Chandler’s “Downward Acceleration of WTC1” is by far the simplest, most concrete, least ambiguous false scientific argument I have ever seen. People think they understand it in full. To those who have fallen for it, it proves that the vast, vast majority of the millions of the technical and scientific community, all over the world, will proclaim the opposite of provable truth, because some unseen authority dictates what they say. There’s no mucking about with the vagaries of complex systems such as climate or the human body, no room for doubt or maybe. In the minds of the convinced, “scientists and engineers are merely whores; Chandler proved it with Newton’s laws”.
This corrupts the public’s understanding of what scientists do. It proclaims, essentially, that there is no science, there’s just authority, and if authority says “say the following”, scientists comply. And that is precisely the theme behind anti-vax, climate change denial, and covid-19 denial. And Node, you subscribe to the latter two as well.
Chandler is not the prime cause of science denial, that honour falls to the corporate media (see Goldacre’s Bad Science ), but he’s probably a major plank in it; the claims in his paper are certainly all over most of the Truther websites. People have informal conversations, you know? Attitudes tend to proliferate.