That was the best and most satisfying debunking video I've ever seen. Right up there with Pen & Teller's Bullshit (a debunking show in the states).
It is worth understanding these people though. I see them not as irritations, but warnings. And its something that happens so often, to so many people. They get the spark of curiosity, and start experimenting or investigating. At some point, experimentally do something they find amazing - but there is nothing amazing. They simply possess a critically incomplete understanding of the physics behind an otherwise understood phenomena. They are unaware of this incompleteness, and mistake cracks in their broken half-knowledge for something amazing, something world-changing, something everyone else missed. But there is nothing there, there is nothing great, there is just unseen ignorance combined with optimism taken to a fault.
They latch onto that idea, that feeling of something stupendous, and almost like the first hit from a crack pipe, they keep chasing after it with amazing focus and determination, and INVARIABLY, they end their own education. They've decided they know enough, because they know all they need to know to chase after the next hit from the crack pipe of imagined innovation. They know enough to have found this thing that everyone else missed - and believe detractors are blind to what they can see so clearly. And the idea is always one of such hope, promise, and unknown ignorance that anyone else who knows too little to know better will simply see a hero. Someone who is doing great work, will change everything. So they act as such, and suddenly, you're hitting that crack pipe while a bunch of other crack heads cheer you on, tell you how heroic you are for smoking crack, all the vitamins crack has in it, all sorts of good stuff.
And that, the (obliviously unwarranted) appreciation and praise and support and respect these people garner from other similarly or more uneducated people, often peers, friends, family as well as others online, is very powerful, I would imagine. I don't know how easily I could give up something like that, honestly. It's very easy to understand how, with friends and ignorance on their side, to see everyone debunking their 'discovery' or otherwise dropping phat knowledge bombs all up in their business as trying to destroy all that, as the enemy.
Thus, knowledge becomes the enemy, and learning comes to an end.
I am glad for videos like this one and people like you, Mr. Jones, because maybe stuff like this will keep someone who might have enclosed their mind in that cage wrought of equal parts ignorance, good intentions, and emotional reinforcement, will keep learning how to think, and thus keep learning. I would not wish anyone to lose out on the greater wonders of reality. The people like ManOfStone will never feel the beauty and wonders and mystery of the real universe - in all its staggering enormity - wash over them. They'll just chase after what began as an innocent flaw in their understanding.
And for that reason, they have my sincerest and deepest pity.
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