Our Past Misconceptions/Misunderstandings About Science/Math

[JacobEvans]

I'm very interested in learning about what topics/ideas/subjects in science and math students have the most difficulty comprehending. ( I really believe that what fuels many people to subscribe to the fallacious ideas of groups like Creationists, religious fundamentalists, Flat Earthers, etc is a simple misunderstanding of scientific explanation for things, as evidenced by the scientific illiteracy displayed by most adherents to those groups.)


So what were some things that you found to be difficult to grasp, and what major misconceptions did you subscribe to/form yourself?


Evolution was extremely difficult for me, and even today I still need to read over new material on the subject more than I would something on another biology topic. A simple question I always asked my biology teacher will sum up my most major flaw in understanding on the subject "How do animals know how to evolve/adapt, and why can't I evolve gills if I just lived in water my whole life" ( I am ashamed of my earlier self :cry: )

In physics, "All reactions have an equal and opposite reaction" led me to wonder how anything could move if that were true in the way I thought it meant. (This one I find understandable I didn't get, the wording is terribly confusing for someone not familiar with the Law already.)

 

[Womble]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Secondary-Science-Childrens/dp/0415097657/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254591614&sr=1-1

THat's about childrens misconceptions about science. It might help in terms of understanding why people don't get things.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I thought protons, neutrons, and electrons were literally little colored balls, and that atoms literally held together with really little sticks.

 

[Zetetic]

I had a badass 5th grade science teacher. He went into the old model of atoms and explained the electron cloud, ect. Then he blew up a small chemical bomb on the side of a hill near the school building, I don't remember why.

I think that the one thing that I didn't totally understand until middle to late high school that would have really helped me is why the scientific method works, and how scientists developed their theories and overall what the philosophy behind scientific inquiry is.

 

[JacobEvans]

I thought protons, neutrons, and electrons were literally little colored balls, and that atoms literally held together with really little sticks.

Oh dear lord I'm not the only one! :lol:

 

[xman]

When math went beyond algebra I was stuck. Before that I was straight A's.
I never had a problem with science in school or Shakespeare. I loved it! I'm just odd that way.

 

[Gunboat Diplomat]

It wasn't until late high school that I figured out what a mathematical equation is despite getting very good grades in math.

I was listening to my friend who was very smart and my senior complain about his chemistry partner. He asked her about some equation and she pointed to some expression in her notes. He told her that that wasn't an equation and she argued that it was. This went back and forth for a while before he finally said "how can it be an equation, it doesn't even have an equal sign in it!" She looked at him, then at her notes and then quickly wrote an equal sign beside the expression. He did a facepalm before complaining that that still wasn't an equation...

That's when it dawned on me that an equation is an expression of equality!

The only reason why I did so well in math classes was because I'm exceptionally good at following instructions. However, at no point before then did I really understand what I was doing, mathematically...

 

[nasher168]

It took me ages to work out natural selection. I thought that the "better" genes were just passed on better that other ones, without really seeing the idea of competition and survival of the fittest.

 

[JacobEvans]

This is actually proving rather fruitful.

 

[Marcus]

Most people have a very limited grasp of the basic ideas of probability. This means that we can tax the mathematically inept through lotteries whose expected payout is less than half the amount of a roulette table. It also means that people don't understand the relevance of the evidence from medical studies, and this lack of understanding fuels much of the anti-vax and alt med idiocy.

 

[The Apathetic Despot]

Most people have a very limited grasp of the basic ideas of probability. This means that we can tax the mathematically inept through lotteries whose expected payout is less than half the amount of a roulette table. It also means that people don't understand the relevance of the evidence from medical studies, and this lack of understanding fuels much of the anti-vax and alt med idiocy.

Mathematics generally is very poorly understood by the general public, in my opinion. Most people have at least some idea of what a scientist does, often a skewed and inaccurate idea but still an idea, but they really have no idea what mathematicians do. I think the biggest flaw in math education below the university level is that it's taught as a set of computational techniques and formulas to memorize rather than a methodology and a way of thinking. It leads to the misconception that math is about applying the right formula and turning the crank, and that just isn't true.

 

[Marcus]

Mathematics generally is very poorly understood by the general public, in my opinion. Most people have at least some idea of what a scientist does, often a skewed and inaccurate idea but still an idea, but they really have no idea what mathematicians do.

Quite true. When I explain to people that I had to do some mathematics research to get my PhD, they are frequently surprised that there is such a thing as mathematics research.

 

[Homunclus]

I thought protons, neutrons, and electrons were literally little colored balls, and that atoms literally held together with really little sticks.

I used to think the human heart was literary shaped like this:

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

As I look trough out my personal experience, the only thing with a slight importance that I have learned up until the end of highschool was probably philosophy, and even that as I look back was really poor. For everything else from what I have learned in highschool from math to any particular science class, as I look back I realise that I haven't really learned any science or math for that matter until I get to colledge.
Most people are not educated in any real science or math and see it as a passive, prescriptive, subjective, qualitative and loosly defined, people think that science is only the simple (and generally what I would describe as not usefull) statments like the earth goes arround the sun or that a^2+b^2=c^2 the pitagoras theorem is like that because someone said so or because some one arrived at that conclusion by experiment.
But that couldn't be further away from the truth, it is like it is something from a completly different world. Many people don't understand how some people find math or science extremely amazing instead of boring and dull, but the fact is you need a good understanding of it to be able to see the beauty of it, and that takes a long and hard work. I can talk for a very long time about it, but fact is I don't believe you would really know it until you actually go trough the actual education.
It is extreme priviledge to actually know what science and math has to say about the world and understand the beauty of it, most of the people will could never imagin such a thing.

 

[kf00kaha]

About the understanding of mathematics, I think the most common problem is that people fail to grasp some simple stuff, perhaps because they missed the class, or the teacher failed to explain in a comprehensible way. This make them unable to grasp other things further on, and the math class become really hard and therefore boring. This happened to my younger brother and his math grades literally plummeted until our dad sat down with him and explained some basic concepts for him. Then his grades were on the right track again.

For myself I had a crappy math teacher in high school (or at least the corresponding school in Sweden) and the whole class was unable to explain what a tangent or a derivative of a function was, half a term after we should have. We got him replaced though and the other teacher (a physics lecturer at the local university actually) was amazing! He is one of the persons I have the most to thank for my way of thinking regarding mathematics and science.

 

[Durakken]

The only 2 misconceptions I had that I can think of that I simply didn't make the connection, rather than something i just didn't know, are...

1. I thought all things in the universe that was outside of the things orbiting the stars didn't move... stars don't move, galaxies don't move, local clusters don't move, etc... That was so wrong...and when i asked a teacher about it once I learned that they all do move, the teacher said they don't v.v

2. I didn't know that the reason why 2x2 was equal to 4 was because it was 2 groups of 2. I thought it was just something people made up. I had to figure this out on my own...