Five Science ‘Facts’ We Learnt at School That Are Plain Wron

EDITOR'S BLOG

Five Science Facts We Learnt At School ThatAre Plain WrongOctober 29, 2014 | by Mark Lorch

photo credit: Rewrite textbooks now. PathDoc

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Lets start with a quiz

How many senses do you have?Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips?What are the primary colours of pigments and paints?What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes?What are the states of matter?

If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow and blue; the back of the tongue; and gas, liquidand solid, then you would have got full marks in any school exam. But you would have beenwrong.

The sixth sense and more

Taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell dont even begin to cover the ways we sense the world.

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We sense movement via accelerometers, which are located in the vestibular system within ourears. The movement of fluid through tiny canals deep in our ears allow use to sensemovement and give use our sense of balance. Make yourself dizzy and its this sense that youare confusing.

When we hold our breath we sense our blood becoming acidic as carbon dioxide dissolves in itforming carbonic acid. Not to mention senses for temperature, pain and time plus a myriad ofothers that allow us to respond to the need what is going on within us and the environmentaround.

Magnetic repulsion

It is not just paperclips that are magnetic. Both tomatoes and humans interact with magneticfields, too.

Paperclip and other objects that contain iron, cobalt and nickle are ferromagnets, which meansthat they can be attracted to magnetic fields. While the water in you and the tomato ormore accurately the nuclei in the hydrogen in the water in you and the tomato is repelled bymagnetic fields. This interaction is called diamagnetism.

But the forces involved are incredibly weak. So normally you dont notice them. That is unlessyou have been in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. In there, a massive magnetmanipulates nuclei of various atoms inside you in such a way that results in detailed images ofyour inner workings.

Though you dont need to go to a hospital to see diamagnetic interactions. Just use a coupleof cherry tomatoes, a strong magnet, a wooden kebab stick and a pin:

And the types of magnetism dont stop there, but thats for another time.

Youre painting with the wrong colour

You were taught that primary colours are those that cant be made by mixing other colouredpigments together, and that all other colours can by produced by blending these primarycolours. Red and blue fail on both counts. You can make red by mixing yellow with magenta.While a blend of magenta with cyan yields blue. Meanwhile a massive range of hues areinaccessible if you start with just red, blue and yellow.

Colour theorists had this all worked out by the end of the 19th century but for some reason ithasnt made it to school curriculums. The proof is in your colour printer cartridges. They comein cyan, yellow and magenta, which are the true primary colours.

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A bitter taste in your mouth

Remember those tongue maps that crop up in biology text books? They clearly show how thetaste buds for bitter sit at the back of the tongue, with sweet, sour and sweet having their owndiscrete regions.

These tongue maps first appeared in 1942 after Edwin Boring of Harvard Universitymisinterpreted a German study from 1901. Despite Borings mistake the maps soon started toappear in schools texts. Then in 1974 the topic was revisited and the whole idea was roundlydiscredited. Nevertheless over 40 years later tongue taste maps still persist in biology textbooks.

Look at the state of your screen

We all learned solids keep a constant shape because the molecules in them are ordered. Thesecan melt to liquids which keep a constant volume and can be poured. Liquids evaporate toform gases that expand to take up the volume available to them. There we have the threestates of matter, end of story.

Expect of course there is more. Liquid crystals have molecules that are ordered like a solid butare fluid like a liquid. These properties are vital for your cells, shampoo and of course liquidcrystal (LCD) flat screen devices.

But why stop at four states. There is plasma, the state of matter for most things in the sun, orBose-Einstein condensates, superfluids and dozens more.

Time to rewrite textbooks?

There are many more than the five facts that need to be fixed in school textbooks. I am notsuggesting that we should start teaching 6-year-olds about matter that only appears in NobelPrize-winning physics labs or filling the curriculum with detail on dozens of senses. But maybewe should stop telling kids fibs.

Perhaps a biology lesson should start with: We have many senses, here are the five we aregoing to learn about. Or a sentence dropped in here and there that mentions the existence ofmore than three states of matter. As for the tongue map, just rip that page out of the book.

Mark Lorch does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any companyor organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Five Science ‘Facts’ We Learnt at School That Are Plain Wron