science: physics

I used to believe…

My dad told me that once a Gravitron ride at a carnival had come loose, flown into the air, crashed down and killed everybody on it. I could never ride it again even though most people thought it was the best ride.

I used to believe…

One of my friend told me that if you place a coin on a railway track and when the train passes on it, it would turn into a magnet. I tried many times on the tracks at the amuzement park to make a magnet out of a coin and well, I kept on losing my money. One day I realized that it doesn�t happen with a small train so everytime we were travelling by train I always wished for a chance to place a coin underneath��.. I never achieved it and I still laugh at myself.

pramod

I used to believe…

While sitting on the shore of a small lake in the path of the local airport, my sister asked why the waves appeared every time a plane flew overhead? I replied "sonic waves of course." She said that's what I thought.

I used to believe…

When I was five I believed that I could restore the elasticity in my sagging crew socks by turning them inside out and then stretching them. I assumed the outward stretching force would be directed inward once I turned them right side out again, thus pulling the socks toward my legs.

I used to believe…

My parents used to have plastic plug-socket protectors (i.e. the plug prongs attached to a shield bit) to prevent inquisitive toddlers from electrocuting themselves.

Apparently I was of the belief that they were actually there to prevent the electricity from flowing out!
Pretty sensible, I thought! :)

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....?

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

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.

I used to believe…

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 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.

I used to believe…

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.

I used to believe…

When I was learning to ride my bike, I was absolutley convinced that I had to balance on it perfectly still BEFORE I started pedaling. Took me a while to get the hang of that!

I used to believe…

When i was little i use to think that if you jumped from a high roof, and had a little step 1 feet from the ground, you wouldn't get hurt because from the distance from the step to the ground was so little.. but later on i changed my mind because i got to think about the distance from the roof to the step.. but it was some really exiting hours of that belief

I had heard something about a mirror being a piece of glass with black behind it. So I found some black paper and a piece of glass, and I was very disapointed...

I first saw Star Wars when I was seven. When the characters spoke about making the "jump to light speed" I instead heard them say "jungle light speed" and I assumed that light moved at a faster speed in jungles.

I used to firmly believe that there was an opposite to everything. The opposite of a carrot was a pea, just as the opposite of a boy was a girl. I got quite annoyed when my dad, who, after all, was a scientist, wouldn't help me classify some of the ground rules to this world of mine.