Science Myths
Old window glass is not sagging, it was made that way
Uneven medieval and Georgian panes are usually offered as proof that glass flows. The manufacturing method explains the shape, and…
Pradeep Naik
Contributing writer, Virgin Myth
Pradeep writes about science misconceptions and taught physics for eleven years.
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12 articles
Science Myths
The far side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the near side
Dark once meant unknown, and then an album cover fixed the wrong meaning in place. There is permanent darkness on the Moon, but it…
Science Myths
Aristotle counted five senses and nobody ever updated the list
Balance, body position and temperature are all separate sensory channels with their own receptors. The number five is a piece of…
Science Myths
Astronauts are not weightless because gravity ran out
At the height of a space station, gravity is still roughly nine tenths as strong as it is at the surface. Floating is a fact about…
Everyday Misconceptions
Chameleons change colour to talk, not to hide
The mechanism is a lattice of crystals in the skin that is tuned rather than pigmented. Most colour changes are signals or…
Science Myths
The march of progress was a foldout illustration, not a family tree
A popular science series in the mid-1960s ran a row of ancestral figures across a folding page. The sequence was a layout decision…
Science Myths
The Big Bang was named on the radio by an astronomer who rejected it
The phrase entered English during a broadcast talk given by the leading advocate of the rival steady-state model. The name imported…
Science Myths
Everest is the highest mountain but not the tallest, and both are true
Measured upwards from sea level it wins comfortably. Measured from its own base a Pacific volcano is larger, and measured from the…
Science Myths
The apple fell, Newton watched it, and nothing hit anybody's head
The orchard story comes from Newton himself, told late in life to visitors who wrote it down. The bump on the head, and the instant…
Science Myths
The magnetic north pole is, in magnetic terms, a south pole
A compass needle points north because opposite poles attract, which means the thing it is attracted to must be the opposite kind.…
Science Myths
The seven-fold limit on paper is real, and a schoolgirl broke it with algebra
The claim that no sheet can be folded more than seven times circulated for decades as a fixed fact. A student worked out what…
Everyday Misconceptions
A camel's hump is fat, and the water it releases is roughly a wash
The tank of water idea is the obvious inference from the shape and has been printed for generations. The textbook correction about…