguably a sign of such.)
But in general, for any drama you need an antagonist. Sometimes that antagonist is a person(s) and sometimes technology. Happy rainbow movies rarely sell.
Plus, it's fun watching sparks fly out of machines. Unrealistic, but fun. Blood and guts are too unpleasant to watch in my opinion. Kick Bot Butt!
Table-ized A.I.
"We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology."
US people maybe. Canada has over 60% approval for sciences.
But what do you expect? Canada also lacks the billions of dollars it took for corporations to convince you science is bad.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Those who wield technology are, therefore, akin to magicians. People are amazed by magicians but they also don't trust what they don't understand.
Most people don't understand the commitment required to be a good technologist, they just want you to fix their computer during the dinner they invited you to. How may times have you heard the "I'm not very good with computers" line? Even more how many time have you met someone with "the next great idea to make millions" and all they need is some dumb monkey coder to do the actual *work* for them? The general expectation is that you'll do it for them but just watch their face if you ask them to tile your bathroom or do a similar amount of *work*.
I think Thiel is right. I'm uncertain if people actually deserve a gift like information technology and the internet which is powerful enough to enslave or free humanity. Frankly people are so vapid and apathetic they are simply driving us to a technology driven dystopia from the sheer weight of idiocracy. The worst thing about it is that myself and every technologist I know is being dragged along, kicking and screaming, with them - fully aware of the consequences.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
i like good science, i hate pseudoscience
i hate high tech hardware that is locked down for my own good, maybe bought an Android tablet for the specific purpose of wiping android off and putting a vanilla Linux distro on it like Debian or Gentoo or maybe Slackware, and most tablets wont boot from other sources, and even if you mount it as a removable storage device and manually delete everything you can on it once it reboots the dang system gets replaced with a fresh copy (system on a chip???) i dont know for sure but i really hate tablets because nothing can be done to them and i got to run the OS that comes with it, and google store is packed full of crappy spamware, ok rant over because i am digressing, thanks
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Hell, Maxwell's treatise on EM was released around the time of the U.S. Civil war. High school physics really only covers basic Newtonian stuff, and maybe some 18th century EM.
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme
For a Saviour Machine
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored
Till it cried in its boredom
'Please don't believe in me,
Please disagree with me
Life is too easy,
A plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or
I may kill you all
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives
On a Saviour Machine
I need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign,
I can steal every mind
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives
On a Saviour Machine
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Movies "all show technology that doesn't work, that ... kills people, that it is bad for the world,"
What do you mean? We elected it governor of California.
Hollywood movie plots don't prove anything except what is considered marketable entertainment.
Last I checked the USA was ranked #1 in research and science.
Except "enhance the reflection on the screw head and run facial recognition on it!" That always works on teevee.
Freedom to experiment, play, make life easier, make the planet better, make money, become socially mobile, etc.
Socialism and totalitarianism - which is what politics has devolved into - dislike freedom. They want people to remain brain-dead, drugged slaves plugged in to television, without the money to experience freedom. For the benefit of the Comrade at the top (because some Comrades are more equal than other Comrades).
Start there. Read the whole thing, don't just cherry pick looking for proof of your statement.
Since the first half of that page is about the history of Famine (which most of it is history at this point in time) the only relevant bits are anything *after* the green revolution, as per what I stated, so I'll "skip" to this point, thank you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Even so, I don't see any causes listed there that aren't political. Since you're so keen on using wikipedia to make your case, then I'll point you to this line:
Food shortages in a population are caused either by a lack of food or by difficulties in food distribution; it may be worsened by natural climate fluctuations and by extreme political conditions related to oppressive government or warfare.
Now if you read on further, the "lack of food" mentioned is mainly this:
Food shortages in a population are caused either by a lack of food or by difficulties in food distribution; it may be worsened by natural climate fluctuations and by extreme political conditions related to oppressive government or warfare. The conventional explanation until 1981 for the cause of famines was the Food availability decline (FAD) hypothesis. The assumption was that the central cause of all famines was a decline in food availability.[132] However, FAD could not explain why only a certain section of the population such as the agricultural laborer was affected by famines while others were insulated from famines.[133] Based on the studies of some recent famines, the decisive role of FAD has been questioned and it has been suggested that the causal mechanism for precipitating starvation includes many variables other than just decline of food availability. According to this view, famines are a result of entitlements, the theory being proposed is called the "failure of exchange entitlements" or FEE.[133] A person may own various commodities that can be exchanged in a market economy for the other commodities he or she needs. The exchange can happen via trading or production or through a combination of the two. These entitlements are called trade-based or production-based entitlements. Per this proposed view, famines are precipitated due to a breakdown in the ability of the person to exchange his entitlements.[133] An example of famines due to FEE is the inability of an agricultural laborer to exchange his primary entitlement, i.e., labor for rice when his employment became erratic or was completely eliminated.[133]
According to the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), global climate change is additionally challenging the Earth's ability to produce food, potentially leading to famine.[134]
Some elements make a particular region more vulnerable to famine. These include poverty, population growth,[135] an inappropriate social infrastructure, a suppressive political regime, and a weak or under-prepared government.[136]
Thank you.
And you fail at trolling by the way.
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both about 100 years old now (really!). Why aren't they taught in high school? High schools mostly teach science that was the state of the art around the time of the US civil war (really!).
Kant is even older than that, and yet you don't see him being taught in high school either. The age of an idea has little to do with the complexity of the idea, and quantum mechanics is quite complicated, if you want to really understand it. Shakespeare is only widely taught because, due to cultural influences, he is considered something that everyone should know, and his plays aren't really all that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics, orbital dynamics, E&M, etc., not so much. It's not simply because they're hard, either, though those subjects are: it's simply because, unless you're going into a field that requires it, you really don't need to know them, just as the physicist doesn't need to know Kant.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Canada looks big but they have fewer people and less area to produce $$$ for funding. Plus they probably can't ever have high productivity because that is something that doesn't go with being the #1 or #2 nation to live in.
The global economy and banking system which control everything are not pro-science. For their population and GDP, Canada probably beats the USA. It doesn't help that Canadians easily cross over to the USA college system and end up staying here despite the lower quality lifestyle. Guess buying more junk and the dream of getting more junk is just too compelling... Once that fades away, can't see why anybody would stay-- we've got nothing else to offer that compensates for being at the bottom of the 1st world nations (except expensive military tech.)
Hope I offended fellow citizens. #1 problem in the USA is we are full of shit; I'm only here (for now) because my science job is here...and all my relatives.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You don't need to know anything except where to find food, but humans should know more than they need to, or what's the point of it all?
Neither relativity nor QM is all that hard to understand. The math can be hard to understand, but the more important consequences of both can be explained geometrically. And, really, you only need algebra and trig to do the math for the basic results in special relativity and in very simple quantum mechanical systems.
I think it's more important to do some simple experiments to show what QM is about, and why the physicists aren't just making all this up - just measuring the light that passes through 2 polarizing filters, and doing a double slit experiment, and explaining that the results are the same if you do one photon at a time, that would be great! Just showing pictures of gravitational lensing and Cherenkov radiation and other visible consequences of relativity would be great!
These are basic facts about the world, and as such there's really no excuse for not teaching these facts along with some evidence to back them up.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When talking about culture in TV Nation where community has died and all that comes close is TV/Movies. We talk using movie metaphors, adopt phrases and new metaphors from the medium which sadly doesn't even come close to the past sources they supplanted.
Advertizing controls people and they don't spend all that $$$ doing product placement, infotainment, endorsements, and advertizing if it didn't have a big impact. People only SAY they don't vote based upon the advertizing that goes on-- but they are lying because most the billions that goes into elections is TV related. Since the biz is all about buying attention-- it's a mix of giving people what they want to see while making them see stuff they don't want to. It actively tries to influence while it actively tries to reflect-- in addition to the other aspects! It can be hard to discern which but it's probably one of the two.
If you want to take a disjointed culture without any community and characterize it, using the most common thread which binds them (I'm avoiding making a LOTR ref) you use TV/Movies. Referencing that either gives the promoted impressions being pushed by a few (since a minority has working control) or you are seeing what people expect to see. Usually the medium doesn't upset people by going too far outside their cultural expectations. That's bad for business unless you are targeting the intellectual minority... A little makes it interesting but too much and it's a niche market.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
And that's why we steer clear of mobile phones, computers, digital watches and clocks, microwaves, cars, planes, xboxes, the internet ect, which has led to the lack of any tech industry in the US. Films attack technology because of the producers hatred of it and they stick to analogue film etc, CGI? what's that?
Really, what a stupid thing to say. There are some luddites, so what.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
You mean Agile development, like the free market, isn't the answer to the world's problems? How can that be? Just wait until I bring that up at today's standup. The scrum master will be aghast...
Is it just me, or do the roles and rituals in agile development sound a bit like a dungeons and dragons game?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
iii - Mention pseudo scientists and one will always turn up to tell you how cold it's been lately.
Troll food: The min temp anomaly map for Australia over the past six months, it's clear minimum temperatures have been warmer across most of the continent. It also clear that maximum temps have been well above average for the same period.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The Spell Checker (technology) didn't work.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s science culture was popular in the US. People looked forward to new discoveries and gadgets and careers in science. Big industry did need to be restrained by environmentalists and that did mostly work in the US. Then young people got seduced by higher paying jobs in finance, an industry that doesnt really create much else than money.
When I travel in China I see the pro-science and technology attitudes of my youth. It i s refreshing.
Sorry, that's faulty thinking, and belies the underying issue with such ideology. Nothing like that can simply fix human nature, and until we evolve further, become less self-centered, less egotistical, less fanatical, etc.. that won't change.
Technology is not a panacea, it's a tool, like any other in the sense that it can be used for good or evil at the whim of human nature.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
This was the example I going to bring up, Star Trek TNG was all about how great technology would make life.
Up until a point though; from what I've read, after a few seasons, they started to realize this was a bit too "pie in the sky", and this is precisely why the Borg were introduced to the show, to illustrate that even technology can have a dark side.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
If the Terminator comes from the future, let's be realistic! He'll show up with lots of bloatware. Not only will ke kill you, he'd go through your social media accounts to track down and kill everyone on Facebook that you ever went to high school with. He'd also check your mail, handle phone calls, self-install software updates from the future, keep track of your bank account, play second-person-shooter video games, autoplay video advertisements, and sound cool alarm tones to remind you of your impending appointment with death.
This fear and distrust of technology is a symptom of the bigger problem of anti-intellectualism. And this can't be fixed until:
a) the education system stops trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
b) religion stops getting a free pass on everything
In particular, there is a distressing lack of logical thinking courses. This is desperately needed, especially because there is currently nothing to counteract the dangerous and forceful indoctrination of children into religious institutions. It has already been demonstrated that children in religious households have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality, for example.
The problem is that this is a self perpetuating problem. Stupid adults who arn't able to deal with the real world, want their kids to be equally stupid and unable to deal with the real world, and so raise them accordingly, and even go out of their way to subvert the education system to push their politics on everyone whether they like it or not.
Ilsa
Quantum mechanics is one of those topics that is really hard to use intuition to figure out what will happen, especially when you were only given a glimpse of simple effects and not an actual foundation in the subject.
The experiment with two polarizing films, if explained properly, will reset intuitions about light. That's why it's so valuable. The intuitive explanation predicts X, the student, hands-on, measures Y, there you go. If you do this the first week that you explain what polarization is, people don't head down the wrong path with intuition in the first place. To me, that's a big deal.
The double-slit experiment is one that no one really gets a correct intuition on, but you can at least show hands-on that the obvious idea doesn't work.
Similarly, relativity, if properly explained with geometry, is straightforward. You can't really do hands-on experiments there, but there's plenty of stuff visible to the human eye that you can at least present to the class as photos or videos.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Lessee, my chances of catching ebola are significantly below those of my winning the lottery and buying a trip the the Station... but the media, esp. Faux, is screaming about ebola. (And I happen to work no more than a few hundred yards from a facility that had one of those possibly exposed.)
We won't mention allegedly science programming channels with supernatural crap.
And then there's the textbooks in Texas and other southern states, where they'd trying to take out evolution. And the budget cuts for scentific research.
And we also won't mention the climate change deniers.
They mostly managed to avoid science in school, it's all magic to most users, and they think that the LATEST IPHONE IS THE MOST IMPRTANT ADVANCE IN TECHNOLOGY THIS CENTURY!!!!!
mark "beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life here"
It's totally unexpected at 30 degrees. At 0, 45, and 90 degrees the intuitive model of polarization as a vector predicts the measured value, but it fails at all other angles. At 60 degrees, explaining why 25%, not 33%, of light gets through is the perfect introduction to quantum mechanics. And kids should at least get that introduction - that the rules of the universe are more odd than you might guess, but still you can work them out, and that's modern physics.
You can also explain, with no more math, that one photon passing through 2 filters, and 2 entangled photons passing through two separate filters work the same way. A result that shouldn't surprise anyone, even though its implications are quite weird. You don't really need to understand those implications in high school, but seeing enough to believe that the physicists are just telling colorful stories, that this stuff is actually real, would be great.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Neither relativity nor QM is all that hard to understand.
Yes, yes they are... for your average elementary school students. Even after explaining it, many, maybe even most adults won't understand. The further you go from the visual world they see, the more difficult these more abstract concepts are to pick up. You mention the double-slit experiment, polarizing light, etcetc as if any of the above people would actually know what they're looking at. They haven't had earlier fundamentals, so the description of that experiment will just lose them completely.
.... dodge micrometeorites? We must have watched different movies there, geez.
It's not vector projection in any straightforward way. With the most obvious mental model of polarization (light pointed more in the direction of the filter than perpendicular to it gets through), you expect the energy passing through both filters to fall off directly proportional to the angle between them. If you just took the dot product (and it's not obvious why you would), you also get the wrong answer of course. It's only if you understand the result in terms of the energy in the direction of the filter vs the energy perpendicular to it that you can explain cos^2. That's easy enough to accept, I think, but the implications are pretty strange. And of course lots of stuff in QM work the same way for the same reason, with the same strange implications about determinism and hidden variables.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
For angular difference, consider the following:
You have a baseball bat at a random angle in the same plane as a picket fence. The spacing on the pickets is such that the bat will fit through if it's within 45% of vertical (or whatever direction the pickets go), and won't fit through at a greater angle. If the distribution of bat angles is even, what's the odds that a bat that passes through the first fence pass though a second at an angle of theta to the first?
It falls off directly with the angular difference. At a theta of 45 degrees, half of possible bats that fit through the first also fit through the second. At a theta of 60 degrees, one third of bats that fit through the first fit through the second. It's the same as taking two quarter-circles, and finding the overlapping length of arc when they're offset by theta (area/length of arc is where "proportional to the angular difference" would come from), as each unit-length of arc represents an equal change of encountering a bat at that range of angles.
That's the wrong answer, of course. Also, any model by which the first fence modifies the photon-substitute in some way gets very odd for the case of entangled pairs of photons, as then you need spooky action at a distance (so that modifying one instantly modifies the other, making relativity cry), and could easily get the wrong answer for 3 filters in a row.
Vector projection would give cos(theta), of course, which is also wrong, unless I misunderstand what you're saying. It's only the square of the vector projection, an energy measurement, that gets you there. I've never met anyone who would have guessed cos^2 ahead of time, but it doesn't really seem that strange that it should be energy that matters once you figure it out - why not energy, after all? (And the energy metaphor works well later on, if you accept the chance that a particle might exist in a certain place as a form of potential energy, in an energy-mass equivalence sort of way).
Anyhow, all of this seems very teachable to high-school students, and simple experiments should establish that light behaves neither light a wave nor like a particle, but "behaves in its own inimical way".
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Special relativity is pretty straightforward, as long as you're willing to ditch a lot of ideas about space and time. (It seems hard to make people realize that "simultaneous" isn't meaningful with spatially separated events.) I haven't seen a good explanation of general relativity that didn't involve either tensors or a lot of handwaving. I can understand everything related to special relativity I've seen, but there's a whole lot about general relativity that I just have to take on faith, since I don't know how to compute it and don't have any relevant intuition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's true of religion, also. Lots of churchgoing people get real uncomfortable when people around them start talking about ways their behavior isn't in accordance with Christianity.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That reasoning is too specific to this one experiment - you always get that cos^2 out of the QM for cases like this. And the chance that a single photon passes through really does go by cos^2 - that's the lesson here, IMO, that energy isn't just an accident that we happen to be squaring something before we measure, but instead that it's the common pattern we observe across both QM and relativity. There's always some sort of vector projection and then squaring going on, and while what the vector is/measures changes from system to system, the square of it keeps looking like some kind of energy.
Heck, given how well Hamiltonians and Lagrangians work in explaining mechanics, I'm starting to think of force as an accidental by-product of potential energy changing over distance (which again makes sense across both QM and GR).
But then that's the real lesson here: that what our intuitions tell us are the fundamental parts of physics from which other stuff should be deduced all comes from human-scale interaction. Pretty silly to think that would be right, given that's not at all the scale at which the fundamental interactions are happening.
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