List of common misconceptions

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This list of common or popular misconceptions corrects various fallacious, misleading, or otherwise flawed ideas that are described by multiple reliable sources as widely held.

History

The Americas

• Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth. In fact, sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth is spherical, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus' estimates of the distance to India. If the Americas did not exist, and had Columbus continued to India (even putting aside the threat of mutiny he was under), he would have run out of supplies before reaching it at the rate he was traveling. The problem here was mainly a navigational one, the impossibility of determining longitude without an accurate clock. This problem remained until inventor John Harrison designed his first marine chronometers. The intellectual class had known that the earth was spherical since Ancient Greece. Eratosthenes made a very good measurement of the Earth's diameter in the third century BC.
• Contrary to the popular image of the Pilgrims, the early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts did not dress in black, wear buckles or black steeple hats. According to Plimoth Plantation historian James W. Baker, this image was formed in the nineteenth century when buckles were viewed as a kind of emblem of quaintness. This is also the reason illustrators gave Santa Claus buckles.
• George Washington did not have wooden teeth as commonly believed. According to a study of Washington's four known dentures performed by a forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh (in collaboration with the National Museum of Dentistry, itself associated with the Smithsonian Museum), the dentures were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, human and animal teeth (including horse and donkey teeth).
• A common misconception among Americans is that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation immediately freed all American slaves. Instead, Lincoln's proclamation warned that slaves in states still in rebellion as of January 1 of the following year will be freed. Since rebelling states did not recognize the power of the Federal government, few slaves were freed as a direct result of the Proclamation. Regions in the South that were under Union control when the Proclamation was issued were not affected by it. These regions were Tennessee, southern Louisiana, and parts of Virginia. The Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery in all of the United States.

Europe

Napoleon on the Bellerophon, a painting by Charles Lock Eastlake depicting Napoleon Bonaparte, who was taller than his nickname, The Little Corporal, suggests

• Napoleon Bonaparte (pictured) was not especially short. After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern international feet, or 1.686 metres, making him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century. The metric system was introduced during his lifetime, so it was natural that he would be measured in feet and inches for much of his life. His nickname was le petit caporal (The Little Corporal). There are competing explanations for why he was called this, but few modern scholars believe it referred to his stature.
• Italian dictator Benito Mussolini did not "make the trains run on time". Much of the repair work had been performed before Mussolini and the Fascists came to power in 1922. Accounts from the era also suggest that the Italian railways' legendary adherence to timetables was more myth than reality.
• During World War II, King Christian X of Denmark did not thwart Nazi attempts to identify Jews by wearing a yellow star himself. Jews in Denmark were never forced to wear the Star of David. The Danes did help most Jews flee the country before the end of the war.

Politics

• Al Gore did not specifically say that he invented the Internet. What he did state was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet". Gore was the original drafter of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided significant funding for supercomputing centers, and this in turn led to upgrades of the Internet's precursor, the NSFNet, and development of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web; see Al Gore and information technology.
• John F. Kennedy's historical words Ich bin ein Berliner are correct German for "I am a Berliner". An urban legend has it that due to use of the indefinite article "ein", "Berliner" must be read as "jam doughnut", and that the population of Berlin was amused by the supposed mistake. However, the phrase is correct idiomatic German for the intended meaning, and in fact the term "Berliner" for jam doughnuts is not even current in Berlin, where they are generally called "Berliner Pfannkuchen" or just "Pfannkuchen" ("pancakes"). It would be akin to a German saying "I am a New Yorker" and being confused with the magazine The New Yorker.

Cooking

• Searing meat does not "seal in" moisture, and in fact may actually cause meat to lose moisture. Rather, meat is seared to create a brown crust and to add a rich flavor via the Maillard reaction.
• Mussels that do not open when cooked can still be fully cooked and safe to eat.
• Some cooks believe alcohol evaporates quickly when heated, and thus that food items cooked with wine or liquor are non-alcoholic. However, it can take 3 hours or longer to dissipate or 'burn off' all the alcohol, depending on how it is added.
• Sushi does not mean "raw fish", and not all sushi includes raw fish. The usual Japanese term for raw fish is sashimi. The term "sushi" actually refers to the way the rice is prepared with a vinegary dressing. Toppings for the rice may traditionally include raw fish—but also cooked seafood, fish roe, egg, or vegetables such as cucumber, daikon radish, or ume plum.

U.S. Law

• Entrapment law in the United States does not forbid police officers from going undercover, or from denying that they are police. It is a common misconception among persons engaged in low-level crime that if an undercover police officer is asked, "Are you a cop?" that the officer must reveal his identity to avoid an entrapment defense.
• The Tenth Amendment does not constrain Congress from spending money on social programs, even if the states are to execute the programs. Congress has the power to tax and spend for the "general welfare," and to use the spending power to incentivize states to adopt social programs. The Tenth Amendment has nothing to do with it, and is more often treated by courts as a truism.

Science

Astronomy

A satellite image of a section of the Great Wall of China, running diagonally from lower left to upper right (not to be confused with the much more prominent river running from upper left to lower right).

• It is commonly claimed that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the Moon. This is false. None of the Apollo astronauts reported seeing any man-made object from the Moon. The misconception is believed to have been popularized by Richard Halliburton decades before the first moon landing. (See Great Wall's visibility from space.)
• Black holes, unlike the common image, do not act as cosmic vacuum cleaners any more than do other stars. When a star evolves into a black hole, the gravitational attraction at a given distance from the body is no greater than it was for the star. That is to say, were the Sun to be replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit (assuming spherical symmetry of the sun). Due to a black hole's formation being explosive in nature, the object would lose a certain amount of its energy in the process, which—according to the mass–energy equivalence—means that a black hole would be of lower mass than the parent object, and actually have a weaker gravitational pull.
• When a meteor lands on Earth (after which it is termed a meteorite), it is not usually hot. In fact, many are found with frost on them. A meteor's great speed during entry is enough to melt or vaporize its outermost layer, but any molten material will be quickly blown off (ablated), and the interior of the meteor does not have time to heat up because rocks are poor conductors of heat. Also, atmospheric drag can slow small meteors to terminal velocity by the time they hit the ground, giving the surface time to cool down.
• It is a common misconception that seasons are caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in the summer than in the winter. In fact, the Earth is actually farther from the Sun when it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Seasons are actually the result of the Earth being tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees. As the Earth orbits the Sun, different parts of the world receive different amounts of direct sunlight. In July, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun giving longer days and more direct sunlight; in winter, it is tilted away. The seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, which is tilted towards the Sun in January and away from the Sun in July. In tropical areas of the world, there is no noticeable change in the amount of sunlight. See also Effect of sun angle on climate.
• It is a common misconception that it's easier to balance an egg on its end on the first day of spring. In fact, the ease or difficulty of balancing an egg is the same 365 days a year. This myth is said to originate with the "egg of Li Chun", an ancient Chinese folk belief that it is easier to balance an egg on Li Chun, the first day of spring in the Chinese lunar calendar. In Chinese Li=setup/erect; Chun=spring/egg. "Setup spring" is a Chinese solar term, literally interpreted as erecting an egg for fun. It was introduced to the western world in a Life article in 1945, and popularized once again by self-titled 'urban shaman' Donna Henes, who has hosted an annual egg balancing ceremony in New York City since the mid-1970s.

Human body and health

A "tongue map" showing zones which taste bitter (1), sour (2), salty (3) and sweet (4). In reality, all zones can sense all tastes.

• Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds, with slightly increased sensitivities in different locations depending on the person, contrary to the popular belief that specific tastes only correspond to specific mapped sites on the tongue. The original "tongue map" was based on a mistranslation by a Harvard psychologist of a discredited German paper that was written in 1901.
• People do not use only ten percent of their brains. While it is true that a small minority of neurons in the brain are actively firing at any one time, the inactive neurons are important too. This myth has been commonplace in American culture at least as far back as the start of the 20th Century, as was attributed to William James, who apparently used the expression metaphorically. In the middle of the century, it was attributed to Albert Einstein. Some findings of brain science (such as the high ratio of glial cells to neurons) have been mistakenly read as providing support for the myth.
• There is no single theory that satisfactorily explains myopia—in particular, studies show that "eyestrain" from close reading and computer games does not explain myopia. There is also no evidence that reading in dim light or sitting close to a television causes vision to deteriorate.
• Shaving does not cause hair to grow back thicker or coarser or darker. This belief is due to the fact that hair that has never been cut has a tapered end, whereas, after cutting, there is no taper. Thus, it appears thicker, and feels coarser due to the sharper, unworn edges. Hair can also appear darker after it grows back because hair that has never been cut is often lighter due to sun exposure.
• Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after a person dies. Rather, the skin dries and shrinks away from the bases of hairs and nails, giving the appearance of growth.
• Although there are hair care products which are marketed as being able to repair split ends and damaged hair, there is no such cure. A good conditioner might prevent damage from occurring in the first place, but the only way to get rid of split ends after they appear is by a simple hair cut.
• Snapping or cracking one's knuckles does not cause arthritis.
• Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. Double blind trials have shown no difference in behaviour between children given sugar full or sugar-free diets, even in studies specifically looking at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or those considered "sensitive" to sugar. In fact, it was found that the difference in the children's behaviour was all in the parents' minds.
• Prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold. Although common colds are seasonal, with more occurring during winter, experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection, implying that the seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors close to others. A lowering of body temperature can, however, reduce the body's resistance to an infection that is already present. (See Hypothermia)
• It is a common misconception that sleepwalkers should not be awakened. While it is true that a person may be confused or disoriented for a short time after awakening, it is actually quite dangerous not to wake a sleepwalker as they may injure themselves if they trip over objects or lose their balance while sleepwalking. Such injuries are common among sleepwalkers.
• While the vitamin A in carrots does help to build healthy vision (among other things), it does not improve the eyesight of a person already in possession of healthy vision nor does it improve night vision. In fact, an excess of carrots can cause vitamin A toxicity and carotenemia in rare cases. This misconception arose from an RAF attempt to hide the discovery of radar from the Axis forces by claiming that their pilots had gained vastly improved night vision from being fed carrots, rather than from any technological advancement.

Biology

• Warts on human skin are caused by viruses that are unique to humans (Human papillomavirus). Humans cannot catch warts from toads or other animals; the bumps on a toad are not warts.
• The claim that a duck's quack does not echo is false, although the echo may be difficult to hear for humans under some circumstances.
• The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is completely false. They have been trained to navigate mazes and can recognize their owners after an exposure of a few months.
• Lemmings do not engage in mass suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. They will, however, occasionally, and unintentionally fall off cliffs when venturing into unknown territory, with no knowledge of the boundaries of the environment. The misconception is due largely to the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff.
• Bats are not blind. While most bat species do use echolocation to augment their vision, all bats have eyes and are capable of sight.
• Mammal blood is bright red or scarlet when oxygenated and a darker red when not oxygenated. It is never blue. Veins appear blue through the skin because of differential absorption of wavelengths of the blood's color by the overlying skin and flesh.
• It's a common myth that an earthworm becomes two worms when cut in half. This is not correct. An earthworm can survive being bisected, but only the front half of the worm (where the mouth is located) can survive, while the other half dies. On the other hand, species of the planaria family of flatworms actually do become two new planaria when bisected or split down the middle.
• According to urban myth, the Daddy Long-Legs Spider (Pholcus phalangioides) is the most venomous spider in the world, but it is harmless to humans because its fangs cannot penetrate human skin. This is false as Pholcus phalangioides can pierce human skin, however, the toxicity of this spider's venom has just a weak effect on insects, let alone humans. In addition, there is also confusion regarding the use of the name "Daddy Long Legs", because Harvestmen (order Opiliones, which are not spiders) and crane flies (which are insects) are also commonly referred to as Daddy Long Legs, and share (also incorrectly) the myth of venomousness.

Evolution

• Biological evolution does not address the origin of life; for that, see abiogenesis. The two are commonly and mistakenly conflated. Evolution describes (and through the theory of evolution, endeavors to explain) the changes in gene frequencies that occur in populations of living organisms over time, and thus, presupposes that life already exists. Evolution likewise says nothing about cosmology, the Big Bang, or the origins of the universe.
• The word "theory" in "the theory of evolution" does not insinuate doubt from mainstream science regarding its validity; the concepts of "theory" and "hypothesis" have specific meanings in a scientific context. While "theory" in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles which, via logical induction, explains observable phenomena in nature in natural terms. Evolution is a theory in the same sense as Germ theory or Plate Tectonics. (See Evolution is just a theory, not a fact.)
• Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. Instead, humans and modern apes share a common ancestor that lived about 5 to 8 million years ago. This common ancestor diverged into two separate lineages, one evolving into modern-day chimpanzees and bonobos, while the other eventually evolved into modern humans.
• Evolution is not a progression from "inferior" to "superior" organisms, and it also does not necessarily require an increase in complexity (see Evolution of complexity). A population can evolve to become simpler with less genetic information or have a smaller genome, but "devolution" is a misnomer.

Physics

• Contrary to the common myth, the Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet. The Coriolis force is relatively small; it appears over large scales (like weather systems) or in systems such as the Foucault pendulum in which the small influence is allowed to accumulate over time. In a bathtub or toilet, the flow of the water over the basin itself produces forces that dwarf the Coriolis force. In addition, most toilets inject water into the bowl at an angle, causing a spin too fast to be affected by the Coriolis effect.
• Gyroscopic forces are not required for a rider to balance a bicycle. However, the stability of a bicycle is improved by gyroscopic forces as well as by its geometry and the rider's ability to counteract tilting by steering.

An illustration of the equal transit-time fallacy.

• It is not true that air takes the same time to travel above and below an aircraft's wing. This misconception, illustrated at right, is widespread among textbooks and non-technical reference books, and even appears in pilot training materials.
  Further information: Equal transit-time fallacy, List of works with the equal transit-time fallacy, and Lift (force)
• Some believe that the sky looks blue because it reflects the colour of the ocean. The sky actually looks blue because the colour of air varies with the viewing angle to the illumination source. Sunlight reflected (scattered) from the air is of shorter wavelengths toward the violet end of the visible spectrum, while the remaining transmitted sunlight has longer wavelengths of the red end of the spectrum. In fact, the sun appears reddish in the evening because the transmitted sunlight has lost much of its blue wavelengths because of scattering, leaving only the long wavelength red light to reach the observer. This phenomenon is referred to as Rayleigh Scattering.
• Putting a teaspoon in the neck of an opened bottle of champagne will not help it retain its fizz. The misconception may arise from the fact that few people have two bottles of champagne open and unfinished at the same time to perform an accurate comparison and likely suffer from subjective validation bias.
• Glass is not a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid, although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids. Panes of stained glass windows often have thicker glass at the bottom than at the top, and this has been cited as an example of the slow flow of glass over centuries. However, this unevenness is due to the window manufacturing processes used in earlier eras, which produced glass panes that were unevenly thick at the time of their installation. It is not uncommon to find old windows that are thicker at the sides or the top.

Scientific method

• There is no single, strict scientific method used by all scientists, a misconception popularized by elementary science textbooks. The rigid "hypothesis/experiment/conclusion" model of science is an important part of many fields, particularly basic sciences like physics and chemistry, but is not the only way to perform genuine science. Many sciences do not fit well into this mold (astronomy, paleontology, mathematics), and much important scientific work has come from curiosity and unguided exploration, for example, the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, or the development of the atomic force microscope.

Religion

• Albert Einstein's position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide. In truth, Einstein was neither religious (in the traditional sense) nor atheistic. He did not believe in a "personal" God and discounted the existence of a creator; rather, he was closer to being a rationalistic pantheist. Many people misinterpreted his words in public, to which Einstein himself responded by saying: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." He has also said: "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

Christianity

• Many people confuse the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth of Jesus when in fact, they are two different things. Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary conceived without original sin and therefore her conception was immaculate. Virgin Birth is the belief that Mary gave birth to Jesus while remaining a virgin.
• Nowhere in the Bible does it say exactly three wise men came from afar to visit "Baby Jesus", nor that they rode on camels. It was assumed that there were three Biblical Magi because three gifts are described. Additionally, the wise men did not visit on the day Jesus was born, but they saw Jesus as a child, in a house as much as two years afterward. (Matthew 2:11)
• The Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus say nothing about a stable or an inn-keeper. The Greek word for an inn is pandocheion, while the word used to describe where Jesus was born is kataluma, which is better translated as "guestroom". What is mentioned is that Jesus lay in a manger but nothing else (Luke 2:7).

Islam

• A fatwā is a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar, not a death sentence. The popular misconception likely stems from the death sentence pronounced as a fatwā on the author Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, when fatwās first gained widespread media attention in the west.

Technology

Inventions

• Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet which was invented by Sir John Harrington in 1596. Crapper, however, did much to increase its popularity and came up with some related inventions, such as the ballcock. He was noted for the quality of his products and received several Royal Warrants. He was not the origin of the word "crap", but his name may have helped popularise it.
• Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. He did, however, develop the first practical light bulb, contemporaneously with Joseph Swan.

Computing

• The clock rate of a CPU is not a good measure of its performance. Computer performance is affected by many things, especially the design of the CPU's instruction pipelines, branch prediction, memory subsystem, and caches; the number of cores; and the ability of software to take advantage of a given CPU architecture's features. This is known as the megahertz myth, and was largely driven by marketing considerations.

Transportation

• The United States Interstate Highway System was not designed with airplane landings in mind. A common urban legend states that one out of every five (or ten) miles of highway must be straight and flat to allow emergency (or military) airplane landings, but this is not the case. However, several parts of the German and later the Swiss Autobahn system were indeed designed to be auxiliary military airports, both during World War II and the Cold War.
• Toilet waste is not dumped overboard in aircraft. All waste is collected in tanks which are emptied on the ground by special toilet waste vehicles. A vacuum is used to allow the toilet to be flushed with less water and because plumbing cannot rely on gravity alone in an aircraft in motion. The infamous "blue ice" is caused by accidental leakages from the waste tank.

Sports

• A myth is prevalent in America that black belt holders in martial arts must register their hands as a deadly weapon with law enforcement agencies.
• Contrary to popular myth, Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. (See The Abner Doubleday myth.)

Language

• Inuits do not have an unusually large number of words for snow. In fact, English has many unrelated root words for snow, such as snow, sleet, powder, flurry, drift, slush, whitewall, avalanche and blizzard. Each Inuit language has a similar number of unrelated root words. Since these languages are polysynthetic, arbitrarily complex thoughts such as "snow with a herring-scale pattern etched into it by rainfall" can be expressed in a single long word each, but this feature of the language is by no means restricted to snow.

See also

• Conventional wisdom
• Counter-intuitive
• Drug urban legends
• Factoid
• List of cognitive biases
• List of fallacies
• List of memory biases
• List of misquotations

• List of topics related to public relations and propaganda
• Misnomer
• Mythbusters
• Old wives' tale
• Pseudodoxia Epidemica
• Urban legend
• QI
• Straight and Crooked Thinking
• common misunderstandings of genetics

Further reading

• Diefendorf, David (2007). Amazing... But False!: Hundreds of "Facts" You Thought Were True, But Aren't. Sterling. ISBN 9781402737916.
• Green, Joey (2005). Contrary to Popular Belief: More than 250 False Facts Revealed. Broadway. ISBN 978-0767919920.
• Johnsen, Ferris (1994). The Encyclopedia of Popular Misconceptions: The Ultimate Debunker's Guide to Widely Accepted Fallacies. Carol Publishing Group. ISBN 9780806515564.
• Kruszelnicki, Karl (2006). Great Mythconceptions: The Science Behind the Myths. Andrews McMeel Publishing. ISBN 9780740753640. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Lloyd, John (2007). The Book of General Ignorance. Harmony Books. ISBN 9780307394910. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Tuleja, Tad (1999). Fabulous Fallacies: More Than 300 Popular Beliefs That Are Not True. Galahad Books. ISBN 978-1578660650.
• Varasdi, J. Allen (1996). Myth Information: More Than 590 Popular Misconceptions, Fallacies, and Misbeliefs Explained!. Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0345410498.