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In November 2016, a viral meme circulated on social media in the wake of the announcement that Ben Carson was being considered for the job of President-elect Trump’s Education Secretary (which he allegedly declined), suggesting that the former Republican presidential candidate didn’t believe in the Big Bang theory because it would have destroyed Earth. Ben Carson, as far as we can tell, never actually made this statement. While Ben Carson has gone on the record as doubting the validity of the Big Bang, his logic is completely different from the more overtly incorrect logic presented in the meme. In a 2012 speech to a collection of Seventh Day Adventists titled Celebration of Creation, Carson suggested his doubt in the Big Bang stemmed from the fact that it contradicts the second law of thermodynamics: As physicist and author Brian Greene explained in 2015, this is a tortured reading of both cosmological theory and thermodynamics. Greene uses the act of cleaning a messy room as an example: The empirical verification of this concept on a cosmological scale, which predicted (with remarkable precision) a specific frequency of background radiation left over from the Big Bang, is considered both one of the crowning achievements in science and the strongest validation yet of the Big Bang model of the universe’s origins. With respect to Carson’s claims about probability and multiple Big Bangs, Greene also takes umbrage: Ultimately, and certainly ironically, the viral meme accusing Ben Carson of a flawed reading of cosmology appears to stem from an equally flawed reading of Ben Carson’s own flawed reading of science.
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