What Is The Speed of Dark?

Law of Ignorance 10/04/2020 02:27:12 AM

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Transcript
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Nyctophobia is the fear of the dark.
But there's another fear that's more chilling.
It's the fear that darkness will go away.
Optophobia, the fear of opening your eyes.
Light travels at the fastest speed possible for a physical object.
Darkness is erased when light appears, and returns
when light leaves.
The speed of dark is the speed of light
but there are other types of darkness
that can move faster than light speed. For instance, a shadow.
Across a distance, a shadow can become much larger than the
object creating it, but still mimic its source, moving in the same
way for the same amount of time. So when a shadow is bigger
than the object casting it, it moves a greater distance
when the object moves but in the same amount of time.
Make a shadow large enough and it can travel across the surface
faster than light.
If you, here on Earth, cast a shadow onto the Moon,
not an easy thing to do, that pointed from, say, point A
on the Moon's surface, and then you moved your finger so that
the shadow moved to point B, your finger would only move a
few centimetres in a fraction of a second. But the shadow it cast
on the Moon would move thousands of kilometers in the same
amount of time. Light transmits information
Do it right and you're easily producing a shadow that breaks
the light barrier. But nothing's wrong here.
The rule is that information can't travel faster than light.
You can't cause something to happen somewhere else
faster than light could travel from you to that somewhere else.
And our super-luminal shadow is transferring shadows do not transmit
no information from point A to point B. information
Sure, point B is being cast into darkness
sooner than a light speed message from A could warn him
it's coming but darkness isn't traveling from point A to point B.
It's traveling from you to point A and point B
at the speed of light. What we tend to call a shadow
is really just a cross-section of a three-dimensional region.
The darkness you are causing only changes shape
when newly unblocked light fills the previous gap

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That's all shadow is: a gap.
So, in a way, a shadow doesn't
travel at all. That's an illusion caused by us thinking
that a shadow is a physical thing, when in reality
a shadow is just the lack of physical things -
photons - which chug along at speed limit
of the universe. But that doesn't mean two shadows can't kiss.
Or, at least, look like they are.
Watch as Guy brings two shadows
near each other. Right before they actually make contact,
the shadows seem to magically bulge toward one another,
in a sort of smooch of darkness. What's going on is the
shadows blister effect and it has to do with the anatomy of a
shadow. The region where an object completely blocks a light
source is called the umbra. It's the darkest part of the shadow
in the most prototypical part of the shadow. Where only a
portion of the light source is blocked, we find the fainter
penumbra. But as two or more penumbras
approach and overlap, the combined amount of light they
block can be enough to produce a perceivable difference,
the shadow blister. The Earth has a big umbra, it's 1.4 million Heliocentric Earth
kilometres long. That's how far away you'd have to be from assumption and teaching
the Earth for it to no longer have a large enough apparent
diameter to block out all of the sun. Here, on the surface of
Earth, we are nowhere near that far away, which is why
Night is “so umbral”. Night is just the Earth's shadow falling
on you. A “you eclipse”.
Sunsets are cool, they're beautiful to look at, but look the other
way and you can see the lumbering shadow of our planet.
Our atmosphere scatters shorter wavelengths of light shorter wavelengths of
more than longer wavelengths, which makes the sky light make the Sky appear
appear blue. But in Earth's shadow there's less light to scatter “blue”.
and the sky appears “darker”. During twilight you can see
the demarcation. While driving east from Denver to Kansas City
I got a particularly great view of it.
This is Earth's approaching night-making shadow.
The beautiful pink band above it? That's “the belt of Venus”. The Belt of Venus.
It's caused by the sky reflecting the the colours Venus’ Girdle. the
of the sunset behind us. You've probably noticed that anti-twilight arch
right after the sun sets, and disappears from view, see photo last page.
there's still light in the sky, scattered from the
no longer visible sun. This is what we call “twilight"
and there are many different stages of twilight.
If the sun is less than six degrees below the horizon it's
technically civil twilight. You can still do plenty of stuff
outdoors without the need for artificial lights.

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Down to 12 degrees below the horizon we have
nautical twilight: artificial lights are more or less necessary
Sky
but the sky still scatters enough light to be bright enough for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky
ships at sea to navigate by seeing a contrast of the horizon In the field of astronomy,
between dark sea and faintly lit sky. Down to 18 degrees the sky is also called the
an astronomical twilight is occurring. celestial sphere. This is an
It looks like night but the sky can still get darker. abstract sphere, concentric to the
Until astronomical twilight ends not all night time astronomical Earth, on which the Sun, Moon,
observations can be made. Below 18 degrees is technically, planets, and stars appear to be
honestly, Night. drifting. The celestial sphere is
If you live at greater than 48.5 degrees north conventionally divided into
or south latitude, during the summer the sun never goes more designated areas called
than 18 degrees below the horizon. constellations.
It's never “ technically night”.
Places like London only reach astronomical twilight at the most
during these months. So, if you live in one of these areas, This description is for a flat
and you want to avoid doing something during the summer, Earth. it does not work
just tell people you'll do it “tonight”. You'll buy yourself a few weeks. on the spherical Earth
But that's slow darkness. model.
Let's cut to the chase because we are looking for fast darkness.
When scissor blades snip, the intersection point between both
blades moves faster than the blades themselves. Think of it this
way: if you had a pair of scissors with blades that were a light
year long and it took one second to close them, the intersection
point would've traveled an entire light year, in not a year but...
a second. No laws are being broken here because such a snip
would be physically impossible. As I've mentioned before,
rigid objects don't move instantaneously all over
when a push force is applied to them.
Instead, that force moves via electromagnetic forces, from one
atom to the next, and so on down the line. A compression wave
that travels at the speed of sound through the material.
But what if we ignored that problem by allowing the blades to
simply be separately already in motion? Well, their point at
intersection can still travel faster than light, because it's not a
physical thing. It's just a geometric point and it carries
no more information than you could already gather
by witnessing the approaching blades.
But don't count out that geometric point of intersection just yet.
It's the key to another type of darkness that can move faster
than light.
When waves collide their crests can fuse into larger crests,
their troughs into larger troughs. This is constructive interference.
But crests colliding with troughs cancel out.

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Destructive interference if these waves are light,
the result is darkness. And, in certain circumstances,
darkness created this way can travel like the intersection
between two lines - faster than light. Imagine these concentric
circles as waves of light.
The lines are wave crests and the gaps in between
are troughs. When they meet the points where they intersect
flee up and down faster than the waves travel,
especially in the middle, which, in the case of light waves,
makes them faster than light. The super-luminal speeds of these
dark patches can be seen really clearly
if we make the wave crests of one source black
as well as the background. Overlapping regions where red
peeks through represent destructive interference -
darkness. And you can see how, especially in the middle,
this darkness races up and down faster than the waves.
In 1995 a man named McArthur Wheeler
robbed a bank in Pittsburgh. He was caught
because his only disguise was lemon juice.
He covered his face with it. He knew that lemon juice could
be used as an invisible ink when writing on paper, revealed by
heating, and he knew so little about
why that worked and he knew so little about how cameras worked
that he assumed, with extreme confidence, that lemon juice
could make him invisible too.
Seriously. Wheeler is an extreme example
and was the inspiration for the Dunning-Kruger effect
Novices, people unskilled in particular disciplines
will often overestimate their knowledge and abilities
in said disciplines because they don't even know
how little they know, how much more there is to learn.
On the flip side, experts in particular field will often
underestimate their knowledge, have less confidence in their
abilities, or think that everyone else has the same level of
knowledge that they do.
What drives the Dunning-Kruger effect
is the fact that often the more you learn about something the
more you realize just how rich and complex and overwhelming
and full of as of yet unanswered questions it really is.
George Bernard Shaw once famously toasted Albert Einstein
by saying "Science is always wrong”.
It never solves a problem without creating ten more."
Einstein didn't exactly disagree. He used
geometry to illustrate how ignorance grows faster than knowledge,
saying "as our circle of knowledge expands so does the circumference
of darkness surrounding it.

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Learning shedding light on a field of inquiry also reveals just how
in the dark we continue to be. How many shadowy things there
are left for us to illuminate. The diameter of light
never exceeds the shadowy circumference."
But what's the speed of that kind dark? The speed of the growth
of the number of things we know we are in the dark about.
What's the speed of ignorance?
If we define ignorance as “the difference between questions we
know to ask, and the answers we have”, the field of agnotology, see article below
the study of ignorance, suggests that the amount of
things we know we are “in the dark” about is growing faster
than the amount the things we have “shed light” on.
Is it a coincidence that the phrase "in the dark" originated during
of all ages “the age of enlightenment”?
When Leeuwenhoek put a scraping
from his tooth under a collection of magnifying lenses he built,
he saw, for the first time in “human” history,
little moving creatures... microorganisms.
He called them 'Animalcules'. The discovery shed light on why
food spoiled life didn't spontaneously come from old meat,
it was already there, we just couldn't see it.
But the discovery also showed us that we were in the dark
about an entirely new realm of biology.
As Philippe Bourdeau has poetically put it, "enlightenment
leads to “be-nightedness" science entails “ne-science".
What's really cool about the expanding size of our “nescience”
circumference is what Stuart Firestein,
the Chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University,
has said about it, "it is there that science begins,
where the facts run out, just beyond them."
He says, "it is a mistake to bob around in the circle of facts,
instead of riding the wave to the great expanse
lying outside the circle."
If science is a road trip, facts are the photos
we take along the way, the fuel that drives it forward
is ignorance. Facts... more like fax. [facsimile]
Part of the past, not the way forward.
When it comes to understanding our world,
knowing “why” is obsolesce by asking “why?”.
Knowing facts makes you bright, but the
equally quick, sometimes quicker,
and most rewarding prize is the Dark.
And admitting that you don't know everything
but that you would like to know some of it.
And as always, thanks for watching.

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Comments:
Jagged Games 1 month ago
I think there are at least three types of darkness:
Darkness,
Absolute Darkness, and
True Absolute Darkness.

The first option, Darkness, is when it becomes hard to see. There is very little light visible, but you can
technically see. This type of Darkness is different for every creature.

Absolute Darkness is the absence of light perceivable by all of a certain species. Absolute Darkness is
different for every species.

True absolute darkness, when it is impossible for any light to exist, is nigh on impossible, because
most things emit some form of light, and at the atomic level, light can get through everything.

Only those who are completely blind know what True Absolute Darkness is, because they can perceive
no amount of light, ever.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
Agnotology From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the 20th-century study of culturally-conditioned ignorance.
For the 19th-century theory of the unknowable, see agnoiology.

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt,

particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.
It was coined in 1995 by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor,[1]
and linguist Iain Boal.[2][3][4]
The word is based on the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing"
(cf. Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"[5]), and -λογία, -logia.[6]
Proctor cites as a prime example the tobacco industry's advertising campaign to manufacture doubt
about the cancerous and other health effects of tobacco use.[6][7]
More generally, the term also highlights the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one
more uncertain than before.

David Dunning of Cornell University warns that "the internet is helping propagate
ignorance,...” which makes [users] prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread
ignorance".[8]
Irvin C. Schick refers to “un-knowledge "to distinguish it from ignorance. He uses the example of
"terra incognita" in early maps, noting that "The reconstruction of parts of the globe as uncharted
territory is ... the production of un-knowledge, the transformation of those parts into potential objects
of Western political and economic attention.
It is the enabling of colonialism".[9]

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 Active causes of culturally induced ignorance can include the influence of the media,
corporations, and governmental agencies, through secrecy and suppression of information, document
destruction, and selective memory.[10]
Another example is “climate denial”, where oil companies paid teams of scientists to downplay the
effects of “climate change”.
Passive causes include structural information bubbles, including those created by segregation along
racial and class lines, that create differential access to information.

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not "come to be", or
are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was censored and delayed for at
least a decade because some evidence remained classified military information related to undersea
warfare.[6]

History Origins

The term "agnotology" was first coined in a footnote in Proctor's 1995 book, The Cancer Wars:
How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer: "Historians and philosophers of
science have tended to treat ignorance as an ever-expanding vacuum into which knowledge is sucked –
or even, as Johannes Kepler once put it, as the mother who must die for science to be born. Ignorance,
though, is more complex than this. It has a distinct and changing political geography that is often an
excellent indicator of the politics of knowledge. We need a political agnotology to complement our
political epistemologies".[11]

Proctor was quoted using the term to describe his research "only half jokingly", as
"agnotology" in a 2001 interview about his lapidary work with the colorful rock agate. He connected
the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since
its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other
rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal, all of which have much higher
commercial value. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest", the same "structured apathy"
he called "the social construction of ignorance".[12]

He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance", in a 2003 The New York
Times story on medical historians testifying as expert witnesses.[13]

Proctor co-organized a pair of events with Londa Schiebinger, his wife, who is also a science
history professor: the first was a workshop at the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 titled
"Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance",[14] and later a conference at Stanford University
in 2005 titled "Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance".[10]

Political economy

In 2004, Londa Schiebinger[15] gave a more precise definition of agnotology in a paper on

18th-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, and contrasted it with
epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how we know while the

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former questions why we do not know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge
but an outcome of cultural and political struggle".[16]

Its use as a critical description of the political economy has been expanded upon by Michael
Betancourt in a 2010 article titled "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism"[17] and
expanded in the book The Critique of Digital Capitalism.[18] His analysis is focused on the housing
bubble as well as the bubble economy of the period from 1980 to 2008. Betancourt argues that this
political economy should be termed "agnotologic capitalism" because the systemic production and
maintenance of ignorance is a major feature that enables the economy to function as it allows the
creation of a "bubble economy".[15]

Betancourt's argument is posed in relation to the idea of affective labor. He states that

The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered
by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of
reality – the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage – contentious and a source of confusion,
reflected by the inability of participants in bubbles to be aware of the imminent collapse until after it
has happened. The bio-political paradigm of distraction, what [Juan Martin] Prada calls "life to enjoy",
can only be maintained if the underlying strictures remain hidden from view. If affective labor works
to reduce alienation, agnotology works to eliminate the potential for dissent.[17]
In his view, the role of affective labor is to enable the continuation of the “agnotologic effects”
that enable the maintenance of the capitalist “status quo”.

Agnoiology
A similar word from the same Greek roots, agnoiology, meaning "the science or study of
ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions"[19] or "the doctrine concerning those things of
which we are necessarily ignorant"[20] describes a branch of philosophy studied by James Frederick
Ferrier in the 19th century.[21]

Ainigmology
Anthropologist Glenn Stone points out that most of the examples of agnotology (such as work
promoting tobacco use) do not actually create a lack of knowledge so much as they create confusion. A
more accurate term for such writing would be "ainigmology", from the root ainigma (as in "enigma");
in Greek this refers to riddles or to language that obscures the true meaning of a story.[22]

Media influence
The availability of such large amounts of knowledge in this information age may not
necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry. Instead it may be allowing many people to
cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs.[23] and to be distracted
from new knowledge by repetitive or base entertainments. There is conflicting evidence on how
television viewing affects value formation and intelligence.[24]

An emerging new scientific discipline that has connections to agnotology is Cognitronics:

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Cognitronics aims
(a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and
globalization and
(b) at coping with these distortions in different fields.

Cognitronics is studying and looking for the ways of improving cognitive mechanisms of
processing information and developing emotional sphere of the personality - the ways aiming at
compensating three mentioned shifts in the systems of values and, as an indirect consequence,
for the ways of developing symbolic information processing skills of the learners, linguistic
mechanisms, associative and reasoning abilities, broad mental outlook being important preconditions
of successful work practically in every sphere of professional activity in information society.[25]
The field of cognitronics appears to be growing as international conferences have centered
on the topic. The 2013 conference was held in Slovenia.[26]

See also
Anti-science – A philosophy that rejects science and the scientific method as an inherently limited
means to reach understanding of reality
Anti-intellectualism – Hostility to and mistrust of education, philosophy, art, literature, and science
Cancer Wars, a six-part documentary that aired on PBS in 1997, based on Robert N. Proctor's 1995
book, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What we Know and Don't Know About Cancer
Cognitive dissonance – Psychological stress experienced by an individual who holds two or more
contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, a social psychology theory that may explain
the ease of maintaining ignorance (because people are driven to ignore conflicting evidence) and
which also provides clues to how to bring about knowledge (perhaps by forcing the learner to
reconcile reality with long-held, though inaccurate beliefs; see Socratic method)
Cognitive inertia – The tendency for a particular orientation in how an individual thinks about an
issue, belief or strategy to endure or resist change
Confirmation bias – Tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or
hypotheses
Creationism – Religious belief that nature originated through supernatural acts of divine creation.,
systematic denial of scientific biological realities by misrepresenting them in terms of various
dogmatic tenets
Denialism – A person's choice to deny reality, as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable
truth
Doubt Is Their Product. Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your
Health is a 2008 book by David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and
Health under U.S. President Obama. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as
saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the
general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."
The Dunning–Kruger effect – Cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task
overestimate their ability, a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and
reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to
recognize their mistakes

9
 Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), a dis-information technique using “the appeal to fear”.
An appeal to fear (also called argumentum ad metum or argumentum in terrorem) is a fallacy in which
a person attempts to create support for an idea by attempting to increase fear towards an alternative.

The appeal to fear is common in marketing and politics.

FUD is "implicit coercion" by "any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."

As persuasion. Fear appeals are often used in marketing and social policy, as a method of persuasion.
Fear is an effective tool to change attitudes,[3][unreliable source?] which are moderated by the
motivation and ability to process the fear message. Examples of fear appeal include reference to social
exclusion, and getting laid-off from one's job,[4] getting cancer from smoking or involvement in car
accidents and driving.

Fear appeals are non-monotonic, meaning that the level of persuasion does not always increase when
the claimed danger is increased. A study of public service messages on AIDS found that if the
messages were too aggressive or fearful, they were rejected by the subject; a moderate amount of fear
is the most effective attitude changer.[4]
Others argue that it is not the level of fear that is decisive changing attitudes via the persuasion
process. Rather, as long as a scare-tactics message includes a recommendation to cope with the
fear, it can work.[5]
Intelligent design – A pseudo-scientific argument for the existence of God, a class of creationism
that attempts to support assorted topics in biological denialism by misrepresenting them and related
junk science as scientific research
Japanese commercial whaling, an attempt at obfuscation of the culpability of commercial whaling
by misrepresenting its junk-scientific rationale as scientific research.
Junk science. used to describe scientific data, research, or analysis considered by the person using
the phrase to be spurious or fraudulent. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts
where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually
conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political,
ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives. The concept was popularized in the 1990s in
relation to expert testimony in civil litigation. More recently, invoking the concept has been a tactic to
criticize research on the harmful environmental or public health effects of corporate activities, and
occasionally in response to such criticism
Merchants of Doubt. (film). How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from
Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming is a 2010 non-fiction book by American historians of science
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. It identifies parallels between the global warming controversy
and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, and the hole in the ozone layer.
Oreskes and Conway write that in each case "keeping the controversy alive" by spreading doubt and
confusion after a scientific consensus had been reached was the basic strategy of those opposing
action.[1] In particular, they show that Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists
joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific
consensus on many contemporary issues.[2]
Historical negationism – Illegitimate distortion of the historical record
Neo-Luddism. or new Luddism is a philosophy opposing many forms of modern technology.[1]
The word Luddite is generally used as a derogatory term applied to people showing technophobic
leanings.[2] The name is based on the historical legacy of the English Luddites, who were active

10
between 1811 and 1816.[1] Neo-Luddism is a leaderless movement of non-affiliated groups who
resist modern technologies and dictate a return of some or all technologies to a more primitive level.
Obscurantism. and Obscurationism (/ɒbˈskjʊərənˌtɪzəm, əb-/ or /ˌɒbskjʊəˈræntɪzəm/)[1][2]
describe the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise, abstruse manner designed
to limit further inquiry and understanding.[3] There are two historical and intellectual denotations of
Obscurantism: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge;[a]
and (2) deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate
vagueness.
The term obscurantism derives from the title of the 16th-century satire Epistolæ Obscurorum
Virorum (Letters of Obscure Men, 1515–19), that was based upon the intellectual dispute between the
German humanist Johann Reuchlin and the monk Johannes Pfefferkorn of the Dominican Order, about
whether or not all Jewish books should be burned as un-Christian heresy.[citation needed]
Earlier, in 1509, the monk Pfefferkorn had obtained permission from Maximilian I, Holy
Roman Emperor (1486–1519), to burn all copies of the Talmud (Jewish law and Jewish ethics)
known to be in the Holy Roman Empire (AD 926–1806);
the” Letters of Obscure Men” satirized the Dominican arguments for burning "un-Christian" works.
In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of
intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge. In the 19th century, in distinguishing
the varieties of obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology from the "more subtle" obscurantism
of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and of modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich
Nietzsche said: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken
individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of
existence."
Sociology of scientific ignorance – Study of ignorance in science, or Ignorance Studies,
the study of ignorance as something relevant.
Sub-vertising – Making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements
The Republican War on Science. is a 2005 book by Chris Mooney, an American journalist who
focuses on the politics of science policy. In the book, Money discusses the Republican Party
leadership's stance on science, and in particular that of the George W. Bush administration, with regard
to issues such as climate change denialism, intelligent design, bioethics, alternative medicine,
pollution, separation of church and state, and the government funding of education, research, and
environmental protection. The book argues that the administration regularly distorted and/or
suppressed scientific research to further its own political aims.
Vaccine controversies, based on assorted junk-scientific strategies to misrepresent life- and health-
saving technologies as harmful rather than beneficial. Vaccine hesitancy, also known as anti-
vaccination or anti-vax, is a reluctance or refusal to be vaccinated or to have one's children vaccinated
against contagious diseases despite the availability of vaccination services. It was identified by the
World Health Organization as one of the top ten global “health threats”
of 2019.[1][2] The term encompasses outright refusal to vaccinate, delaying vaccines, accepting
vaccines but remaining uncertain about their use, or using certain vaccines but not others.
Arguments against vaccination are contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus about
the safety and efficacy of vaccines.[5][6][7][8] Vaccine hesitancy stems from multiple key factors
including a person's lack of confidence (mistrust of the vaccine and/or healthcare provider),
complacency (the person does not see a need for the vaccine or does not see the value of the vaccine),
and convenience (access to vaccines).[4] It has existed since the invention of vaccination, and pre-

11
dates the coining of the terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" by nearly 80 years. The specific hypotheses
raised by anti-vaccination advocates have been found to change over time.

References
2]. interview with Robert Proctor "So I asked a linguist colleague of mine, Iain Boal, if he could coin a
term that would designate the production of ignorance and the study of ignorance, and we came up
with a number of different possibilities."Agnotology: Understanding Our Ignorance”, 15 December
2016, retrieved 31 January 2017
3]. Arenson, Karen W. (22 August 2006). "What Organizations Don't Want to Know Can Hurt". The
New York Times. "'there is a lot more protectiveness than there used to be,' said Dr. Proctor, who is
shaping a new field, the study of ignorance, which he calls agnotology. 'It is often safer not to know.'"
4]. Kreye, Andrian (2007). "We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)".
The Edge World Question Center 2007. Edge Foundation. p. 6. Retrieved 12 August 2007. "This is
about a society's choice between listening to science and falling prey to what Stanford science
historian Robert N. Proctor calls Agnotology (the cultural production of ignorance)".
6]. Palmer, Barbara (4 October 2005). "Conference to explore the social construction of ignorance".
Stanford News Service. Archived from the original on 24 July 2007. Retrieved 12 August 2007.
"Proctor uses the term "agnotology" – a word coined from agnosis, meaning "not knowing" – to
describe a new approach to looking at knowledge through the study of ignorance."
8]. Kenyon, Georgina. "The Man Who Studies the Spread of Ignorance". BBC.
10]. "Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance". Retrieved 12 August 2007
13]. Cohen, Patricia (14 June 2003). "History for Hire in Industry Lawsuits". The New York Times.
Retrieved 15 July 2014. "Mr. Proctor, who describes his specialty as "agnotology, the study of
ignorance", argues that the tobacco industry has tried to give the impression that the hazards of
cigarette smoking are still an open question even when the scientific evidence is indisputable.
"The tobacco industry is famous for having seen itself as a manufacturer of two different products,"
he said, "tobacco and doubt"."
14]. "Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance". The British Society for the History of
Science. Retrieved 15 July 2014. "Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture Pennsylvania
University Presents a Workshop: ... Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, co-organizers"
16]. Schiebinger, L. (2004). "Feminist History of Colonial Science". Hypatia. 19 (1): 233–254.
doi:10.2979/HYP.2004.19.1.233. "I develop a methodological tool that historian of science Robert
Proctor has called “agnotology”—the study of culturally-induced ignorances—that serves as a
counterweight to more traditional concerns for epistemology, refocusing questions about "how we
know" to include questions about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely
the absence of knowledge but an outcome of the cultural and political struggle."

Further reading
Angulo, A. J. (2016). Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad. Johns
Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-1932-9.
Michaels, David (2008). Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your
health. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530067-3.
Mooney, Chris (2005). The Republican War on Science. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04676-2.
Proctor, Robert N. (1995). Cancer Wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about
cancer. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00859-9.

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 Proctor, Robert N.; Schiebinger, Londa, eds. (2008). Agnotology: The making and un-making of
ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5901-4. Retrieved 31 October
2011.
Smithson M (1985). "Toward a social theory of ignorance". Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour. 20 (4): 323–346. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1985.tb00049.x.
The man who studies the spread of ignorance - Georgina Kenyon, BBC, 6 January 2016
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/AgnotologyConference.html 2005

The workshop will explore a new theoretical perspective and methodology – agnotology, the cultural
production of ignorance – in interdisciplinary science studies.
Workshop participants will explore how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings,
through (for example) media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document
destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and
forgetfulness.
The point is to develop a taxonomy of understandings and uses of ignorance, but also tools
for understanding how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not or did not "come to be"
or are delayed or neglected at different points in history.

Organizers: Londa Schiebinger, Barbara D. Finberg Director, IRWG,

and Professor of History of Science, Stanford University
Robert N. Proctor, Professor of History of Science, Stanford University
Speakers:
Iain Boal, Research Fellow, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
"Lost Paths in Technics: The Bicycle in Global History"
Lundy Braun, Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Africana Studies,
Brown University
"Biomedical Science, Colonialism, and the Production of Invisibility: The Case of Asbestos
Diseases in South Africa."
David Magnus, Director, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University
"Agnotology as a Strategy in the Debate over Genetically Engineered Organisms: The Precautionary
Principle versus Risk Assessment"
Adrienne Mayor, Visiting Fellow in Classics and Human Values, Princeton University
"Suppression of Indigenous Fossil Knowledge: From Claverack, New York 1705 to Agate Springs,
Nebraska, 2005"
David M. Michaels, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health and Epidemiology, George
Washington University
"Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the
Public's Health & Environment"
Charles Mills, Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago
"White vs. Black: Race in the Epistemology of Ignorance"
Naomi Oreskes, Associate Professor, Department of History and Program in Science Studies at the
UC, San Diego
"Deny, Deny, Deny: How to Sow Confusion over Climate Change"
Robert Proctor, Professor of History of Science, Stanford University

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 "Agnotology, A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and its Study)"
Geoffrey Sea, Author and independent scholar, Piketon, Ohio
"The Circle Game: Uranium Enrichment and the Depletion of Knowledge"
Michael J. Smithson, Reader, School of Psychology,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
"Social Theories of Ignorance"

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https://judithcurry.com/2011/07/11/agnotology-agnoiology-and-cognitronics/
Agnotology, Agnoiology and Cognitronics
Posted on July 11, 2011 by curryja | 281 Comments

by Judith Curry

I’ve just come across three really interesting words, that I have somehow missed up to this point in my
studies on uncertainty and ignorance: agnotology, agnoiology and cognitronics.

While cruising my blogroll last nite, I spotted a post on Michael Smithson‘s blog Ignorance and
Uncertainty entitled “Writing on Agnotology, Uncertainty, and Ignorance.” Which led me to the
Wikipedia page on agnotology, which introduced me to agnoiology and cognitronics.

Proctor on agnotology

From an interesting interview with Robert Proctor, who coined the term “agnotology”:

“When it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is

reversed: Ignorance increases.
[Proctor] has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology.
Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”
As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests
work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim;
church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully
seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it
did before.
“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid
attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally
suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about
what’s true and what’s not.”
Maybe the Internet itself has inherently agnotological side effects. People graze all day on
information tailored to their existing worldview. And when bloggers or talking heads actually engage
in debate, it often consists of pelting one another with mutually contradictory studies they’ve Googled:
“Greenland’s ice shield is melting 10 years ahead of schedule!” vs. “The sun is cooling down and
Earth is getting colder!”
The most important thing these days might just be knowing what we know. What don’t we
know, and why don’t we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political
instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden

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traditional questions about “how we know” to ask: Why don’t we know what we don’t know? The
essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge;
it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political
geography, but there are also things people don’t want you to know (“Doubt is our product” is the
tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change,
military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical
archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why
various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.
Michael Smithson on agnotology, From Smithson’s blog post:
Two fundamental concerns have been at the forefront of philosophical and social scientific approaches
to unknowns.
The first of these is judgment, learning and decision making in the absence of complete information.
The second concern is the nature and genesis of unknowns. While many scholars have treated
unknowns as arising from limits to human experience and cognitive capacity, increasing attention has
been paid recently to the thesis that unknowns are socially constructed, many of them intentionally so.

There is an agnoiology blog www.agnoiology.com, which gives the following definition.

agnoioligy: n. the study of human stupidity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oliver K. Manuel | July 12, 2011 at 12:20 pm |

Today NASA scientists and NASA reporters bravely released a video that destroys any remaining
credibility of the Standard Solar Model (SSM) of a Hydrogen-filled Sun
and world leaders’ hopes of using the threat [ or contrived lie ] of CO2-induced global warming

as the “common enemy” to unite the nations, [DE. not enuff aliens , eh ? ]
end the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation
and establish a one-world tyrannical government: [ oh, wait ! aliens are demons, oh FUD ! DE]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-dark-fireworks-sun.html
July 12, 2011 Dark fireworks on the Sun By Dr. Tony Phillips, Science@NASA

On June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western
edge of the solar disk. Registering only "M" (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast
at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill eruption--that is, until researchers looked at the movies.
"We'd never seen anything like it," says Alex Young, a solar physicist at the
Goddard Space Flight Center. "Half of the sun appeared to be blowing itself to bits."
NASA has just released new high-resolution videos of the event recorded by the Solar
Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The videos are large, typically 50 MB to 100 MB, but worth the wait to
download.
"IN terms of raw power, this really was just a medium-sized eruption," says Young, "but it had
a uniquely dramatic appearance caused by all the inky-dark material. We don't usually see that."
Solar physicist Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC calls it a case
of "dark fireworks."
"The blast was triggered by an unstable magnetic filament near the sun's surface,"

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he explains. "That filament was loaded down with cool 1 plasma, which exploded in a spray of
dark blobs and streamers."
The plasma blobs were as big as planets, many larger than Earth. They rose and fell
ballistically, moving under the influence of the Sun's gravity like balls tossed in the air,
exploding "like bombs" when they hit the stellar surface.
Some blobs, however, were more like guided missiles. "In the movies we can see material
'grabbed' by magnetic fields and funneled toward sunspot groups hundreds of thousands of kilometers
away," notes Young.
SDO also detected a shadowy shock wave issuing from the blast site. The 'solar tsunami'
propagated more than halfway across the sun, visibly shaking filaments and loops of magnetism en
route.
Long-range action has become a key theme of solar physics since SDO was launched in 2010.
The observatory frequently sees explosions in one part of the sun affecting other parts. Sometimes one
explosion will trigger another ... and another ... with a domino sequence of flares going off all around
the star.
"The June 7th blast didn't seem to trigger any big secondary explosions,
but it was certainly felt far and wide," says Young.
It's tempting to look at the movies and conclude that most of the exploded material fell back--
but that wouldn't be true, according to Vourlidas. "The blast also propelled a significant coronal mass
ejection (CME) out of the sun's atmosphere."
He estimates that the cloud massed about 4.5 x1015 grams, placing it in the top 5% of all
CMEs recorded in the Space Age. For comparison, the most massive CME ever recorded was 1016
grams, only a factor of ~2 greater than the June 7th cloud.2 The amount of material that fell back to
the sun on June 7th was approximately equal to the amount that flew away, Vourlidas says.
As remarkable as the June 7th eruption seems to be, Young says it might not be so rare. "In
fact," he says, "it might be downright common."

Before SDO, space-based observatories observed the sun with relatively slow cadences and/or
limited fields of view. They could have easily missed the majesty of such an explosion, catching only a
single off-center snapshot at the beginning or end of the blast to hint at what actually happened.
If Young is right, more dark fireworks could be in the offing. Stay tuned.

---------------------------------------------------------
June 7, 2011 www.timeanddate.com for Abilene, Texas

Sunrise: 06:38 AM _62degrees ENE Astronomical Twilight 04:58 AM to 10:29 PM

Meridian: 01:43 PM 180 degrees South Nautical Twilight 05:35 AM to 06:09 PM
Sunset: 08:49 PM 298 degrees WNW Civil Twilight 06:09 AM to 09:17 PM
Day length: 14:11:24 Difference; -00.39
Solar Noon 01:43 PM Altitude: 80 degrees Heading: 180 degrees South Position: Day
Summer Solstice: June 21,2011

Earthquakes for June 7, 2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_2011

June Strongest magnitude 7.2 United States Alaska
Number by magnitude Total fatalities 2

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7.0−7.9 1
6.0−6.9 13
5.0−5.9 161 Earthquake.usgs.gov.

01]. Chile A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck just offshore of Arauco Province, Biobío Region,
Chile, on June 1.[72]
02]. Japan A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the east coast of Honshu, Japan, on June 3.[73]
03]. Australia A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck west of Macquarie Island, Australia, on June 5.[74]
04]. New Zealand A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, on June 13,
preceded by a magnitude 5.7 foreshock.[75][76][77]
05]. Indonesia A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the Molucca Sea on June 13.[78]
06]. Papua New Guinea A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the New Britain Region, Papua New
Guinea, on June 16.[79]
07]. Chile A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck Antofagasta, Chile, on June 20.[80]
08]. Solomon Islands A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the Santa Cruz Islands, Solomon Islands, on
June 21.[81]
09]. Japan A magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck near the east coast of Honshu, Japan, on June 22.[82]
10].United States A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Fox Islands in the eastern Aleutian Islands,
Alaska, on June 24.[83]
11]. Solomon Islands A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the Santa Cruz Islands of the Solomon
Islands on June 24.[84]
12]. Indonesia A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Papua, Indonesia, on June 26.[84]
13]. Japan A magnitude 5.4 earthquake struck Nagano Prefecture, Japan on June 30, killing one
person.

Dawn is the beginning of morning twilight Civil, Nautical and Astronomical twilight.
Dusk is the end of the evening twilight

The Crescent Moon remains visible just moments before Sunrise.

The Moon rises with Sunrise and sets with Sunset.

17
The Milky Way can be seen as a large band across the night sky
and is distorted into an arch in the 360 degree panorama.

18
The Belt of Venus seen from an airplane at an altitude of 42,000 feet or 8 miles.

19