We were taught the Germans were humorless and at all not delusional.
I don’t know if this counts as a ‘theory’, but in school (40 ish year ago), I was taught that the sea is blue because it is reflecting the colour of the sky.
This happened in England, where the sky is grey about half of the time - and I questioned this exact point when the teacher asserted it, but was told just to shut up and accept it.
The sea is blue because water is a blue coloured substance, even in its purest form (other factors such as suspended materials, algae etc probably also contribute to the blue colour of the sea).
Yes, but when the sky is grey the sea is grey.
It is a misrepresentation if it’s not explicitly labeled “diagram not to scale.”
Scale diagram of the solar system: If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system
It would be quite a challenge to fit that in a textbook.
I graduated high school in 1965. I learned all the things were incorrect statements about what “science” knew, in science class as a freshman. (1963) Plate tectonics wasn’t a thoroughly integrated theory until shortly after that, but elements of it were already well studied.
So, when you say that “science” believed these things, what you mean is that the education system in the political jurisdiction where you lived taught these 40 to sixty year old theories without updates, and you didn’t do any research outside of class to find if it was true.
Tris
Oh, if you are over 75 years old, a few of those things were still ardently professed in some academic institutions, while you were in school. I apologize.
Yes, but it simply isn’t.
You got some photographs of a blue sea under a grey sky?
Have you ever seen a textbook that has that disclaimer under every diagram that isn’t to scale? Every diagram representing an atom, for example?
Imagine trying to include the larger Eris, not to mention Quaoar, Sedna, Makemake, the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, etc. in there. What you learned in grade school is a very limited picture.
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On the other side, when I took anthropology in 1956, the text, 1948 edition, made it clear that the story of human evolution would be a lot more coherent it Piltdown man had never been found. He didn’t exactly claim it was a hoax, but he obviously had some doubt. Since the hoax had been exposed in 1953, my confidence in the book was greatly increased. It is in fact one of the only texts from my college days that I still have.
Let us not exaggerate the errors of science. Plate tectonics was rejected largely because no one could imagine a mechanism. Sure the Americas seemed to fit together, more or less, with Europe and Asia, but that could be a coincidence. Without a mechanism, it is speculation. It reminds me of the time that someone^* called a colleague of mine with the statement that 1 + 196,882 = 196,883. Aside from being obvious, the two numbers on the left are the first two coefficients of a series important in number theory while the third is the degree of the first representations of something called the monster group. My colleague dismissed this as moonshine and the name has stuck to one of the most important recent developments connecting number theory and geometry.
- “Someone” was John Conway whom some non-mathematicians may have heard ot.
That’s a lot of scrolling. I’m on my way to Saturn. I keep expecting a jump scare though.
Most of these are not really examples of science getting it wrong.
- Dismissing a hypothesis until sufficient evidence has been presented is good science (plate tectonics)
- A crude model being superceded by a more precise one is good science (number of organism kingdoms)
- Stuff that’s “common knowledge” often isn’t anything to do with science (cold causes cold)
- Specifically on the appendix thing, yes functions have been found for the appendix but that’s not the same thing as saying it is not vestigial. It’s still debatable whether you’re better off with or without an appendix.
Wikipedia does the solar system right, with illustrations that explain planet sizes and distances accompanied by captions clearly indicating what aspects of the figure are/aren’t to scale.
Likewise for the atom. The nucleus in the large illustration is not drawn to scale, but the inset clearly specifies its actual dimensions.
It’s fine to present neophytes with simplified subject matter, including illustrations that distort one or more aspects so as to facilitate convenient depiction of other aspects. But readers should be made to understand that what they’re learning has been simplified.
I visited the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff and it had a Solar System walk to scale, a series of engraved bronze plates set in the sidewalk with the sun at six inches in diameter. Pluto was not included but the plates had probably been there before the demotion so I suspect there simply wasn’t enough room, over 2,000 feet according to this site.
I have read of kits you could buy, small cast plates for mounting on posts at a scale of 36-inches for the sun, the size of those plastic spheres you see on high tension wires. Then Neptune would be almost 4km away from the starting point.
I’m not sure in what sense this is supposed to be a “misconception.” In fact, the dominant process in most forests is that trees do compete for light, and slower-growing individuals are shaded out and die. They also compete for minerals, nutrients, and water. It has been found that trees may benefit other individuals by sharing nutrients, but competition is still a very important process. I would call this an incomplete picture, rather than an actual misconception.
Are you serious? Because the question is ridiculous. The colour tint of the water in the ocean is not a surface phenomenon.
Here is a video of a ship in a storm (cloudy sky) traversing large waves in the southern ocean. At 16 seconds in, what colour is the water in the large wave that breaks over the bow of the ship?
Which is ironic because, IIRC, the solar system walk was on the path leading to the observatory where Pluto was discovered.
It would help if I had included the video link, I guess:
While we are here, here is another one - scuba diving on a rainy, overcast day:The water is blue
I’m not denying that water is inherently blue, or that your teacher’s logic was flawed. I’m just saying that to prove it, you need something stronger than your childhood self’s incorrect belief that the sea will appear to be blue under a grey sky.