Ah, crystal now.
Well, Congress, anyway.
Does sleeping (or going outside) with wet hair count?
People used to be afraid of electricity. They thought that a faulty electrical light could leak electricity into the air like a faulty gas light could. They also thought it was possible to receive a fatal shock just be touching an electrical fixture. Many wealthy people refused to handle any electrical devices themselves and had servants turn them on and off.
Before the first test of an atomic bomb, wasn’t there very serious concern that it would ignite the entire atmosphere, thereby destroying most life on Earth?
Considering that very few people knew about the atomic bomb before it was first used, and most of these people were probably pretty smart, so the concern must not have been frivolous.
Does anyone know the specific scientific basis for this fear?
Before electrical standards were better enforced, especially the way devices were grounded (or not), that fear was prudent.
I hear peopled used to think that leaving a fan on overnight will kill you…oh wait…
In this form, the story is probably mythical. This paper (a pdf) goes through the issue in some detail, concluding that there were probably instances of audience members “fliching” at certain scenes, but that was likely about it. Promoters and others found it in their interest to exaggerate how startlingly realistic audiences found the shows, thereby establishing and building up the mythical “panic” version.
Might not seem “funny” (as in unreasonable) now, but groundless: I seem to remember reading in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff (about the Mercury astronaut program) that when Chuck Yeager first broke the speed of sound, there was concern as to what would happen to the pilot at such a high speed.
More recently, there have been fears that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will destroy the earth.
Me too. The ground collapsed beneath me near a hot spring. Even without any danger of drowning, when apparently solid earth becomes scalding mud I wouldn’t say that it “now seems funny.”
I don’t know about you, but I still find the idea of being buried alive to be fairly horrifying.
I was just listening to the latest This American Life podcast and they open with how up until the 1950s both psychologists and pediatricians recommended limiting physical contact with your child. They believed that touching your children, or showing them any sort of love would endanger them physically and emotionally. Recommending that you don’t ever pick them up, or that you kiss them no more than once a year. There were apparently government health pamphlets on the subject and everything.
On a similar note, I found out by listening to RadioLab that they used to think it was a good idea to irradiate the tracheae of an infant so as to prevent SIDS. :smack:
Heh. I did this on a ridiculously cold January day when I was a student at Michigan State. -10 F on the thermometer, something like -40 F with the wind chill. And I was outside with no hat and a long mane of soaking wet hair, walking all the way across campus to class. It was an interesting experience–exactly why, I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.
Rock music. If you weren’t a drooling idiot already when you started listening it would make you one, and then you would make America go to Hell in a handbasket, and then you would go to Hell.
Some people still think drinking milk isn’t good for you; but what’s wrong with rectangles?
<strike> The sky falling on their heads ?
This was not just a fear of imaginary cartoon Gauls. Arrian relates a story where Gallic chieftains were asked by Alexander the Great what they were most afraid of in all the world, and replied that their worst fear was that the sky mught fall on their heads.
Though its possible this was a mistranslation of a Gallic oath.</strike>
Missed someone else posted the same reply above
I imagine to the people of Pompeii in 79AD, it looked like the sky was falling on their heads. A reasonable thing to be concerned about, in some circumstances.
Not really the past, but people being scared of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that would suck reality into a singularity was somewhat foolish.
The fan fear is not of having the fan on overnight, it’s of being in a draft when you’re not hot. Whether the draft is natural or from a fan is not important, and having a fan overnight would be fine so long as it’s not pointed at you.
What’s that an example of–fear of the reanimated dead, or fear of being reanimated?
In any case, Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” received a science-fiction update/tribute in the opening chapter of Greg Egan’s Distress, so I’d say the latent fear remains.
It wasn’t a serious fear, or they wouldn’t have gone ahead with the test. It was calculated that it wouldn’t happen. The physics was well understood, the Little Boy uranium bomb wasn’t even tested before it was dropped on Japan. The Trinity test was of the more complex plutonium bomb, which required explosive lenses to compress the core precisely in order to form a critical mass.