science

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.

When i first heard of fax machines i used to believe that there was an invisible line in the sky that it would transfer the page and papers would "move" around the sky...

I am 16 and a sophomore in high school. I believed from the time I knew what an atomic bomb was to today (August 19th 2008) that when things in close proximity to the blast are vaporized, that they just disappear. I was informed by my chemistry class and teacher that they do not, in fact, "turn into air" rather they are converted into extremely small particles that are lighter than air. Silly me.

when i first found out the world was round i thought it would fall and smash on the floor

I used to think that the "speed of light" was the speed of the light going from the switch to the lamp when you turned it on. I was with my parents in a lousy hotel once, and the light in the bathroom would take four or five seconds to turn on since I had pressed the button, so I thought "hey, the speed of light is really low here".

When I was young I believed that my playstation wouldn't start a game unless I held the controller and put my energy into starting the game.

I thought the controllers had sensors that said hoy much you were trying to start the game and if you weren't trying hard enough the game wouldn't start.

When I was aroud 3 years Old my family was travelling by car and we saw a big Factory Chimney. I asked what it was and my brother told me that was where the rockets were send to the moon. I Believed that until I was 7 or 8 years old!!

While in the car, I remember asking my parents : "is it our car that's moving or is it the whole scenery that's somehow moving past us while the car stands still?"

When my mom tried to telephone someone and she'd hang up because the line was busy, I thought she said "The lion was busy." And I thought there was a lion in a big cage somewhere and if he was eating a big steak for lunch or was otherwise busy, calls couldn't get put through till he was done.

When I was twelve I thought that if I took a diamond (it was a very SMALL diamond by the way) and somehow be able to fix it on top of the hole on my rocket launcher toy, I would be able to construct a powerful signal beam.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeah, what?

When I was growing up in the early 80's, I thought that when my parents called the "operator", they were calling this one lady that they knew, and she knew everyone's phone number, her name was "operator"

I used to believe that the world was actually flat, and that we were at the bottom of the universe, with the sun and moon, and all the stars floating up above us.

I used to believe a nuclear bomb was powerful enough that it would actually split the world into tiny pieces that would float around the solar system. Needless to say, once I found out about its capabilities (less powerful than what I originally believed), nuclear attack has never really worried me as much as other people.

One day my dad was making me and my younger sister breakfast, when we were very young. We asked him how the toaster worked, and our dad (i suspect now rather than admitting he didnt KNOW how the toaster worked, being a drama teacher and not a scientist) told us that a little man lived inside the toaster. His name was Mr. Frosty, and he had a special trident with a red-hot tip to cook the bread. We got obsessed with Mr Frosty and every morning (mystifying our mum) the three of us (Dad, Me and sister) would look intently into the toaster and say a polite 'good morning' to mr Frosty. My sister and I also used to receive little letters on tiny scraps of pink paper from mr Frosty, thanking us for keeping him in business with all the toast we ate.

When I was young I saw my Dad's Popular Science magazines and they would talk about the "Internet Super Highway" that was coming. I thought it sounded way cool. I assumed we'd all be literally surfing on a crazy highway in the sky.

Just now I was watching "How it's Made" on the Discovery Channel while browsing the internet at the same time, and I wasn't really paying attention when they said the item they were making, then I took a break and started watching again, and they had these little pins, and they were talking about elephants. I thought they were making little carvings of elephants on the top of pins (I read about it in a book once), but then they started putting the pins in a circuit board. I got confused, but then I listened more closely and I heard they said ELEMENTS.