science

When I was about four or five, I was fascinated by the way my bedroom would get lighter as I tried to get to sleep. The door was always left ajar and I surmised that the light floated round the door like clouds. When people used to talk about the speed of light I thought it was about 6 feet per fifteen minutes. I have a BSc now!

When I was quite youg (couldn't have been over 3 or 4) we watched a documentary on black holes with Stephen Hawking in it. This was before he had his robo-chair, so he siply spoke the best he could at the time and was subtitled. Now my sister and I both couldn't read at this time, so we were put off by this, and one of us asked why he spoke that way. "It's because a black hole sucked out his voice," Dad joked. My sister and I believed him explecitly... a few years ago we were talking and we remembered this, and confronted Dad. He claimed not to remember.

When I was young I learned all about Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and how they invented the telephone and talking machines. I knew they had lived close to my house and obviously spoke English. It was my impression then that these devices only could be used while speaking English. How lucky was I to be able to use these wonderful devices. It perplexed me to no end then, how a French speaking person was able to talk on the telephone and get it to work!

I used to believe I could call God on the old telephone my mom put in my bedroom for me to play with. The number was 1-800-GOD. I'd call and leave messages for my dead Great-Grandma Clara. Come to think of it, it was more God's answering service than God himself.

A friend's child wanted to call one of his friends from school and I told him he needed to have their phone number or his parent's name because we could look in the phone book, but we'd need his parent's name. He looked at me very matter of factly thumbing through the phone book and said, "Where's the kid's section?" I just had to laugh!

I used to think that when you called "information" that they could really give you "information". I asked the operator once :How many people there were in Brooklyn". She was not amused. I also used to call them at Christmas time and sing carols for the operators. Sometimes they enjoyed it...sometimes not.

I used to think that if a near-sighted person held a mirror and viewed the reflection of a distant object, they should have no trouble seeing the object in perfect focus. After all, they're looking at the mirror, and it's only a foot or so away.

My sister has an excellent design for a spaceship.

First take a house and tip milk all over it (milk is actually an excellent form of glue), then find out exactly how fast the house is moving, from Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle, it now follows that the house could be anywhere in the universe.

Note: The reason you have to first tip milk all over the house, is to glue the house up and stop yourself from suffocating if you end up in deep space, rather than on some inhabitable planet.

I had learnt in school that carbon dioxide turns lime solution white...so if you blow into lime water, it will turn milky. After that everytime mom made nimbu pani (lime juice), I'd spend hours blowing into it, waiting for it to change colour.

I used to believe you couldn't burn food in a Microwave Oven, because it works on the idea of rubbing water molecules past each other, right?
And if we cooked something enough for it to dry out, there wouldn't be enough water molecules to keep the food up to a burning temperature -- self correcting!
Well, I'm not a great cook, but I've met someone recently who doesn't understand why you can't simmer something in a microwave oven over an afternoon, without it turning hard, salty, & sometimes burning (honest!)

I used to believe that people turned off the plug sockets to stop the electricity escaping and electrocuting people.
I believed this until I experimented by waving my hand in front of a plug socket that was on end experienced none of the effects of electrocution.

I used to believe that if you left a lightswitch inbetween fully on and fully off that the switch would shortly burst into a shower of sparks and flames, burning your house down.

When I was a kid, I had railroad tracks running though my backyard. When I'd walk back there, I'd find little pieces of coal. From science class, I knew that if you put enough pressure on coal, it would turn into diamonds. I put so many pieces of coal on the tracks, but I never did find any diamonds...

I was always scared to walk over bridges, especially wooden ones. I thought that they would collapse on me (probably got this idea from watching too much disaster tv or something). One day, when I refused to walk over a bridge, my mom told me to walk across where the nails were, cause underneath the nails were the beams that held the bridge up, so if the bridge collapsed I would still be standing on the beams and be safe. This made perfect sense to me and I never had a problem again. I guess it never occured to me that the beams would probably fall too. The funny part is, I'm now 20 years old and I still find myself walking on the nails whenever I cross a wooden bridge. :)

My father worked in an auto parts plant and would tell us about the dirty, oily machines and vats he had to work around. One time he was talking about a conversation he had with his co-worker about being assigned to a particularly unwelcome task, and he said, "You don't want to work near that machine, there's oil snakes and all sorts of things down in there!"

Being a little kid, I didn't realize he was just being facetious with his co-workerl so for quite a few years, I believed there were actually "oil snakes" that lived among the machinery he worked on. I don't know why I thought an auto parts factory would have snakes in the machinery, guess I just never thought about it...

When I was young. One of my friends came up with a way to send signals faster than the speed of light.

It went like this. If you have a pole long enough (i.e. from the earth to the moon) and you jolted the pole on earth. The pole would instantaneously be jolted on the moon, thus sending a signal faster than the speed of light.

Oh How we argued for years over that one :D

When I first learnt about atoms, for some reason I thought that if you shot a gun. You would be killing thousands of atoms as the bullet shot through the air.

When you get the error message that ends "...if you need help, hang up, and then dial your operator," I heard "hang up, and burn down your operator."

I didn't think that the phone people actually wanted you to set an operator on fire, but I just figured that "to burn down" was a saying or idiom of some kind that I just hadn't learned yet.

I used to think there was this group called the "Local Trude" and I kept accidentally dialing their telephone number when I meant to call home or call one of my friends. I didn't know who this "Local Trude" was, but I didn't like them.

Then one day I realised that it was just a recording saying "Your call could not go through", but I'd misheard it as "You called the Local Trude."