Scientific falsehoods heard from adults during my childhood

I caught my mother-in-law telling my then 2 year old daughter that the sun turns into the moon at night. I laughed and said that, even though she is young, we should we should try to teach her things that are accurate- then I explained to my daughter that "the Earth goes around the sun and the moon goes around the Earth."

My mother-in-law gave me a dirty look and said, "How do you know?"

 

I hate, hate, HATE when people tell such falsehoods to young children.

Your MIL sounds like my co-worker's MIL. She believes that dinosaur bones were put there by Satan "to trick us".

 

I knew that guy couldn't be trusted...

 

Interesting.. I used to work with a woman who thought all white people come from God.. Everyone else came from Monkeys.

 

That is one idea that drives me nuts. How can something so blatantly untrue be so common? I swear I've heard now and then that the sun and moon cannot be rising at the same time.

 

People get crazy idea from in some cases reading.

I'll site PopSci. I get it every month. They sometimes post info that is only half right. Of course you can see the moon in the day(sometimes) However, they make it sound as if the moon can be seen 24/7 no matter where you are. And thats just plan wrong..

They also talked about when you watch say an F1 race the reason the tires look like they are going backwards is because the camera can't go that fast.. Now while that IS true, they didn't tell you that if YOU were sitting there you would see the same..

 

But that doesn't explain this, because you can very easily see disproof of the idea just by glancing up in the sky. I mean, if someone read in a book that grass was purple, all they'd have to do is look out the window at their lawn to know that was untrue. If they read that, say, women had no noses, the first time they looked at a woman they'd know it was garbage. The Moon spends as much time in the daytime sky as it does in the night sky. All you have to do is go out your door and stand someplace where you can see the sky, and the odds are good that it'll be right in front of you, that you won't even have to make any appreciable effort to see it. So it's bizarre that anyone would be unaware of something that's literally right in front of them so much of the time.

Maybe the problem is that it isn't right in front of a lot of people. So many people today live in cities, and their sky view would be largely obscured by tall buildings, clouded by smog, etc. Still, it's hard to believe that they'd never have been to the suburbs or anyplace where they had a clear view of the daytime sky.

 

That could be.. I live in a small farm town. My buddy from Columbus came up here once and was floored by how many more stars he could see from outside my door. Then I took him 15min outside town and was like "look up".. He had no words.

 

It was like that when I went to boot camp in Great Lakes. We mustered one morning at 3am and all of these guys are muttering, "Whoa. Do you see that? I've never seen the sky like that. Where'd all those stars come from?" So I look up and ask what the big deal was. It turns out most of them had grown up in the city and light pollution is pretty bad. I grew up in the sticks, so it was no big deal. My eye opener was out in the Indian Ocean, when I could actually see the bands of the Milky Way.

 

Once in awhile you can see the bands of the Milky Way from the deck of the house I gre up in.

 

Clouds sometimes, in varying configurations. General blueness, due to preferential scattering of lower-wavelength light in the visible band. Sometimes other colors are visible, ordinarily dependent on the time of day. The moon is of course apparent from time to time. Venus, too. Sometimes it's gray-black. Oh, and usually there's a big G-class ball of plasma visible.

It's all generally the same, and the variations that do occur are nothing particularly novel...

 

Every public school science textbook I've ever read said that gravity works because all objects attract each other. A good guess on Newton's part, but utterly wrong.

 

I've NEVER seen the bands of the Milky Way...until I saw this post, I was seriously thinking that was just a textbook exaggeration and not actually visible to the unaided human eye. I remember that even the first time I saw Orion's sword was a big deal. Where I live now, I don't have a chance to see even that.

 

(Resists temptation to make risque remark.)

You could book time on a telescope.

http://www.mytelescope.com/help/ ($10+ per hour)
http://www.robosky.com/index.php?page=TelescopeBooking (can be free)

 

You make those sound so mundane, but there's such great beauty and variety in them. You might as well say all paintings are the same because they're all made of paint and canvas. While technically correct, it's completely missing the point.

No, it isn't. Every mass in the universe exerts a gravitational force, and that force attracts all other masses. True, General Relativity defines it as an alteration of the spacetime metric rather than a force, but quantum theory does treat it as a force, an exchange of gravitons analogous to the exchange of photons that mediates the electromagnetic interaction. And even in GR, the effect is the same -- every mass creates an alteration of spacetime which has an attractive effect on other masses.

So at most, it's a simplification. It's not actually wrong.

 

All the stars are going out...

 

Oh, dear...I totally walked into that one--didn't even notice!

Neat...though I think I may just wait for next time I'm ever out in the boonies after sundown.

 

A couple that stick out in my memory:

The heads of babies are big in proportion to their bodies because skulls don't grow larger as you age.

Plasma is a made-up science fiction term. It doesn't exist in real life.

 

I recall that we had a biology teacher in secondary school who didn't believe in evolution nor that smoking can cause heart disease and lung cancer. He also omitted any part of the A-level syllabus to do with DNA from his lessons. Presumably, he didn't believe that DNA carried genetic information. I think his brain must have been stuck in the 1930's.