Misunderstandings Workshop

Raw material for constructing your theory of misconceptions

Look here for those puzzling beliefs that you know are wrong, not because they rub your wishful thinking the wrong way, but because they have a strong dose of obvious absurdity built in.

Look here for those trusted beliefs that you "know" must be right even though the people whom you trust about other, similar matters look at you with suspicious puzzlement when you show your enthusiasm.

Look here for clues to where you and your friends are pushing up against your personal edges of human comprehension. Look here for clues to help locate those occult dimensions which lay hidden from your view, but that lay right in front of you . . . unseen.

Certain statements give little clues that something wasn't really quite understood.

...simple, but subtle...
...obvious, yet unobserved...
...the edges of (easy) human comprehension..

For the following:
We should like to know:
What are the clues?
What was missed?

and...
How might it affect important decisions?

"Microsoft made a quantum leap with their introduction of Windows 95." ??
"What year did NASA first reveal the dark side of the moon to mankind...1966?" ??
"Earth rise on the moon" (Caption for a photo of earth from the moon) ??
"Here is a bold heretic whose brilliant new theories infuriate academic plodders. In 1959, when everybody thought the surface of the moon was frozen lava, he decided it was covered with dust from meteor impacts." ??
"The earthquake's epicenter was two kilometers below Northridge, California." ??
"Congress set the parameters for the budget, and then special interests tried to exceed them." ??
"The Beatles introduced some of the most unique innovations in the music of the 1960's" ??
"We had 95° heat today." ??
"The thermometer read 33° today, but the wind brought the real temperature down to 21° wind chill factor." ??
"This device costs one third less than it did this time last year." ??
"The laws of physics say you can't use energy more than once." ??
"Society must conserve energy; why, there's even a law of physics called the Law of Conservation of Energy." ??
"Energy is the capacity for doing work." ??
"To be valid, a hypothesis must be disprovable, or falsifiable. This hypothesis is falsifiable if inconsistent data is not found." ??
"He lost an eye during the war . . . and so he has no depth perception." ??
"We will not allow our school children to go outside during the total eclipse of the sun. Even though it is heavily overcast, we understand that looking at sunlight during an eclipse is dangerous."??
"Do unto others as they would do unto you." ??
"You can't simultaneously measure both position and momentum." ??
"Quantum mechanics showed that the world behaves according to statistical laws." ??
"The uncertainty principle showed that measurement disturbs the object measured." ??
"The odds against winning this lottery are 80 million to one. You're more likely to get hit by lightning 16 times in one year." ??
"They didn't poll every American, so they can't say 80% of Americans disagree with my organization's opinion. They only polled four thousand people!" ??
"Only human beings have color vision; all other animals are colorblind." ??
"I have students all over the intelligence map; from A-students to F-students." ??
"A really tough Private Investigator has to be ready to use his fists, just like in the movies." ??
"The optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty." ??
"John Czesznski is the biggest athlete on the team." ??
"We all know how sunburn correlates with heat; to avoid sunburn stay out of the sun when it's hot." ??
"It will take light-years to solve the problem of eliminating war among mankind." ??
"Before we go ahead and construct that dam, we must calculate the benefit to cost ratio." ??
"The value of gravity is 32...oh, all right, it's 9.8" ??
"The Dow is falling: down 80 points." (Then, 30 minutes later): "The Dow is still falling, but not as fast; it's now down 40 points." ??
"I could care less!" ??
"Which groups is my new tax law more fair to?" ??
"We don't inhale carbon dioxide; we exhale it." ??
"This lack of confidence in the economic system is not going to be restored easily." ??
"The new roller coaster accelerates you from zero to 100 mph in six seconds straight up. Then you have zero gravity for six seconds. After the six seconds of zero gravity, you come down." ??
"Motion implies a force." ??
"We have too many rocket scientists and not enough musicians." ??
"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." ??
"What you have there is an old fashioned stereoscope. Two identical pictures are mounted in front of your two eyes and you fuse them together when you look through these lenses. That gives you an illusion of depth." ??
"Look at this broken valve stem. The metal crystallized."??
"Tomorrow is the one hundredth centenary of George Gershwin's birthday." ??
"The spotted owl is an endangered specie." ??
"How fast would you say our city is growing? Pick one: a)very slowly, b) moderately, c) very fast, d) exponentially." ??
"All these apologies from so many of our government officials [for bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade] are getting a little egregious; just a single apology from the President would have been enough." ??
"A thousand milligrams strong!" ??
"The river's 'water flow' is the number of cubic feet that passes in each second." ??
"In lightning, get in your car; it's grounded with the tires."??
"About fifty miles east of San Diego, near Campo, where forest fire fighters are fighting this fire. It started yesterday afternoon about 2 pm. Accounts right now put the coverage at about 2000 square acres."??
"His comments shed more heat than light on the topic."??
"We regularly follow up each sales with a survey of our customer's satisfaction. The positive feedback we almost always get encourages us." ??
"Let's mine comets with spacecraft! Comets are ice, and ice is hydrogen and oxygen, and that's rocket fuel!" ??
"In E = mc², m stands for 'matter'" ??
"Silicon breast implants have been approved by the FDA." ??
"Rain comes from holes in clouds."???
MORE

So here we have a collection of statements, each of which has clues that the person speaking doesn't quite understand something important. All are real-life statements (with only the names and situations changed to protect the guilty). Most are quite common examples of common errors.

This list is just a sample, just a suggestion. If we are to map "the edges of human comprehension" we need to study as many common mistakes as we can identify; mistakes like these.

This is the Web workshop area of Knowledge for Use. These are the raw material for examining the edges of human comprehension and for crafting tools and techniques for avoiding some of the myriad of little "irrationalities" and "solipsistic sillinesses" that are pitfalls at the edges.

We're looking for things that are very simple, but have something about them that make them "slippery." Remember, physics students usually learn prodigiously and well. But, all too often, little elements of those elementary concepts simply don't get seen. The fundamental essence of physics gets missed.

This problem is probably easier to see in physics, which is the simplest of the sciences, but it's a problem everywhere...

Because it's nothing more...or less...than our exploring into the edges of human comprehension.

Look around...
Find more of these...
Tell us about them...
Let's discuss them...
And add them to this list. . .

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