50 Science Misconceptions

(YouTube link)

I'm proud to say that the majority of the 50 misconceptions in this video have been addressed over the years here at Neatorama, and those of you who've been following along all that time probably know these things. Even so, there may be some science misconceptions here that are new to you. -via mental_floss

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I used the 'correlation does not imply causation' in an English essay and my teacher made me explain to her what I meant

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Typical glasses at room temperatures are solids on pretty much any human time scale: it is mechanically the same as any other solid, just the atomic structure is not crystalline. On long enough time scales and various situations, plenty of other solids will show effects of flow or other deviations from an ideal, elastic solid. Efforts to find evidence of flow in glass have turned up negative, and estimates of the viscosity of glass give it something quite high. For comparison, pitch drop experiments will show that pitch flows if you wait long enough, producing drops from a funnel about once every ten years, and pitch is about 200 billion times more viscous than water. Estimates of the viscosity of glass give it values about a billion times higher than that. That doesn't necessarily mean it would flow, but would take at least billions of years if it did (and some estimates I've seen have give times much longer than that).

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Wow, neat! I never knew that glass wasn't a solid... You know, I've always been fascinated by moldavite, it being millions of years old (and so pretty :D ). It's basically naturally occurring glass (like, say, obsidian), and you can pinpoint its origin quite exactly because all of it on this planet only exists courtesy of this one distinct meteor impact. But now I appreciate it a lot more, knowing that it's somehow solid and liquid at the same time (or maybe neither).

Looking further into it that also explains to me the difference between glass and rock crystal, which as a quartz would indeed be a strictly solid form of glass. I've really learned something today!

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I rather dislike the "centrifugal force is not a thing." It certainly is a thing, and has many practical uses in analyzing various situations. The only problem is that such inertial forces that come about from being in an accelerating frame have some caveats and are easy to make simple mistakes with. Some care needs to be taken when teaching circular motion, to make sure students learn the actual concepts and not something superficial. But somehow this has evolved into the idea that "centrifugal force does not exist" instead of "centrifugal force is handled differently than what was previously covered." Not surprisingly, people don't seem to attack the Coriolis force, despite being another fictitious force just like the centrifugal force.

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