Top 10 Biggest Lies Taught in School About Science

The Top Ten
1 Humans evolved from monkeys

yup this is a lie! humans didn't evolve FROM monkeys, they evolved WITH monkeys. both are cousins, evolved from a common ancestor that is neither!

'why are there still monkeys today?' because we evolved WITH them not FROM them

'but religion' religion isn't science! its fine to believe in it but if it tells you false things...

Macro evolution, from one kind to another is an outright lie. Micro evolution, for example within the dog kind you can breed to a certain size or color or shape but it is still a dog.

The origin of human being is quite simple: God. It has always been truth but we don't see it because we are obsessed with making things difficult to be proud of ourselves. Trying to find the origin in a monkey is a clear example of that.

2 We have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste

This is really not taught in school past casual mentioning in elementary school. What most people are referring to are the five wits, and while they don't cover all sensations (like balance, pain, temperature, moisture), they are still culturally important. You can't really write a poem about the world as experienced through temperature or hunger.

Seriously?!?! If those are all of my senses, how can I subconsciously decide to run from a tiger, recall information from certain stimuli, eat, sleep, rave, repeat? The brain, in fact, has many more senses than that.

It annoys me that so much people believe this. But, I don't blame them, we all probably learned it in first grade and were led to believe it. There are so much more senses we should appreciate..

3 There are seven colors of light

Under infrared, certain species can see different colors. I am not talking about hues or tints-those are just our basic colors with a drop of black added or a drop of white added to the colors humans see: red, yellow, blue...the primary colors. Apparently, there is a part of our brain which is locked into seeing just the primary colors and the secondary colors (mixing 2 primary colors will give you a different color..blue and yellow gives you green. These colors are secondary colors. To reiterate, hues and tints are simply adding white or black...humans see them as well as primary colors and we can see secondary colors. There are other colors but 1. Humans can not even imagine what they are and 2. Currently, only a few animals can see colors that we can't see...since they have different wiring in their brains. Probably evolved for their survival thousands of years ago.

We cannot actually equate electromagnetic spectrum with light. Light is a part of electromagnetic spectrum, not the whole spectrum.
The definition of light itself is "The visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible to the human eyes".

4 The "North Pole" is a stationary north pole

The geographic north pole is in fact a magnetic south pole. Why else would the north pole of a compass point north? And also, it's not a physical pole like a lamppost which stays in one place. Because the rotating core of the Earth which drives this magnetic field is not a perfect sphere, perturbation in the core causes the poles to move. Mind blow!

And given the nature of the spinning orb we are on, compasses won't all point to the same place at the same time from different geographical positions. Try getting a region 1 compass to point you even close to magnetic north from a region 3 location.

J.R.R. Tolkien's version is the best.

5 Only mass can mediate gravity

I believed this lie in primary school, as did most people. It is in fact momentum and energy, which is what is needed to induce gravitational wells. But Einstein famously stated that mass and energy are interchangeable, so mass serves as the more noticeable source of gravitational force. How else could we model both energy and mass with the electronvolt unit? Think E=mc^2.

6 We use only 10% of our brains

False also stupid teen titans go needs to rot in hell before it cause someone a stroke if they haven't already. Also stupid people that believe it.

Not 10%. Hitting a baseball with a bat will use more than 50% of the brain. Also while your eating with your friends, you use all your senses which is almost 50% of your brain. I was offended when I saw a Teen Titans Go episode proving that we use 10% of our brain. Man that cartoon is stupid

Then wouldn't of evolution gotten rid of that other 90%?

7 "Particles" are fundamental

When 5-year-olds take on science, they are told that everything is made of particles, which is, in a sense, true, ignoring waves and strings. But that implies to them that all particles are the same. They later rename them "atoms" and call them fundamental. Later, they tell you to forget that crap, because atoms are made of nuclei and electrons, and this time, we mean it, nothing smaller. But they don't. This will eventually wind down to leptons, quarks and bosons, which are fundamental as far as we can confirm, but it's more than a decade of misinformation beforehand.

It always baffled how in every successing grade I always realised that the particle, which I considered as fundamental, was not at all.

I think this is very helpful as a person who needs to overcome the truths and lies of science

8 Stars burn

Nothing can burn in space. For something to burn, oxygen needs to be present in the atmosphere around it. Plus, if a star such as the Sun was burning, it would have run out of fuel by now. The Sun is in fact driven by fusion of atomic nuclei to produce heavier nuclei, in which their mass is converted purely into energy, which is more energy for a given quantity than you get from burning it. And these nuclei can continue to fuse for longer than coal, including fusion into heavier nuclei. In the case of the heaviest stars, from hydrogen up to iron. It's only that iron being the most stable nucleus implies that less energy is released than put in when heavier elements are fused, which is why fission works to generate power from them.

They don't burn. They lose fuel after millions of years overtime and fade away, or possibly explode, if they are big enough.

This is indeed a lie. I've never known a star to have sunburn. Have you?

9 Black holes are physical balls of compressed matter that would crush you to death

True, black holes are formed when matter is compressed to such an extreme density that light cannot escape its surface, but that's only the half of it. Once the matter is compressed, it is reduced to an infinitesimally small point, a singularity. The "surface" of a black hole is the event horizon, the boundary which, once crossed, light cannot escape. We simply cannot see past it because light would need to be reflected off of the surface to illuminate it.
We also cannot be crushed to death because the tidal forces, which change immensely with spacetime in the vicinity of a black hole, stretch us to death instead. This is spaghettification. However, because of the time dilation outside of the black hole, one would not simply tumble into it like you see in Star Trek. Your approach slows until the light from your body fades from view. To an observer, you never enter the black hole's space. But you can't really enter a singularity's space anyway. By definition, it is a point in time but not in space. It is the universal arrow of time which makes this unavoidable.

10 Mercury is the hottest planet

Most teachers think that proximity to Sun is the only factor contributing to a planet's temperature. Now, that's wrong: atmosphere composition, nucleus activity, soil chemical composition, albedo and even the presence of life are also in the picture, and they can change the game for good.

It's a common misconception that Mercury is the hottest planet because it's closest to the sun, when in reality it's Venus.

Venus is of course the hottest planet.

The Contenders
11 There are 3 states of matter
12 You're gonna use this in the future

Hmm, yes, I am TOTALLY gonna need to know how Embryology works when I have a job! (Yeah, never happening)

13 Bats are blind

No they are no entirely blind sharks are also not entirely blind, moles are more than nearly blind but still not blind.

Eh, I think you'll find that Pos is about as unreligious (and unbiased, I might add) as they come.

Well even though their not blind, it's a saying or catchphrase ok.

14 Carbon dioxide is dangerous in every way

Another topic that should be on here is that global warming is real. It isn't and I absolutely hate it when people defend it. The world is always changing. Have you heard of the ice age(s). Is that global cooling? Way back thousands of years ago the earth was hot. How is that possible? There weren't cars or factories to put that stuff in the air.

I've seen children shiver at the very mention of the name of the chemical. It has got a bad reputation because of global warming, but without it, we wouldn't have sparkling drinks. CO2 is also used for cryogenics, respiration stimulants in medics, and oil extraction.

If we did not have carbon dioxide then we will freeze.

15 All disease is caused by germs

Nobody even mentions genetic diseases until four years into high school. Before that, kids think that genetics are only why you look like your parents and have brown hair.

We learn about genetic diseases in my school before we reach high school. We learn about it in 8th grade

Ok stop blaming everything on these little poor creatures who only want to live

16 Different areas of the tongue can taste different flavors
17 Cannabis is a "gateway drug"

If you mow a huge lawn with a normal sized mower everyday, chances are you are going to want to move up to a larger lawn mower eventually. This larger lawn mower was a gateway from the first lawn mower. This "gateway theory" can be explained with almost anything. The fact that alcohol has been found to be a bigger gateway drug than cannabis, has shut this theory down the drain.

18 You can see the Great Wall of China from Space

It is possible, but not with the naked eye. The Great Wall of China is too narrow. and its color blends in with its surroundings.

19 If you make a weird face for long enough, it will stick

It was just told so that you didn't do it too long. My grandma did this to my mom, and for the longest time she believed it.

Not science, this isn't real at all.

20 There is no left and right side of the brain

The brain has 2 hemispheres. They control how you move and think. They even determine your talents

21 Pluto is a planet

When I was at Disney World years ago I watched the news in my hotel room and they said that Pluto is no longer a planet, something that school has taught me for YEARS. I was surprised. Fast forward to a few weeks later, school has just started, and I was in my 9th grade science class learning about astronomy stuff. I told the teacher that Pluto is no longer a planet anymore, and all my classmates were like "WHAT!". The teacher told them that I was right. They were all really confused.

Poor Pluto excluded from the group also it isn't a planet.

22 There is no gravity in space

I think this is brought on more by pop culture. Movies where astronauts glide through "zero gravity" environments, or where the ship engineer flips an "anti-gravity" switch and gravity "disappears." If anything, this myth is dispelled once you learn what gravity is in school.

That's very false. Gravity is a universal fundamental interaction with infinite range. Gravity is responsible for all attractions between objects, and without it, no solar systems or galaxies. But dark energy is what keeps them apart.

Isn't it like so low that it almost feels like it's not there?

23 Atoms cannot be split

Here's a research topic...hiroshima

I was pretty confused in school about it but when I did research on nuclear decay, I got it all

24 Only 1% of Earth's water is fresh drinking water
25 Humans breathe out air having more Carbon Dioxide and less Oxygen and inhale air having more Oxygen and less Carbon Dioxide

I fully believed this statement during my primary school days. While the second part of the statement is actually true, the first horribly gets wrong (or can be misinterpreted wrong by kids). The correct statement should be "Humans breathe out air in which the concentration of carbon dioxide is relatively greater than what it is in the inhaled air." Because the percentage of oxygen is still greater than that of carbon dioxide in exhaled air too.
Like when we inhale air, about 0.04% of carbon dioxide is inhaled along with 21% of oxygen. But when we exhale, the percentage of carbon dioxide increases to 4% at the expense of oxygen. But clearly as we can see here, the percentage of oxygen in exhaled air (17%) is still greater than CO2 (4%).

I learned the real facts in the fire service. If we breathed out more CO2 than O2 then doing rescue breathing (mouth to mouth) wouldn't help the victim as they wouldn't be getting a high enough concentration of oxygen to benefit their blood/organs.

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