History Main / GravityIsOnlyATheory

* In the ''WesternAnimation/CloneHigh'' episode "Blinded With Pseudoscience: Magnetic Distractions", Candide Sampson hires a substitute teacher named Professor Hirsute, who turns out to be a pusher of pseudoscience (and was hired by Candide under the gambit that the students who aren't leadership material would be stupid enough to blindly believe his nonsense and get themselves killed). At one point. Hirsute shows a bird in his hand and takes [[InsaneTrollLogic the bird flying away as prove that gravity isn't real]].

* "Jet fuel doesn't burn that hot!" is a frequent cry of 9/11 "Truthers", asserting (actually, correctly!) that the temperature of an aviation fuel fire is not as high as the melting point of steel. The fact that steel beams don't actually need to melt, i.e. ''become a liquid'', in order to be compromised to the point where they can become soft malleable (something any blacksmith could tell you) doesn't seem to register with them.

** In [[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2703#comic a much later strip,]] a biology teacher reverses the arguments against evolution-- he argues that ''history'' is only a theory. More specifically, he does not believe in "the theory of revolution": According to his religion, all states were created in their current form (he handwaves away revolutions he could personally observe as "microrevolutions" whose resulting states are [[FullCircleRevolution basically the same]].[[note]]This is a parody of the creationist tactic of handwaving away as "microevolution" clearly observed cases of natural selection such as the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.[[/note]]) However, [[spoiler: he was deliberately using InsaneTrollLogic in order to prove his point that teaching Intro Biology was tougher than teaching Intro History, because even though both have to deal with wackos and conspiracy theorists of all flavours the biology professor actually has to deal with bullshit "theories" as well]].

* Flat Earthers often reject gravity, with some proposing instead that constantly experiencing a 9.8 m/s[[superscript:2]] acceleration towards the centre of the Earth is in fact a flat earth endlessly accelerating ''upwards'' at that rate. This would violate several other core principles of physics, like conservation of energy (where is the energy causing that acceleration coming from?) or the speed-of-light limits imposed by relativity (accelerating constantly at 1G, it would only take about a year to approach the speed of light, where the amount of energy needed to ''keep'' accelerating gets beyond astronomical) but that doesn't seem to bother them.
** They're also apparently unbothered by the ungodly mess that their theory makes of the relative motions of the planets, which was one of the things that was steadily eroding Geocentrism (the notion that Earth is the centre of the universe around which everything else moves) before Newton was even born.
** Finally, there's a peculiar obsession among some Flat Earthers that the Moon emits a "cold" light (not physically possible; all light, whether considered as being a waveform or as being a particle, has energy, and objects can only get colder by ''releasing'' energy, so shining a light of any kind on any object will raise its temperature -- even if the increase is too small to be measured without incredibly sensitive tools) based on their failure to understand how radiative cooling works.[[note]]Longer explanation; the experiment involves checking the temperature of two points of a surface, one point in shadow and one in direct moonlight. The surface that is in shadow will be a little bit warmer than the surface in direct moonlight, but this is because some of the heat radiating from that surface is being reflected back onto it by whatever is casting the shadow in the first place. This is why overcast nights are warmer than clear ones; the clouds are reflecting/re-radiating some of the heat being radiated from the Earth back down to the ground, while on clear nights the best the infrared can do is slightly warm the atmosphere on its way into space.[[/note]]

* "Jet fuel doesn't burn that hot!" is a frequent cry of 9/11 "Truthers", asserting (actually, correctly!) that the temperature of an aviation fuel fire is not as high as the melting point of steel. The fact that steel beams don't actually need to melt, i.e. ''become a liquid'', in order to be compromised to the point where they can no longer support a structure is ignored.

A large part of this trope's use in both fiction and RealLife stems from the fact that 'theory' means something very different in a scientific (and philosophical) context to its everyday use, which could be summed up as 'unconfirmed idea'. 'It's just a theory' is a common way to indicate lack of confidence/certainty. This is not at all how the word is used in science, which gives many scientifically ignorant laypeople the confidence they need to attack any science of their choosing. What "theory" actually means is a tricky, tricky subject -- just go to your friendly university library and ask for some books on philosophy of science. In some works, however, the theory of gravity comes under fire as well, most often for purposes of analogy and satire. [[note]]The ''presence'' of gravity is not theoretical and is very clearly observed. It's the ''explanation of how gravity operates'' (as opposed to the phenomenon itself) that is indeed a theory, and has changed from time to time in the wake of new evidence, as scientific theories do. Gravity is currently best explained by the General Theory of Relativity, which has been empirically demonstrated to be correct, but which conflicts with quantum mechanics, which treats time as a constant.[[/note]]

* In ''VideoGame/SamAndMaxFreelancePolice Season 2'', Max claims not to believe in the existence of magnetism, insisting it's 'only a theory'. Then he brings out his Luger...only for it to be magnetized to the North Pole. He then says he believes it, "But that's my limit!"

** [[http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1049/1049_01.asp?wpc=1049_01.asp&wpp=a Some tracts]] go into this territory, claiming that the universe is held together by Jesus rather than any scientific principle such as gravity (see page illustration).