Until fifth grade, I used to believe that ice was always a constant 32 degrees F. When I found out that a piece of ice could be COLDER than that, it really blew my mind.

Michael H. USA

I used to believe, in fact I think I still do, that you can cut a pane of glass into any shape you want with a pair of kitchen scissors if you hold the glass underwater. I seem to remember trying this and it working but that may have been a dream

chris

When I was in 2nd grade I was told by my best friend, if I placed a rock i a ziploc bag with some mud and buried it, it would turn to gold.

Haven't struck gold!

When I learned that oil came from dinosaurs I thought that the dinosaurs were still alive underground and oil drills were drilling down to them, into their bodies and sucking the oil out of the poor beasties.

Colin T

When I was a child, I was thinking about matterials in general. As had no idea where to start, I started with the fact that some things were solid, some were liquid and some were gasses.

I not yet had made the connection between ice, water and steam, so I thought that everything that is liquid must have some water in it. I just could not figure out how much. If something would be solid, the water was gone.

houghi

I saw a headline in the news paper that read, "Mixing alcohol and gasoline is explosive." So my friend and I got some gas and rubbing alcohol and tried to get it to explode by mixing it together. Luckly we didn't try lighting a match.

Steve

I can't remember what Superman film it was, but there is a scene where Superman gets a lump of coal, squeezes it really hard and turns it into a diamond for Lois.

I thought, why don't people get one of those car crushing machines and then fill it with coal, you'd be loaded!

Ben

i used to think that fire crackers were made from crackers that you eat....i was very confused and curious for a long time.

Anon

When my brother and I would play shooting games, I always would say that something was metal, so he couldn't hit me when I was behind it, or he couldn't break it, because I thought metal was indestructible. I believed this until my early teens.

Matt

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

A friend of my brother (alas, younger than myself) had us believe that his cool steel marbles had been produced in the most bizarre way: supposedly, the maid working at his home created them by ironing once and again over a special piece of cloth, which produced tiny marbles that grew in size as she kept ironing.

Juan

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.

Anon

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

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.

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)

Anon

My cousin once told me that glass was made from ground up beetles, and I believed her!

benjymous

When my sister and I were younger we fought a lot (I love her to death now).

I remember how she always liked to play with my mother's make-up and perfume in the bathroom, and she'd spray ALL the different perfumes a lot and make it smell horrible. With only one bathroom to share, that kinda sucked.

One day after she sprayed a whole bunch, I had to pee and found what she was doing. I was annoyed, so I told her that mixing different chemicals can create an explosion. Then I locked her in the bathroom, holding the door from the outside. After I took off, she told on me.

The BEST part about that was that when she told my Dad, he responded something like, "Well, technically you never know what shouldn't be mixed..."

Anon

once when i was very young i thought anything you wanted to kill or get rid of should be thrown in the fire. well lets just say big metal objects dont burn very well

william howard

Once my dad told me that sometimes glass bottles in the bush start bushfires when the sun shines through them (true). I spent months shining torches on glass bottles stuffed with paper to see if this was true, no such luck.

Steve

Early in my becoming acquainted with science, I thought the density of all elements would be proportional to their atomic weights, regardless of whether they were solids, liquids, or gases. I "figured out" some amazing things based on that. For one thing I wanted to do a demonstration that I never got to do because of the difficulty of obtaining the heavy gas xenon. I thought that if only I could get some xenon and fill a beaker with it, I could do an amazing demonstration. For one thing I thought the xenon would be so heavy that it would stay in the beaker without dispersing into the atmosphere for quite some time. Then I thought I'd place a piece of iron on top of the xenon in the beaker and see the iron float on the xenon. Since xenon has a considerably higher atomic weight than iron, I assumed that even gasseous xenon would be denser than solid iron, resulting in that floating of the iron that I expected. When I later learned about the behaviour of gasses, I realized that gasseous xenon, for all its large atomic weight is much less dense than most any solid, including iron, so likely no solid would float on it. And even a heavy gas would disperse into the atmosphere quickly, so the xenon wouldn't likely stay in the beaker long enough for me to even try the demonstration.
Another amazing "fact" I deduced on the same basis came after I first heard of osteoporosis, and how it is a disease causing loss of bone density. I knew that bones have a lot of calcium, an element of considerably larger atomic weight than nitrogen and oxygen that make up most of the atmosphere. But human flesh, I learned, is composed primarily of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Since hydrogen and carbon have lower atomic weights than the latter two that also make up air (99% or air, anyway), I deduced that human flesh must be lighter than air, so that our heavier bones were what holds us down. So I thought that the main risk of osteoporosis sufferers was that their bones could become so depleted of calcium that their bodies' overall density would be less than that of air, and they could go floating away to the top of the atmosphere!

Shelley