We are all familiar with the story of The Emperor's New Clothes: a pair of unscrupulous traders exploit an emperor's vanity and stupidity to sell him a non-existant suit sewn of non-existant fabric. He paraded naked in front of his subjects and told them of its magical powers - only stupid people cannot see the beauty of the suit. His sycophantic subjects could not see the suit, but each privately thought that everybody else could, so they must be the stupid odd ones out. It was only when a small child had the confidence to declare that there was no substance to the suit that others could admit they did not see it either, and the emperor retreated in disarray.

Science, too has its fair share of "Emperors" too, people who want to gather an unquestioning following¹, in the manner of quasi-religious personality cults, so you should beware also of "The Emperor's New Theory" (ENT).

This is a hypothesis² held by a small number of people (e.g. 1). The main indicators of an ENT are comments like "it's obvious to me", "those who are not blinkered by dogma will see..." and "all intelligent people will immediately see that I am right". They are trying to bully the reader into accepting the ENT as fact, as to object to it³ is to prove that you are not as intelligent as the perpetrator of the ENT.

Typical ENTs fly in the face of sound, observed fact and repeated explanations of the real situation are as water of the duck's back. Perpetrators of ENTs are wilfully ignorant, which is an inexcusable and unforgivable position to take.

The main ENTs doing the rounds at the moment:

"Gravity is little to do with mass - things have to rotate in a vacuum to have a gravity field. Nothing that has gravity cannot spin. See, I have made up a bit of nonsense formula with undefined variables to show that I am correct."

"Relativity and quantum mechanics are wrong. I have replaced it all with a particle I have made up by myself. You cannot prove me wrong because you have to invoke spacetime, the big bang and mathematics, all of which are fictional, because there was a universe before this one and there's one outside this one as well. Oh, and zero sometimes equals one."

"Life did not evolve. It was designed. The evidence is obvious: it is all too complicated for somebody as clever as me to understand, so it must have been designed by a Superior Being."

"Time goes at different speeds on different planets, gravity doesn't exist, we are held down by air pressure, the planets are held in their orbits by magnetism, and all planets, asteroids, comets and stars are formed exactly the same way. Oh, and they are all spherical, even if they don't look it."

"Erosion is a myth. Pebbles grow from sand. Pebbles keep growing until you get rocks, boulders and mountains. It's all done by seawater evaporating and leaving new layers on the pebbles. Oh, and limestone used to be really soft, which is why the Egyptians could build the pyramids with sticks and dinosaurs ate it. Fossils are dinosaurs that fell into soft limestone and got stuck when it set."

"You can travel faster than light in an aluminium ball powered by static electricity, the Bible is actually an accurate science text book, the Masons were originally formed to persecute me, and me alone. The world will end on March 29th this year [2006]. All of this (and ID) is proved by the bizarre sight of snow in winter."