Science based creationism has arrived and is fashionable: Established academics and NASA scientists claim that evolution is merely a deception, the fossil record planted; darlings of “new-atheists” get away with basically saying that the universe is made for humans; arXiv is not above promoting considerations of we-are-in-a-simulation scenarios that are hidden variable realities blatantly inconsistent with quantum mechanics.

A topic that should get more attention in science outreach is the weirdness of the small. And no – I do not mean the ad nauseam covered ‘quantum weirdness’, which is not* about small stuff anyway. The classical (non-quantum) behavior of the small is counterintuitive enough. Many misconceptions could be avoided with some awareness about how the surfaces of objects, even smooth looking metal surfaces, look like at small scales (think mountainous battle fields).

If you believe in scientism, you trust such tales as that, for example, the criticizing of a scientific paper is published in the same journal as the criticized article. Science writers, say people like T. Dorigo right here on Science2.0, eagerly help to disseminate such falsehoods about the peer-review system. How far do these cheerleaders themselves buy into such convenient rationalizations of the power structures that feed them? In truth, critical papers are outright rejected, whistleblowers blacklisted. “Criticism” in academic culture is a show-dance that increases established players’ citation counts. True criticism is silenced; it can be happy to land in a ‘dump-journal’ that is listed on the scientific citation index (SCI) at all.

While many fields realize that modernity comes to an end like any epoch eventually does, the “hard sciences”, especially physics, still rest in relatively naïve stages, still proud of their “modern” status like a teenager loving his first car. Attempts to advance beyond adolescence are countered with references to the Sokal Affair, although that affair has long since been understood in more enlightened ways and even Alan Sokal himself in the end concluded that the affair proved the enormous bias due to pure status in all sciences, news perhaps to the physicist Sokal, but certainly not to social constructionists.

The idea that we are already inside a simulation is in a sense true anyway (if we define “simulation” as the possibility of being described as emergent from a computational substrate). Nick Bostrom, the director of Oxford University’s 'Future of Humanity Institute', and others became famous with such ideas, see Simulation Hypothesis on Wikipedia.

The holographic universe: A “simulation” anyway!

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) famously offers $1000000 to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities.  Its has helped to stem the spread of pseudoscience.  The Quantum Randi Challenge is quite similar (although its main purpose for you personally is to teach you quantum mechanics intuitively):  The large reward it offers is instant fame.  Whoever overcomes the challenge would deserve a Nobel Prize in physics!  But the Quantum Randi Challenge does not depend on a foundation that is