science

my dad used to tell me that if you pointed at things, you were poking holes in the air and the fairies/birds would trip over them.

i'm still hesitant to poke holes..

I used to believe that the liquid that causes glowsticks to glow was radioactive and would kill me if I got it on my skin. My mother took my friend and I to a carnival when we were about 7 and kept breaking them to make ourselves glow. Not wanting it to stain our clothes, she told us that any more would kill us if we touched it. I didn't want to go near a glowstick until 4 years later when my 6th grade science teacher said otherwise.

I used to think that conputer viruses were little worms or caterpillars.One day mom was trying to get rid of a virus,then I said "why don't you jump inside and catch it with a net?"

I used to believe that telegraphs worked by pulling on a cable and the person on the other end would be able to feel when it was pulled. I figured that to send a message a really long distance you had to pull really hard, but could never work out how someone would have enough strength to pull the cable hard enough to send a message overseas.

When I was little, I saw a science show on t.v. that explained about how splitting atoms would make nuclear explosions etc...etc...etc... So I believed if a person just broke something or tore something in half it would cause atoms to split and blow apart the planet.

I used to baby sit these three girls, and one day i told them I would copy a CD for them, as in burn. The youngest one, at seven, asked me how you burned a CD... I told her that you just throw the CD you want a copy of, and an empty CD into the fireplace, light up, and when the flames are burned out, the CD would be finished, and you could put it in the CD-player. The next time I came to visit her, I found her throwing a cd into the fireplace... You should really learn to watch what you say around kids...

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.

When I was probably about four or five I used to hear about "skyscrapers" and I assumed that these were machines that scraped the sky clean. I have vivid pictures in my head of little upside down yellow bulldozers that would drive back and forth cleaning the clouds away.

For the longest time I thought programming was something impossibly difficult, but not in the way you might think. I thought that the only way to program anything was to randomly press buttons, but nobody knew what effect they had. Programmers would press these buttons, and statistically, every once in a while a viable program would be produced. I thought it was a totally blind process, and a miracle anything resulted from it.

I used to think I could make televisions or radios using household materials. I gathered napkins, pieces of wood, toothpicks, and other random objects, and set about arranging them and hoping for the best. I figured I just had to position them in SOME way and it would work.

When I was about 4, my mother was in the Hospital because her lungs had collapsed (abusive relationship with my father). Well, I hadn't seen her for at least two days, and she called me on the phone to talk. Well, I put the two together, and like any other logical toddler, I ran away screaming that "The Phone Ate Mommy." I cried for days.

I thought that inside the speaker things you order through in fast food places, there was a little midget who asked what you wanted then radioed the orders to the people at the window.

When I was really young, I used to lock myself in the bathroom and mix together toothpaste, mouthwash, soap, ...whatever, thinking I was doing chemistry and I was going to discover some whole new compound no one has ever seen. Generally I just made a mess in a Dixie cup, but the good news is that I did end up with Ph.D. in Biology, so it wasn't a total loss.

When I about 4 I didn't realize that pressing that little button on the phone would hang it up (on those older phones with cords). My mom was talking to my dad who was away with the Navy and I pressed that button. My mom just looked at my and said "You just hung you dad up." I immediately had this image of my dad in his Navy uniform with him hanging on a coat hanger at the shoulders. I was totally fascinated by how in the world I could have done that!

When I was very young, I had a Spectrum 48k computer and I wanted to program in it. There was a program in a book I wanted to play, but I didn't think I had to actually program it, I thought you just had to write the name of the program on a tape and load it, and it would work. I drove myself to tears when it wouldn't work no matter how hard I tried!

I grew up hearing a lot about the atom bomb, and, having just heard about atoms in school, I thought that these incredibly powerful bombs were, well, the size of a single atom. When my father told me that atoms were always dropping off of me I was wondering how there weren't explosions everywhere.