Example number "infinity" of "duh experts" ignoring discoveries by non-PhDs

Taking a short break from the usual serious analylsis:  If you're a parent with a gifted but "difficult" child (where "difficult" covers a multitude of behaviors), show 'em this:

Gifted kids deduce at an early age that there's something (actually a LOT of somethings) not right with the world.  For starters it seems that the people leading most nations are astonishingly stupid.

Kids aren't sure why stupid people rule, but it's obvious to them that it's true.  And as you could guess, that conclusion is understandably...unsettling.

As kids get more information the picture starts to get clearer: stupid people ridicule new ideas that aren't supported by the "elites" but turn out to be true.  Truth is ridiculed by people who believe what the "cool kids" believe, which is what everyone is taught.  

It can take decades before most people gradually realize and accept "new" truths.  And at that point everyone pretends they knew it all along.

Oh, I see you don't believe that.  Okay, think about "plate tectonics"--the idea that the continents drifted over the surface.  Initially ridiculed, slowly accepted, now regarded as obvious.  

Or the DECREE that the Chyna virus could not *possibly* have been modified by Chinese virologists in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make a harmless bat virus deadly to humans, but HAD to have evolved naturally.  Anyone who claimed the virus was modified by the Chinese was villified.  But years later the "experts" have finally admitted the obvious.

If that's still too controversial for ya (and for most Democrats it totally is) here's one that Democrats can show your kids without betraying duh Partei:

Experts are now pretty sure that 65 million years ago an asteroid six MILES wide struck the Earth.  That impact vaporized so many cubic miles of rock that the sun was obscured.  Plants died, and either lack of food or cold temps killed the dinosaurs.  

That hypothesis was first proposed in 1980, after scientists found a razor-thin layer of a rare metal called iridium in geological strata in dozens of places around the planet.

Geologists can get a good estimate of the date when a layer of sediment was deposited, and it turned out the thin layer of iridium appeared at the same time all over the world.  How odd.

Iridium is quite rare.  And the thinness of the layer suggested the metal fell out of the air in a matter of a few years.  What could account for it?

In 1980 Luis Alvarez and his son Walter wrote a paper suggesting the layer was due to a *really* big asteroid--rich in iridium--hitting the Earth.

But for that theory to be true, the impact would have produced a crater 120 miles across.  No such crater was visible on the Earth's surface, so that left the ocean.

Turns out that huge crater had already been found, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatán, by an eccentric petroleum geophysicist named Glen Penfield.  But because Penfield was an "oilman" (sneered at by PhDs), no one would listen.

One of the ways oilmen discover big oil fields is to measure the Earth's magnetic field.  Anomalies in that field suggest underlying "stratigraphic traps" that could contain billions of barrels of oil--worth billions of dollars.

Companies looking for oil had measured the magnetic field in the Gulf of Mexico with great precision.  Using just pencil and paper (how low-tech!) Penfield mapped anomalies in that field--and found a hole 120 miles across.  He later confirmed that by anomalies in the Earth's gravity field.

It was the hole the Alvarezes had been looking for.

So Penfield called Walter Alvarez to tell him the good news.  He left a message but Alvarez didn't respond.  He told NASA about his findings and got a sneering response--essentially "We're great and you're not."  

He tried to share his discovery for a decade, but according to Penfield the attitude of the so-called "experts" was “This guy doesn’t even have a doctorate” and "It’s not worth talking to some oil guy.”

He says he was depressed that no one would listen to his *convincing evidence* of the huge crater--including Alvarez, whose hypothesis would have been confirmed by Penfield's discovery.

Of course eventually Penfield's discovery was confirmed by "duh expert PhDs," and now experts agree that the "Cretaceous extinction" was caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth off the Yucatan peninsula.

Point is: With few exceptions so-called "experts" refuse to listen to anything that contradicts what they "know" (i.e. were taught).  A tiny percentage are open-minded enough to listen and learn--and they slowly influence the rest of the "cool kidz."

So if you have a kid who's bright but struggling with the feeling that "the experts" are often wrong--for example, Fauci et al lying about covid-- show 'em this.

Source: (many)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater