physics

i used to belive that the world was spinning because a basketball player was spinning it on his finger and if someone stole it from him the world would forever be in a night or day

peter

When I was in grade school I was convinced by another student that you could make a laser by placing a flashlight inside a drinking glass and angling it just the right way. I tried this at home and was delighted when I saw some light rays come out of the glass at weird angles. I thought for sure I had made my own homemade laser beam!

Pat

My older brother told me when I was 3 or 4 that the reason ships float is because they are so light. In fact, they are so light I could lift an ocean liner with my little finger. I figured out the truth by the time I became an adult.

M.A. Stolz

My mom told me that the earth was always spinning. This fasinated me, but the next morning when I woke up excited to see my back yard and front yard switched I was very disappointed. My mom had to explain to me that it was the whole earth that moved, not just the yard around the house.

Anon

I thought that if I could just get hold of a really small and sharp pair of scissors, I could cut up a piece of paper over and over, eventually finding out whether matter was infinitely divisible or made of atoms (my father claimed the latter was true, and at the time I thought this was really suspicious).

LP

I don't think i'm the only one with this belief. I thought if u spun around in one direction long enough to get dizzy (e.g clockwise, or anti- cloc) Then if u turned back the same amount the other way you could kind of un-dizzy yourself. I'm not i scientist do it still makes a small bit of sense to me , i'm 17.

Anon

I used to believe that each people has their own perception of color, for example: I see color red as red, but when I was a kid I used to think that others may perceive different. I see red but they see other color, and we describe the same color because we are used to it since birth.

Anon

When I was in grade school (I schooled in Canada), I held the belief that during Winter the world was cold because the world was covered in snow. As you could see manhole covers and vents that had melted snow around it, they were direct links to underground, my premise was that heat actually came through the center of the earth (remember those nifty schoolbooks with the picture of the core of molten hot metal) and snow was actually blocking the heat coming into the air. This was also confirmed by it not being cold in the house, as the floor of the house didn't have any snow on it.

Mathew

our father would tell us that the wind shield wipers on his early '80s vw rabbit were in fact turbo wipers, serving the purpose of wiping air out of the way so the car could travel faster. that explanation paired with well timed hits on the accelerator made the notion quite believable to my brother and i.

cj2

I must have been told in a lesson or something that the world spun, because after that I couldn't understand the concept properly and came to the conclusion that when we walked we were just lifting our feet up and down in the same place but that the world moved underneath us!!

Claire

I used to believe that because of the damage it does, UV light' was 'ultra violent light' not 'ultra violet'.

Jane

I used to believe that if I threw a paper airplane hard enough, and held on tight enough, that I could fly with it. It only took one failed attempt to realize I couldnt

Ben

As a bit of backstory, my Dad, as a child, skipped Kindergarten. Until around 46, my dad thought that the primary colors were just a myth, and you could mix something like green and orange to get red. We still tease him about this.

Anon

When I was about 6 years old, I believed that the world consist of bacond, sour cream and juice. Pretty wierd huh.

Arthur III

I used to believe that the boiling water was air passing through the bottom of the pot wich was dilated because of the heat

PonC