Five science ‘facts’ we learnt at school that are plain wrong

rpm

rpm

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Five science ‘facts’ we learnt at school that are plain wrong

Let’s start with a quiz…

  1. How many senses do you have?
  2. Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips?
  3. What are the primary colours of pigments and paints?
  4. What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes?
  5. What are the states of matter?

If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow and blue; the back of the tongue; and gas, liquid and solid, then you would have got full marks in any school exam. But you would have been wrong.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but, a sense of pain, vibration, 2 point discrimination, temperature, proprioception etc would broadly and generally fall under 'touch'. Thats almost like saying to be able to perceive colour, light and dark, shapes are senses as well?
 
rpm said:
Five science ‘facts’ we learnt at school that are plain wrong

Let’s start with a quiz…

  1. How many senses do you have?
  2. Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips?
  3. What are the primary colours of pigments and paints?
  4. What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes?
  5. What are the states of matter?

If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow and blue; the back of the tongue; and gas, liquid and solid, then you would have got full marks in any school exam. But you would have been wrong.
Click to expand...

Apart from 4 which is utter nonesense, the school answers are mostly correct for all intents and purposes.
Unfortunately most people in school are not interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They are only interested in what they can use.
 
No 3. Is interesting.

I like the Red Blue Yellow, it's an easy way of teaching children the basic concept of colours and spectrum.
TV's though have been using Red Blue Green for ages though. I always had issues with RBG though.

Now try explaining CMYK to 6 years olds.
 
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We can have the craziest and most fundamental misconceptions in all walks of life, but the one we won't ever dream of being way off the mark, is that life can evolve into being from nothing.
 
GforceD said:
No 3. Is interesting.

I like the Red Blue Yellow, it's an easy way of teaching children the basic concept of colours and spectrum.
TV's though have been using Red Blue Green for ages though. I always had issues with RBG though.

Now try explaining CMYK to 6 years olds.
Click to expand...

RGB is good enough for video displays, not for high quality printing.

Another misconception is being taught in school that the brain processes images from the eyes like a TV camera does. Actually scientists have known for a while now the brain processes images as vectors.
 
GforceD said:
No 3. Is interesting.

I like the Red Blue Yellow, it's an easy way of teaching children the basic concept of colours and spectrum.
TV's though have been using Red Blue Green for ages though. I always had issues with RBG though.

Now try explaining CMYK to 6 years olds.
Click to expand...
I dissagree with the article. RGB and CMY are both primary colours depending on the type of mixing ie. additive vs subtractive. For creating colours using light combination RGB are primary but for painting where it is about absorbtion of colours CMY is correct for printing where it is effectively the source light minus the colour on the material. I have however never heard of RBY..
 
I would have thought Pluto not being a planet would have made the top 5.
 
themank said:
I would have thought Pluto not being a planet would have made the top 5.
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No, it was not a misconception, and now they teach kids the new convention from what I've seen. If you were taught that a certain country in Africa is named Zaire, that was not wrong, that's what I was taught at school and it was 100% the truth in the early 90s. Now that same country is called Democratic Republic of Congo. The classification of planets were changed by a group of people.
 
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As I said in the other thread, without any references, this is all rather meaningless...
 
jmak said:
I dissagree with the article. RGB and CMY are both primary colours depending on the type of mixing ie. additive vs subtractive. For creating colours using light combination RGB are primary but for painting where it is about absorbtion of colours CMY is correct for printing where it is effectively the source light minus the colour on the material. I have however never heard of RBY..
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+1 Well said!
 
abandonallhope said:
We can have the craziest and most fundamental misconceptions in all walks of life, but the one we won't ever dream of being way off the mark, is that life can evolve into being from nothing.
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That's so last season. Our latest challenge to overcome is to escape the Matrix. Religious people are better batteries that atheists. Wheh!
 
jmak said:
I dissagree with the article. RGB and CMY are both primary colours depending on the type of mixing ie. additive vs subtractive. For creating colours using light combination RGB are primary but for painting where it is about absorbtion of colours CMY is correct for printing where it is effectively the source light minus the colour on the material. I have however never heard of RBY..
Click to expand...

Yes! At last someone started talking some sense - don't know where the MyBroadband authors are getting their facts from sometimes these days.
 
Try to get scholars to do there homework and become better people, they are never going to grasp the Bose-Einstein concept. Also agree where does this type of article come from?
 
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