Common Sense Often Wrong

Something I’ve learned in my travels and reading is that while common sense can be helpful, sometimes it has been shown wrong by modern science.

​Objects fall down.

The Earth is spherical and objects do not fall down. Rather, they fall towards the Earth even when they are on its underside.

If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

At least ninety percent of the matter making up galaxies is invisible, known only from its gravitational effects.

Solid matter is full.

Solid matter is mostly empty space. Atoms are made of incredibly tiny nuclei surrounded by vast clouds of electrons with nothing in between.

Empty space is empty.

Empty space is full of matter. Virtual particles pop in and out of existence in accordance with quantum uncertainty principles. This is how forces are mediated and quantum tunneling is made possible.

My time is your time.

Time runs at different rates for different objects. Objects travelling near the speed of light barely experience time at all.

Everything has a defined position.

Waves are particles. Particles are waves. An individual electron can pass through two slits at once and interfere with itself in order to hit a detection screen where a particle moving in a straight line could not reach.

Eating fat makes you fat.

Eating fat does not make you fat. Eating more calories than you use makes you fat, whether those calories are from fat, oil, protein, sugar, starch, or alcohol. The human body is perfectly capable of taking unused energy in any form and storing it as fat molecules.

A one-degree increase in temperature over the course of a century can’t hurt us.

Just because the ecosystem can survive swings of thirty degrees or more from day to night or from summer to winter, it does not mean that a rise of one degree in the global average is not a problem. Increased temperature over many years has a cumulative effect and it is not so much the temperature that is the problem so much as the total amount of heat energy in the system. This energy can then turn into other forms, causing higher wind speeds, moving a larger volume of moisture around to cause increased rainfall, or melting the icecaps and causing the oceans to rise. The more energy that goes into breaking the hydrogen bonds in the ice and turning it into a liquid, the less that can go into raising the temperature of the air.

Just because something makes sense, doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because something doesn’t make sense, doesn’t mean it’s false. Common sense is not always right.

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