Facts That Learned Men Should Not Teach

1) Columbus thought the earth was flat

Admittedly the last time you thought in detail about Christopher Columbus sailing the Atlantic in 1492 you were probably about 10 years old. And so I cannot put too much blame on people for continuing to perpetuate this misconception. Columbus may not have gotten the shape of the world correct (he thought it was pear shaped) but he certainly knew it wasn’t flat.

If you don’t believe me lets just rewind to when you were first learning about his voyage. Your teachers told you when Columbus landed in the Caribbean he referred to the local population as ‘Indians’  due entirely to the fact that he thought he had landed in India. Not the brightest conclusion but certainly not a conclusion you could have reached if you thought the world was flat (Columbus had sailed west when he left Europe and would have thus ‘fallen of the edge of the world’ not reached India).

Columbus simply thought there must be a faster way to get to India by following a geodesic on his ‘pear shaped’ earth. And yet this remarkable insight into the geography of the world is completely obscured by non-learned men insisting he was 1500 years behind his time. 

2) An apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head

It makes a very warming story, a genius discovery galvanized by a falling apple. Unfortunately it is completely false. In Newton’s own words “the thought of gravity came to [him] while [he] sat in contemplative mood, and was occasioned by the fall of an apple”

3) Gravity acts on all objects with the same force

This one annoys me more than it should. Usually discussed in the context of Leonardo Da Vinci dropping cannon balls from the leaning tower of Piza (which also never happened). Teachers like to tell their pupils that “everything falls at the same speed, showing that gravity acts with equal force on all objects”. Nice, but wrong. These people have clearly never heard of Inertia, which in this case is an objects' resistance to external forces based on its mass. When a heavier object falls it indeed is being pulled by a large force of gravity, however the heavier object also has a higher resistance to changes in motion and so falls at the same rate as the lighter object.

Probably more will come to light when I start working at a high school in Fife during the fall term but for now this apperas to be all.