That glass is a liquid at room temperature, just a very viscous one so it doesn’t appear to flow. It’s not. It’s not a crystalline solid so it has an internal structure similar to a liquid, but the structure is definitely solid at room temperature because the components are not capable of moving relative to each other like a liquid would.
It’s also not the reason church windows are thicker at the bottom, a common myth that my ex-colleague with a PhD in polymer chemistry(!) somehow bought into
Glass not being a polymer still does suggest they’re talking out of turn
Not a polymer but an amorphous solid like many polymers; I believe she popped that nugget while explaining crystallinity and glass transitions. She was quite knowledgeable otherwise but that little false factoid must have slipped through.
Racism used to be a problem until Lincoln and MLK fixed it.
Trickle down economics are an effective way to redistribute wealth
Hear about pluto? Pretty messed up huh?
You know that’s right!
The myth that glass is a very thick liquid. It’s actually much weirder than that. https://gizmodo.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894
That fluoride and vaccines are bad for you… tbh, I only believed it for 2-3 weeks until I did my own research, but it was a frightening clarification. Didn’t believe that teacher a single word after that.
Fluoride can be bad for you, just at much higher doses than they put in water supply. It can cause issues with bones and neurological development. Again, only in very high doses over a long time. It happens a lot in poorer countries where they can’t treat well water.
Basically everything I can recall being told in D.A.R.E program classes (war on drugs era propaganda taught in public schools in the USA) was utter nonsense and fabricated bullshit. After actually having personal experience with most of the substances they vilified, none of the effects - good or ill - are what I was taught in that ridiculous program.
On the contrary, some of the fear tactics they used made me curious to investigate on my own. The breathlessly scared rural teacher describing the mind bending effects that “magic mushrooms” was supposed to have sounded fascinating to teenage me. In reality, they are very fun and therapeutic to use, but nothing like the wild Alice in Wonderland mind journey they made it sound like it would be.
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I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.
When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!
I had a substitute teacher who saw the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ads against John Kerry and repeated it to the class like it was 100% fact.
By the time I was in school the Bohr model was already proven inaccurate, but was taught anyway because the orbital model is too esoteric for teenagers 🙄.
Taste buds are arranged by flavor in four sections of the tongue. Complete load of horseshit.
Multiplication tables (I still know them mostly). I have a calculator on damn near every device now.
Things will always get better <-- this one is the biggest lie of them all
That humans came out of Africa once and then settled the rest of the world. In reality there was a constant migration of humans in and out of Africa for millennia while the rest of the world was being populated (and of course it hasn’t ever stopped since).
I love how much DNA analysis has completely upended so much “known” archaeology and anthropology from even just a couple decades ago.
Whats about DNA??
Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.
A huge number of aspects of the US’s geopolitical enemies, and its own mythologization of the Founding Fathers and early settlers.
There was also a really bad political test with liberalism on the left and conservativism on the right, and we had to take a test and put what we got in front of everyone, which was very strange.
Physical Vs chemical changes.
It was typically taught that physical changes are differentiated from chemical changes because they could be “undone” or that they had “no chemical reaction.” Which was very confusing, because you can’t uncut paper, and dissolving stuff in water clearly results in different chemicals being produced, yet both were examples of physical changes (actually the latter is sometimes taught as a chemical change). Furthermore, most chemical changes are actually reversible.
It has since been recognised that this classification is BS, and most changes actually exist on a continuum.
I am teaching this next week. It is sometimes painful how simplified we have to make content for middle school. You are expressing what science teachers hope for from students. You were curious enough to explore further and ask questions, the true purpose of science.
That America is the best and most free country in the world.
And eagles and burguers
