#pseudo science

Julius Bien (1826–1909)

Arrangements for Taking Composite Photographs of Skulls, 1886

“The nineteenth century was an era of great changes and scientific progress in the Western world. [...] Medical advances were great, and the understanding of mental illness began to improve after the birth of psychiatry [1830s], but up until then, there was no particular field of research specifically aimed at mental illness. […] until the nineteenth century […] asylums were all but places of horror, filled with the criminally insane. With the reforms of the nineteenth century, this changed, and the mentally ill were seen as "sick humans needing care" instead. With this progress, the public's perception began changing as well […] the popular image shifted from that of the bestial madman of the eighteenth century, to the the less threatening but troubled mad-woman.

This sudden shift between the genders of the icon of madness was no coincidence. New diagnosis included hysteria, anorexia nervosa and neurasthenia, almost all exclusively attributed to women. Not all of these were created equal in the eyes of the psychiatrists. Nervosa anorexia was seen as a self sacrificing and a very feminine disease while hysteria was often deemed selfish and destructive, a rebellion of which doctors did not approve.”

— Elísabet Rakel Siguroardóttir; “Women and Madness in the 19th Century: The effects of oppression on women's mental health” (2013)

Johnny explains the pseudo-science.

But 1 isn't a big sample size...

Oh no! The plane is going to crash! We need Generic-Superman-clone-man to help us!

Now you're probably thinking, of course, Generic-Superman-clone-man can just simply lift the plane and drop it on the floor. Just like who he's an expy of!

But here's The Plane Problem.

Superman has a quirk of his power that he can lift an object by almost any point and it retains its structural stability. A kind of Tactile telekinesis forcefield around his body he can extend to his body that makes things he holds stronger so they don't break from his strength because super strength means nothing when you're so strong you break anything you try and lift. It also let's him make an anchoring point on the ground that let's him pull a Hancock and let a train crash into him. Because see, no matter how strong and durable you are, if something is moving and it's packs enough force to move your weight, You Will Move. But since Superman can create his own anchoring point on the floor he's cool.

Not only that it also helps avoid another problem with lifting things since the ground needs to be just as stable to carry the weight of what you are lifting. Otherwise you'll end up like pure Bulk here.

This let's Superman kinda break Physics when it comes to how he uses his powers. In Man Of Steel Vol4 #1 Clark explicitly states that things get easier to lift when he's flying. This is because his flight which seems to also be some form of gravity manipulation or Telekinesis let's him create his own leverage to let him lift things easier so he doesn't get the Bulk problem above.

In Superman Returns you can see this version of the character explicitly doesn't have this ability or at least in my opinion has a weak version of this power, He starts to push on one wing to stabilize the aircraft but it tears away. He then has to kinda glide it downwards from the nose, which kinda shouldn't work exactly as shown but is close enough, he probably has a less powerful version of this ability. Other characters like the Viltrumites from Invincible have the explicit ability to 'create their own leverage'.

The best example of the use of this lack of leverage certain expies of the character have is Homelander from The Boys.

In this scene Homelander explicitly says 'You want me to lift the plane, there's nothing to stand on, what do you want me to use air?' or at least something like that.

He's right, since all he has is flight and super strength as in super strength not supes TK. If he tried to lift the plane like he did in the Superman gif above, he would quite literally punch a hole right through the plane and just make it crash faster. Wanna clarify tho, I'm not defending him. There are other ways he could have done this if he was actually competent.

He could have called over the Deep and A train with him, you know actually leading his team. Then try and someone glide the plane into the water by angling it just right from the landing gear, he would probably have to laser the engine out or turn it off some other way. Then once he brings it to the land safely on the water. Then have Deep use his water buddies and A-train run on water to safely get them to land. I wanna clarify it wouldn't exactly be a 100 percent success, people could still die and he could have failed but what makes him evil is that he didn't even try. But yeah that's besides the point of this post

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has not disproved the Big Bang, despite an article about a pseudoscientific theory that went viral in August, and which mischaracterized quotes from an astrophysicist to create a false narrative that the Big Bang didn't happen.

[...]

Nature wrote a piece on the research on July 27, in which Kirkpatrick said: "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning, wondering if everything I've ever done is wrong." It's this quote that was later misused.

"It was a good quote!" Kirkpatrick said. "I try to be a pretty forthright person, and I meant what I said — that everything I had learned about the first galaxies based on previous telescopic data probably wasn't the complete picture, and now we have more data so we can refine our theories."

Kirkpatrick went back to her research and forgot about her quote. That was, until mid-August, when she received a text from a friend saying that there was an article — originally published by an organization called the Institute of Art and Ideas but now being republished on mainstream news sites — saying that JWST's observations of distant galaxies had disproved the Big Bang, which is not correct.

Worse still, the article had taken what Kirkpatrick had told Nature and misused it out of context to give the false impression that astrophysicists were panicking over the thought of the Big Bang theory being wrong.

The author of the article, an independent researcher named Eric Lerner, has been a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative.