science

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.

I used to believe that electrons orbiting around a nucleus were a small solar system, with people actually living on the electrons.
The earth was also an electron on an atom in a much larger world.
Time is also relative in all these worlds; say if I were to throw a piece of paper into a fire, the seconds that it will take the paper to fall into the fire are like eons to the inhabitants of the small universe on the paper. Likewise, if someone in the large world tosses the paper we are an atom on into their fire, what seems like a couple seconds in their world will be centuries in ours. So.... suppose the giants have already tossed our piece of paper towards the fire....?

When I was a child, electricity was delivered in these parts by the South of Scotland Electricity Board (it now calls itself "Scottish Power"). I believed that set up on end in the countryside near Stirling there was a huge piece of hardboard which was the South of Scotland Electricity Board. On one side cables went in from the power stations, and on the other side there were rows and rows of plug sockets with wires trailing out, each to one house.

i used to think, and still do, that if ur IN an elevator thats falling down, that u wont die if u jump at the last second

When we were younger, my sister and I used to tell our other siblings that there were people inside our record player. These people would sing and play instruments. They believed us!

Since I grew up in a town where the
phone prefix was the same as the first
three digits of the zip code (626), I used
to believe that was true everywhere.

I used to lay on the ground looking up at the sky, watching the clouds go by. I thought that was evidence that the world was turning, as if the clouds were stationary, and the world moved beneath them.

When I was a child I thought that blankets had heat built into them. That
was why they kept you warm. The more you piled on the warmer you
would be. I can't remember when I stopped believeing this but it came
as a shock that I was wrong.

I read a lot of kiddie science fiction books when I was younger(okay so I still read sci-fi) anyway for at least a few years I thought we lived in the 21st century (this was in the late 1980's/early 1990's) and couldn't quite understand why we didn't have cool spaceships and stuff like in the books I read.

I used to believe that radio waves were actually thousands of microscopic, kayak-shaped, silver flying machines with tiny men inside them who drove from the radio station all the way into the antennae of the car radio. They couldn't fly well inside tunnels, though.

You know that sort of windy noise in the telephone, like if you had a bad connection, or you'd hear it after you hung up? I used to think it was caused by the wind blowing through the telephone wires.

Based on the "experiments" I used to rig up with things like old discarded blenders and other small appliances, I clearly believed as a child that electricity could not hurt me.

I certainly learned that it could blow fuses, though.

I used to believe that you could pass things down the telephone.

As a child, I believed in the law of balance. I don't even know where I got the idea. I believed if there were two options or two ideas, one had to be one way, and the other had to be the opposite.

Like winding an old clock, you had to let it wind down or you'd break the spring if you kept winding it. We had a bathroom with two light switches, one of them not connected to anything. So when I flipped the switch for the light up, the unused switch had to go down, and vice-versa.

Or if I had to turn around to the right to do something, I'd then have to turn back around to the left, as if there was some invisible string attached to me that would get wound around me oddly and somehow make my life more difficult if I didn't unwind it the other way.

I also believed that if I was walking with someone closely, like a friend or parent, there was some sort of invisible connection between us, and if I let something pass between us, like me walking on one side of a pole and the friend walking on the other, we'd break the connection and our relationship might start to fall apart. So I always scooted to be sure we walked on the same side of things together, eve if we had to go single-file.

That's pretty much the oddest thing I believed.

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.

One of my very first memories is of the time my mother took me to have my picture taken at JC Pennys. I was two years old. There were all these pictures of children all over the walls and I thought that when my picture was taken I would be forever stuck in that picture. I couldn't understand why my mother would leave me there in that picture. She didn't end up leaving me so I thought she changed her mind. It seemed like it was a long time before I understood what having my picture taken really meant.