What bugs me about billionaires and their purported love of Physics

Angela Collier turns her SciComms talent on the weird trait for loud-and-proud billionaires to "flex" on their so-called Physics bona fides. They are telling on themselves.

It is a little-known fact that back in 1983 when I was enrolling at SJSU, I chose physics. Mainly due to a really engaging physics teacher in high school that really connected the dots for me.

Another admission, I was a nerd in high school. I was clearly on the college track, and my schedule was crammed with maths, sciences, and the “serious” humanities (of which I dodged the US/World Literature because I had an awesome teacher who pulled me into a “public speaking” trial program - best thing to happen to me in high-school if I am being honest) and while I had many “shop” friends, that path was foreclosed to me.

So, while at the time I wanted to be a computer programmer, the field of computer science was really in its infancy, thus I realized that if I studied physics in college, I would be able to apply that to a future as a rock-star computer programmer.

That didn’t work out the way I thought, but instead I found that I had an aptitude for the physics side, and did quite well, even though I was working nearly full-time as a cook/sous chef I laid down some impressive grades.

Of course, I don’t really use my physics background too often today, but the one thing it instilled in me was to always take problems that you face back to first principles, and how to approach a problem from non-obvious angles¹.

Okay, that is a long intro to my geekdom, but I needed to establish my street cred.

In the video below, that just flitted across my Youtube feed, I remember when I first discovered science comms people on Twitter, and particularly the women who were in this space (c.f. Dr. Katie Mack, astrophysics). They were doing double duty, communicating factual science information and swatting away all the mansplaining and misogyny that was lobbed their way².

Angela Collier takes on the billionaire / physicist pipeline

Angela clearly knows her stuff, and in this 50 minute video, she lays out the bullshit that the public billionaires spew about their affinity for physics, as a way to claim their intellectual chops, to somehow “humanize” them.

I think it is a weird flex for these ultra rich d-bags to claim that they found inspiration in physics, or feel that they have “effectively” studied physics because physics is their soulmate or something.

Yada yada.

But, as Angela lays out, this fetish is primarily centered on those loudmouthed public twat-waffle billionaires, Musk, Zuck, Gates and even his saintness Steve Jobs.

You would be excused if you thought that all the billionaire boys clubbers were all center of attention whores who are in your face 24/7/365. But most of the 850+ billionaires in the US are private assholes, living in their enclaves, enjoying the spoils of their luck in the business realm.

No, the class of attention hogs all want to claim some fundamental connection to the physical world (not physics per se) as a flex of their domination and to stroke their egos.

Angela has a segment of this long-ish video on the “Walter Isaacson” approach. That is to take an anecdote from their early childhood, and to spin a tale of how that drove them to their aerie as a captain of industry, wealthier than God, and somehow deserving of their success.

To illustrate this, is a longish segment where she recounts how she read Ayn Rand in school (not assigned) and she enjoyed it. But this frame of reference is in the knowledge that at the end of her life, Ayn Rand was on food stamps and her lung cancer was treated via Medicare³.

You know, the “socialist” things that she excoriated throughout her (gawdawful) fiction, and the credo of Objectivism.

From this knowledge, Angela assumed that Atlas Shrugged was parody, that it was meant to be satire.

And then Angela shreds it, like any rational person would do by any critical read of the tome and of the underlying “objectivism” worldview.

It is because of that section that I felt I needed to write this.

The video below is long, but it is well done, Angela lays it out in logical segments, and you will probably find yourself nodding to a lot of what she says.

And Fuck President Elon Musk sideways with a chainsaw. That fucker didn’t actually get his physics degree he blathers on about like an insincere douchebag.

1. As a measure of my nerdiness, I LOVE word problems. Mainly because all you need to get the answer is in the statement, and you have to suss it out, and figure out how the facts are to be employed into delivering the answer.

2. What the fuck is wrong with men’s fragile ego that they think that women can’t do hard sciences? It is a scourge in academia and in the lay public, it is not true, and I do EVERYTHING in my power to swat that shit away.

3. I was in my 30’s when my father gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and I read it during a 2 week vacation in Italy, as a way to pass time on the trains whilst we were transiting.

I always assumed that he probably meant to hand that to me to read when I was in school, and maybe in my late teens/early twenties I would have given it some intellectual credence. But by the time I read it, I already knew how ridiculous Galt’s Gulch was, and the absurdity of an “oligarch” (oops, I meant “makers”) strike to bring the US of A to its knees.

Truth is, the people make the things, the oligarchs just have too much money and have to pay physical therapists to treat the torn muscles from them patting themselves on the back.

Lame.

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