# Scientifically inaccurate songs
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [October 12, 2005, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882 "2005-10-12T12:54:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 10
### Author:  [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/181 "2005-10-19T17:00:59Z")
Who wants to be the one to tel Billie that those aren’t fruits on those trees?
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/182 "2005-10-19T17:27:31Z")
Despite his evident pride, I feel compelled to point out to Mr. H. Miser that attaining a temperature of one hundred and one degrees is not sufficient to trigger a phase transformation from solid to liquid in the greatest number of objects that might fall to hand. Similarly, his equally boastful brother, Mr. S. Miser, is deluded if he believes ten degrees below zero will cause the same set of objects to undergo an alteration of physical state; however, his braggadocio goes several steps beyond his brother’s in that he claims not just a change from liquid to solid but a truly alchemical transmogrification of the object into actual snow, the which is, of course, impossible.
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### Author:  [@LeeshaJoy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LeeshaJoy)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/183 "2005-10-19T19:16:54Z")
> [@Mr. Blue Sky](#):
>
> “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…”
> The next line would be:
>
> “…watch it burn a hole in your leg…”
Wouldn’t it be more like “Catch a falling star and rush to the emergency room to receive treatment for your burned flesh and fractured finger bones”?
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### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/184 "2005-10-19T19:26:07Z")
> [@Cervaise](#):
>
> Similarly, his equally boastful brother, Mr. S. Miser, is deluded if he believes ten degrees below zero will cause the same set of objects to undergo an alteration of physical state.
And, even if he were made of snow, he would be no more capable of locomotion or, indeed, simple elocution than Frosty.
And, while we’re on the subject, there’s this outrageous lie:
_It froze clear through to China,
It froze to the stars above,
At a thousand degrees below zero,
It froze my logger love._
Well, certainly, a logger would be just as likely to freeze as anyone else were the temperature of the air actually to attain one thousand degrees below zero. Unfortunately, regardless of the choice of scale, either Fahrenheit or Celsius, this is well below absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases. We can, however, give the songwriter a break and call this the song’s only egregious error (other than the logger pounding his whiskers in with a hammer and biting them off inside, perhaps), since freezing either the Earth’s core “clear down to China” or the ether (what, we know it doesn’t exist?) all the way to the stars would not require a temperature any more impossible than that. We can imagine anything we like, but this is really imagining only one thing.
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### Author:  [@moonstarssun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moonstarssun)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/185 "2005-10-19T21:40:39Z")
More from the Talking Heads:
_Here where you are standing
dinosaurs did a dance._
Some dinosaurs may have been quite agile, but the ability to move artistically is a very different supposition.
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### Author:  [@Bippy\_the\_Beardless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bippy_the_Beardless)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/186 "2005-10-19T22:42:22Z")
More Bowie
“Time, he flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor.”
Now that is some very special relitivity.
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### Author:  [@ioioio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ioioio)
#### Post date: [October 19, 2005, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/187 "2005-10-19T23:34:45Z")
Bruce Springsteen may have a bad desire, but if he were on fire, he’d be in too much pain to keep singing.
And there’s no way his head is big enough for a freight train to run through.
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### Author:  [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/188 "2005-10-20T01:41:32Z")
> [@Bippy the Beardless](#):
>
> More Bowie
> “Time, he flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor.”
>
> Now that is some very special relitivity.
Mr Bowie also asserts, in **Rock’n’Roll Suicide** , Time’s ability to take a cigarette and put it your mouth. Other researchers, unable to duplicate the phenomenon under test conditions, remain unconvinced, and cite Bowie’s failure to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal rather than an album about the life and death of a bisexual alien rockstar Messiah as further grounds for scepticism.
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### Author:  [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/189 "2005-10-20T01:45:14Z")
> [@LeeshaJoy](#):
>
> Wouldn’t it be more like “Catch a falling star and rush to the emergency room to receive treatment for your burned flesh and fractured finger bones”?
I stand corrected!
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### Author:  [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/190 "2005-10-20T02:02:26Z")
Should the OP have been worded, perhaps, “Songs that use scientific metaphors”?
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### Author:  [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/191 "2005-10-20T02:21:45Z")
> [@lissener](#):
>
> Should the OP have been worded, perhaps, “Songs that use scientific metaphors”?
Hi, **lissener**. Nice to see you back. Well, some of them are metaphors, like **Heart of Glass** ,and nit-picking them in a _faux_-pompous manner is silly but fun, but the ones that are just plain stupidly wrong {and pretentious to boot: “See you on Aldebaran”, indeed!"} deserve to be mercilessly ridiculed. Just wait until I get to work on Deep Purple’s **Space Truckin’** …
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### Author:  [@Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/192 "2005-10-20T09:03:34Z")
Clearly the children did not perform controlled scientific tests before concluding there must have been some magic in the old top hat they found. This is the fallacy of mixing coincidence with causation. Such a conclusion should only have been reached with the appropriate laboratory double-snow-blind testing using a number of snow-men, snow-women, heaps of unshaped snow, and water (as a control). Substitute top hats would also be used to test for placebo effect. However, given the potential military applications of a giant top-hatted snow monster, the federal government is now preparing to fund a long-term study and is presently in the process of testing battle-hardened carrots.
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### Author:  [@Bob\_Scene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bob_Scene)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/193 "2005-10-20T13:12:48Z")
There’s an old sea shanty that has the following verse in it:
> [@](#):
>
> Then we set sail for the Hawaiians
> With a cargo of forty-seven lions
> By the time that we were done
> We had buggered every one
> And the offspring were a miracle to science!
It’s not clear whether the word “buggered” (which usually indicates anal sex) applies to vaginal sex with a female animal. If it doesn’t, then there’s no way the lions could have gotten pregnant, because anal sex results in the deposition of semen in the rectum and anal cavity, but pregnancy only occurs if semen is deposited in the vaginal canal of a female.
Even if we grant that buggery is meant in the sense of having vaginal sex with a female animal, this verse is still scientifically inaccurate because humans and lions are far too distantly related for viable offspring to result from insemination of a female lion by a human male.
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### Author:  [@seosamh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/seosamh)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/194 "2005-10-20T13:22:14Z")
Not a scientific error, but a historical one.
Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” mentions “sixteen Vestal Virgins”, but in fact there were originally just two, then four and finally six of them.
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### Author:  [@tim314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim314)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/195 "2005-10-20T15:58:18Z")
> [@Superdude](#):
>
> “Saved the Best for Last,” when Vanessa Williams sings “sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon.”
Technically, this is true in the Moon’s frame of reference. (Except that it should be “all the time”.)
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### Author:  [@Spiff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiff)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/196 "2005-10-20T18:49:38Z")
You don’t need no silicone
To calculate poverty.
– One More Time, The Clash
This one has always bugged me. Silicon, as in Silicon Valley, is the primary ingredient in the chips used in calculators.
Silicone is used to make boobies bigger.
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### Author:  [@Faruiza](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Faruiza)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/197 "2005-10-20T19:18:17Z")
> [@Only Mostly Dead](#):
>
> One that is on the radio right now (not to mention just a lame “Og this woman is out of original ideas” tune):
>
> Seems like you’re gonna fail every time. Light traveling faster than sound and all. (Plus with rolling thunder, being a more sustained sound, you’re going to have quite a bit of time to react before you can even begin to define it properly as “rolling”)
Yup. This is the one I was going for. Freakin’ nails on a chalkboard that.
_shudder_
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### Author:  [@Leviosaurus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leviosaurus)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/198 "2005-10-20T23:38:49Z")
_“You might as well be walking on the sun.”_
Regardless of how bad the alternatives may be, you’re definitely better off \*\*not \*\* walking on the sun.
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### Author:  [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)
#### Post date: [October 20, 2005, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/199 "2005-10-20T23:53:43Z")
There was a time when I used to listen to both Gerry Rafferty’s _City to City_ and Joni Mitchell’s _Blue_ a lot.
It always amused me the way each has a song comparing love to the constancy of the Northern Star, but (true to their nature as songwriters) one goes one way with it, and one entirely the other.
> [@Gerry Rafferty from Right Down the Line](#):
>
> You’ve been **as constant as the Northern Star** ,
> the brightest light that shines
Which is both upbeat and scientifically somewhat short of the mark (ever seen the sun, Gerry?)
> [@Joni Mitchell from A Case of You](#):
>
> Just before our love got lost you said,
> “I am **as constant as the northern star**.”
> And I said, “Constantly in the darkness
> Where’s that at?
> If you want me I’ll be in the bar.”
Ouch.
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### Author:  [@Hometownboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hometownboy)
#### Post date: [October 22, 2005, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/scientifically-inaccurate-songs/325882/200 "2005-10-22T03:28:12Z")
In spite of the assertion by Mr. Barry in “Maybelline” that
> [@](#):
>
> Nothing outrun my V-8 Ford
any number of vehicles have surpassed his 1950s-vintage automobile, particularly since he claims a maximum speed of 110mph.
No doubt Mr. Barry was unaware that his benchmark had been comfortably exceeded a half-century earlier, on Jan 26, 1906 when Fred Marriott achieved a speed of 127.6 mph in a twin-cylinder Stanley Rocket at Daytona, a land speed record that would stand for more than four years.
However, Mr. Marriott’s contributions to songwriting and performing history, if they ever existed, have been lost in the nearly 100 years since his motoring achievementachievement. With this lack of hard evidence, historians are left only with unsupported conjecture as to whether Marriott might have been able to reach compete even at the minimum level of talent of the embarrassing “My Ding-a-ling.”
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