When I was six, I was obsessed with turning out the light and racing it to my bed as I ran and dove on to it.

I thought the after-image in my eyes was the light fading away because it wasn't powered any more by the light bulb.

Andrew

I used to think that lbs. stood for a form of measurement called labs. I felt like an idiot when I realized it meant pounds.

D

When I was 5 or 6, someone told me that the Earth was spinning. I couldn't believe, so I performed an experiment: I drew a sign on the floor and went to sleep. The next morning I found the sign in the same place I had drawn it, so I thought that the Earth hadn't moved.

tunefultuna

I used to believe that if you had this really big sheet of paper, and if a jet airplane flew through it fast enough, it wouldn't hurt the paper.

David E.

I used to believe that Electricity was chiped overseas in large thick rubber boxes on ships.

Anon

There were train tracks just back of my grandmothers house. I was 5 or 6 and used to try to run too close. My grandmother told me that there was a vaccummm force and if I was too close when it whooshed by the force would suck me under and i would of course die. Hence I stayed away from all train tracks. In highschool science we learned of many different forces but I still beleievd this maybe was cintrifgal or the doppler effect with air ...Ok I didnt listen much in science, until the day i was visiting a friend in my twenties and ran like hell from the tracks becasue a train was coming. When I told them why they laughed themselves silly . I can't believe I still kept this idea for so long.

D

I beleived as a child that everything that moved had a wind up key and that it was just a matter of finding it. Some years later I began to think that they were only visible when you had your eyes closed and that if you looked for them really quick you might see them before they disappeared

Anon

When I was little I remember being taught that light was the fastest thing in the universe, however to my little mind I wondered that if light was so fast why was the darkness always there first, surely that was quicker?! Seemed logical at the time.

Adr

People said that the earth spinned but I never felt this "spin". I then swiftly came to the conclusion that the only way to feel the earth move was to spin around in circles and that your dizzyness was actually the enlightenment of feeling the earth move.

My science teacher told me I was wise for my age.

Anon

When I was younger, I had a firm belief that if I ever fell from a high place (i.e. a cliff, skyscraper, etc.) I could simply grab on to something during my fall, or jump off of something right before I hit the ground.

Dave

When i was like 6 or 7 i was on a family vacation in cape cod and we decided to go on a whale watch. I was on the top deck with a good number of other people. When a whale came into view all the people of course would go to one side. the waves where making the boat dip back and forth. I thought this was caused by all the whale watchers standing on one side. So to avoid capsizing the boat i would run to the other side and try to balance us out. Needles to say i didn't see very many whales on that tour.

Ghotzy

As a child, I always wondered why the moon changed color as it rose higher in the sky. So in my mind I formulated a solution: it got hotter as it went up, so that (like metal, I thought) it was RED hot when it first appeared on the horizon, then rose higher and heated up to YELLOW, then when it was up the highest it was WHITE hot.

Polly

When me and my friend were about 6 years old, we decided to go time-travelling. The only way we could work out how to do this was to sit at the top of my stairs in my baby brother's baby bath and wait for my mum to get home from shopping(the front door was right in front of the stairs) and then we would slide down the stairs and right out the front door so quickly we'd have to go back in time. Fortunately we didn't have the patience to sit all squashed up in the tiny little baby bath for longer than about 10 minutes so we gave up on our time-travelling plans and watched tv instead.

SA

The German word for x-rays is Röntgen-Strahlen, so I used to believe it must be an amazing coincidence that the man who discovered them bore the name of Röntgen.

ke

I used to believe that sonic booms were huge explosions that only occured at the very tops of mountains.

Jessica Tinch

When I was four or five I recall my dad telling me that it was possible to stop time. He's an amatuer physicist, so I'm sure he was just trying to explain some principle that I was too young to understand. The thing is, I have a very distinct memory of him demonstrating this ability. I was able to pluck a "frozen" bumblebee right out of the air and put it in a jar.

Scott

I had heard something about a mirror being a piece of glass with black behind it. So I found some black paper and a piece of glass, and I was very disapointed...

Anon

I teach 8th grade. Many of my students have been amazed to learn recently that our Galaxy is called the Milky Way, that this isn't the only galaxy, that our sun is not at the center of our galaxy, and that no people or even space probes have left our galaxy. I especially love to watch their faces when I show them a picture of the Hubble Deep Field North and say that every point of light in the picture is a galaxy, then explain just how small an amount of the sky that the picture covers.

Shelly

When I was Younger I used to believe that if I talked into a jar and then covered the top... I could hear myself when I opened the jar

JM

I used to believe that if I jumped from a height and I had my legs crossed I wouldn't break my legs and I would land unharmed.

Anon