science

When I learned about faxes, I thought you could fax whole objects. Like in Willy Wonka. Ex. Scan a chair, and fax the info, and a chair comes out where you sent the fax.

In Denmark (where I grew up) a calculator is called something that would translate back into "Pocket Calculator".
Because of this I often wondered as a child, how such a device could calculate the contents of my pockets.

I used to believe that if you dialed "0" and didn't press another button on the phone REALLY fast then the you would call the police. I would get very nervous anytime I had to call my friend at 868-0791. Sometimes I just couldn't handle the pressure and I'd walk to his house instead.

I remember seeing the sun set and it didn't look all that far away, really. I also imagined it as being about the size of my wading pool. I was hoping for the day the sun would come down right in our yard. I wanted to go touch it.

I used to believe that if you photocopied a piece of blank paper, the copy would make a new piece of paper. I thought that I was the first one to come up with this and was convinced my family could save millions of dollars in paper :)

I one time asked my dad what comets are and he said they are made of dirt and ice. Based on this I thought if I got some dirt and ice I could throw it into space and make my own comet!

I used to believe that sunlight coming from windows spontaneously generated dust since that's the only place I ever saw it in the air.

I used to believe that the robots living inside the computer that controls displays, keyboards, and printers.

I used to believe that when you fax something, the machine crumbled up the paper and sent it through the telephone wires and when the other machine received it, the machine ironed it out. But that didn't explain why the person still had the original sheet! I couldn't figure that part out.

I believed that the sound from a speaker traveled around the speaker in a circle very fast, and if you poked a hole in the speaker, the sound would stop when it came around to the hole. I believed this until I poked a hole in our car radio's speaker just to see if it was true. My dad never found out. (Thank goodness.)

I used to believe that because jet airplanes went so fast, that if you held a large sheet of paper in front of them, they would go right through the paper without making a hole or tearing the paper.

When I was a kid, I thought that when I turned off the computer, the characters from the computer games gathered around a bonfire and talked to each other about what I did to them the whole day.

I used to believe that splitting an atom was done by finding a very thin needle and sticking the needle into the atom.

When I was little, behind my school there was a very large metal box/room thing with a little door that contained a power transformer or something. It had a small oval-shaped transparent panel through which I could see something that looked vaguely like a robot face. Because of that, I used to believe that robots lived inside power transformers.

I used to believe that nuclear power stations consisted of a giant room where they set off nuclear bombs, then siphoned off the energy from the explosions. Therefore the main danger of these power stations was that the giant room might be unable to hold in the explosion.

When I was 23 my sister and I were driving in California on a road trip when I looked up at the power lines and said "Isn't it amazing how the power is in those lines and then it just shoots into your house through the air?" She turned her head around in shock and questioned my statement. I further went on to detail how I thought power just shot around the air like cell phones or tvs. She set me straight on how power arrives at my house and the dangers of electricity loose in the air.