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When I first learned about the periodic table of the elements I thought the elements were numbered in the order they had been discovered!
Bootlebat
I used to believe that if you mixed exactly the right amount of each colour of poster paint, you would make white. I spent hours staring at a brown pot of paint, gently adding another dab of blue (or whichever) thinking I must be doing it wrong!
I used to believe that medicine could only make you better and wasnt harmful, which eventually lead to me drinking an entire bottle of medicine....
I remember doing it, my logic was 'Mum makes me drink this when Im not well and it makes me better....so even though Im not ill, itl just make me feel even better!'
My mother didnt agree
Emily
when i was little i went to a museum and saw a whole thing about rocks and gold and stuff, and someone said that over time the rocks get bigger underground. when i went home i took all of my mom's gold jewelry and buried it in a flower pot to make more gold.
Eden
When I was little I thought everything could be made out of water or turned back into water! Gold, silver, anything could be heated up and turned into water, even people. I have no idea why I decided this was so, but it wasn't until a field trip in 5th grade to the water refinery that I was informed that not everything was made of water.
Alissa
Until I learned about it in eighth grade, I thought the periodic table didn't always look the same way. It made sense to me that it could be rearranged, since it looked like such a crazy shape already.
This belief probably arose from the fact that, because of that crazy shape, I could never remember what it looked like between the times I saw it.
Aretia
when i learned about atoms at a young age, I never really comprehended how small they were. Whenever the sun would gleam off dust particles in the air, I thought what I was seeing were actually atoms, and I thought I must have some special sight super powers since a book I read said atoms were invisible to the naked eye. (I also thought "invisible to the naked eye" meant it was literally invisible unless your eye was 'wearing' special lenses)
I used to believe that ice cubes were only cold because they were left in the freezer all the time. If you left them out they would simply become "warm ice." I was so insistent about this that one day my grandmother got fed up and told me we were going to do an experiment. (This is when I learned what "experiment" means.) She left some ice cubes on a plate by my bed and told me to check them in the morning. Of course when I woke up the plate was full of water, but I wasn't fooled: I was sure my grandmother had come in when I was asleep, taken the "warm ice" away, and filled the plate with water. It never occurred to me to wonder why my grandmother would be so concerned with hiding the truth about ice from me.
i used to believe that if you held hydrogen in one hand and oxygen in another and clapped that water would come out.
i just found out today and i'm 15.
H2O
When I was young, I figured out why yawns were "contagious." When someone yawned, they sucked in a lot of oxygen, leaving less for everyone else in the vicinity, so people nearby had to yawn too, to get more into their lungs. I still sorta believed it into my 20s.
SCB
This one isn't mine, but it's one my daughter picked up from me one day when we were driving. She was about 4 years old at the time and we were driving to the zoo for the day. We were passing a power plant with the two large steam silos that were giving off quite a bit of steam. My daughter asked me "Is that where clouds come from?", I was only half paying attention to here remark because I was driving but I responded, yes. We were driving the other day and she called me out on it. She's now 15 and knows better, but we both laughed as she confessed that she believed that's where the clouds came from until she was about 8.
Dan
I am 16 and a sophomore in high school. I believed from the time I knew what an atomic bomb was to today (August 19th 2008) that when things in close proximity to the blast are vaporized, that they just disappear. I was informed by my chemistry class and teacher that they do not, in fact, "turn into air" rather they are converted into extremely small particles that are lighter than air. Silly me.
Kara Collett
We were taught about AIDS before we were taught about viruses. We learned about viruses in middle school. But, of course, even in middle school, they had to teach us about AIDS first. Pretty much, all we knew about AIDS was that it had something to do with RNA and Helper T-cells, since those were the words they kept using. So up until high school, I always associated RNA as a diseased DNA.
So they described the process of how the AIDS virus spreads: the virus attaches onto a white blood cell and injects some of itself into the cell. The little viruses multiply and become more viruses until the cell is so stuffed with viruses that it explodes with lots of little AIDS viruses.
Very smart of them to teach us about AIDS before teaching us about viruses IN GENERAL.
See, the way AIDS infects the body is THE SAME WAY ALL VIRUSES INFECT THE BODY. But I didn't know that. So for years, I thought that all viruses that spread like that (which would be all viruses) were AIDS!
i used to think that fire crackers were made from crackers that you eat....i was very confused and curious for a long time.
I thought the chemicals in chemistry sets couldn't really blow up in real life I thought it was only on the cartoons, so I was wondering why when I asked my mom for a chemistry set when I was eight my mom had said "ARE YOU KIDDING YOU'D BLOW US ALL UP IN HERE"
very confused at age eight
When I was a kid there was regular and unleaded gasoline. The only difference, in my mind was that the regular (by default the "leaded" gas) was heavier.
Ann Y.
I had heard that coal can be made into diamonds. I thought this was because there was a diamond inside every piece of coal.
So I did the only logical thing: rinse off a charcoal briquette in the sink until it became a diamond.
I never stopped to think that, if diamonds were this easy to obtain, why we had a whole bag of potential diamonds in our backyard and yet we weren't millionaires. I thought I had made some sort of fantastic, nobel prize-winning discovery.
When I learned about acid rain in school, I thought that it would burn and dissolve everything in its path. I had nightmares about acid rain dissolving my house and burning me to death.
kim
My friends and I actually believed that once you buried fake gold, you could dig it up a day later and it was real. We tried to sell a bunch we dug up to pasisng cars in front of our friend's house.
Matt
the other month I mentioned to a friend that I spray on 3 different deoderent and 2 different perfumes every morning. He looked at me in shock and said 'you can't do that! the chemicals in them will mix together and cause an explosion or form a poison. you could die!' I spent the rest of the day waiting for something to happen to me, I was scared that at any moment I could explode. For weeks after I wore only one deoderent, until finally someone told me that it wasn't true.
squizy rach
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