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ground. “I say the cork will not go anywhere,” Wessen says.
“The cork would probably rise a little bit,” Knox counters. I
expect someone to get up and ask the bartender for the needed
supplies, but no one seems to want to leave the debate. Knox
and Wessen talk about buoyancy and gravity for nearly an hour.
Physics instructors sometimes teach the experiment Wessen
described, and he is right about the outcome. Buoyant force—
what makes a cork float—disappears when a container of fluid
is in free-fall, meaning the cork will stay submerged until the
container hits the ground, then pop up to the surface. But
when I later search “cork in a bucket gravity” on YouTube, I
find instructional videos for building a gravity bong—a device
whose invention required some knowledge of physics but is
not generally known to make people smarter.After the convention, I meet up with Jan Willem van
Prooijen, an experimental psychologist based at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, who has studied conspiracytheories since 2009. Back then, he says, some of his col-
leagues were dismissive, but as social scientists realized
that such theories can have a real impact on civic life, their
sentiment began to shift. “It influences whether or not peo-
ple get their children vaccinated,” van Prooijen tells me. “It
influences whether or not people support policy to reduce
global warming. It influences who people vote for.”
Scholars like him are now trying to dispel the notion
that conspiracy theorists are firmly on the fringe of soci-
ety. “These are normal people who have normal everyday
lives,” van Prooijen says. “This isn’t just a few lunatics
who are in the basement of their house being lonely.” He
notes that some go to YouTube to satisfy real inquisitive-
ness. Flat-Earthers “may be a bit too open-minded” when
it comes to accepting evidence, but in other ways, “they’re
much like scientists in their curiosity about the world and in
their desire to figure out how things work.”
Whether people convert may hinge on what they find when
they go in search of answers. YouTube’s efforts to prioritize
videos that promote accepted truths have not solved the crux
of the problem: Most content about the globe is simply not as80 FALL 2019 • POPSCI.COM
“YouTube’s algorithm spreads information to