If “smugly thinking that you are so smart because you found something out by using the internet” had it’s own TV show, that show would be The Big Bang Theory (BBT). Its fan base actually fancies themselves as among the nerds just for watching a show that was written to appeal to grandiose fantasies of being nerdy, as opposed to being unattractive and lost in bad television without the intelligence.

That’s the appeal of the show. That’s what makes people continually come back for more of it: that the viewers think that they’re so smart for living in the 21st century, and this is the show that pats them on the back for it.

People are not scientists just for watching a show about people pretending to be scientists. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to imagine having to explain to anyone over two years old. But here we are today, witnessing another new low in humanity’s race to the bottom.

Think I’m overreacting? Here’s a clip from BBT. Keep in mind that this wasn’t some random clip from some hostile viewer out to make BBT look bad by sarcastically adding a laugh track every time the show fails at humor. The video was posted by CBS as representative of the kind of humor that the show has to offer:

There’s a reason this show has a laugh track. Without it, viewers would have no idea when the writers want them to laugh, and the show would just be one stale, awkward delivery after another.

Not only does this show give people a false sense of intellectual grandiosity, it actively misleads them. The clip above briefly mentions Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic church. Myths about Galileo’s persecution have long been thrown around, but recently, I heard someone mention that Galileo was excommunicated. My BS detector went off, so I later did some research.

What I found out was that Galileo was not excommunicated. At worst, he was put under house arrest.

When you think about the great acts of religious persecution throughout the ages, what do you think about?

• In the year 1915, entire towns of Armenian Christians were killed by invading Young Turks, in what is today known as The Armenian Genocide.
• In the 1940s, millions of Jews were killed by Aryan supremacists in what is known today as the Holocaust.
• Rudie poo house arrest.

Galileo was under house arrest because he presented a theory that was in conflict with the Catholic church’s then-popular geocentric ideology, which, contrary to popular belief, was taught nowhere in the Bible, but instead found it’s way into Catholic thinking due to the influence of Platonic philosophy. But you don’t hear pseudo-intellectuals firing their mouths off about how Platonic philosophy is leading people astray.

Galileo wasn’t excommunicated. He decided to remain a Catholic. He did so because that was what he believed in, not so some fifteen-year-old with a superiority complex can later dump on what he stood for.

When it comes down to it, people aren’t actually interested in science. They’re more interested in thinking themselves so smart because they own smartphones. Yeah, those things which are made to be as simple to use as they can be so that just about anyone could use them. Touchscreens are among the most straightforward interfaces known to mankind, and smartphones usually have just one button on the front of them. Don’t feel so smug just for being able to use something like that.

If people were interested in science, we’d see more people forming hypotheses and then rigorously testing them using the scientific method and documenting their observations, and reading long research articles published in periodicals. It seems like people are far more interested in bad television.

When most people say that they like science, what they really mean is that they like playing games on their cell phones.