*FACEPALM!* In this post people tell stories about the dumbest things other people thought were true about astronomy. Of course we’re human and we all make mistakes, but some of these are astoundingly stupid. Like a mars-centric solar system, Pluto not being a planet anymore because it was destroyed, or just planets being fake in general, haha. To be fair, apparently there’s thousands of people out there who still believe the earth is flat, so maybe these stories really aren’t that bad:
(via: Vellum and Vinyl)
Got any hilariously wrong space facts? Let us know in the comments below!
A friend of mine once asserted that at night the sky became black because there was a black hole in an elliptical orbit (he seemed to know what that was) around Earth, and night was when it was closer, so obviously it was sucking all the light away from us.
Tangential to Astronomy but, when I was in college I assisted a History Professor by running study groups before exams. Now, the professor had been talking about the economies of the Ancient Greek City states, with particular emphasis on coastal cities vs inland cities. So, I made sure that I asked if anyone had questions. One boy raised his hand and said ‘how do we know the difference?’ And I started to clarify the economics for him and he just started looking more confused. I finally stopped and asked if that was what he needed… he looked mournfully at the map in the book and said ‘No… how do we know which are coastal cities and which are inland?’
I had to explain to a guy in college that the big blue areas of maps meant ‘water’….
The comment about not needing to know about the moon reflects a comment made by Sherlock Holmes. When Watson told him that the Earth orbited the Sun, he said that he would immediately try to forget it, on the grounds that the human brain can only hold a limited (though large) amount of information and even if we went round the Moon it would not be relevant to his detective work.
Makes me think of this passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study In Scarlet” – Watson learns that Holmes didn’t know the earth revolved around the sun:
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”