100 Hoaxes & Mistakes That Fooled Science

The Way Stuff (Doesn’t) Work

A look inside CERN at the Large Hadron Collider. CERN continues to perform experiments with neutrinos.

Myth #1

Neutrinos Are Faster than Light

According to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But for a brief moment, the world dared to hope otherwise.

Photons, or particles of light, travel through a vacuum at the speed of 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s). But if an object with actual mass were to approach the speed of light, the amount of energy necessary to accelerate it would exponentially increase to infinity—which many have long considered impossible.

In 2011, however, physicists at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Center for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland conducted an experiment with neutrinos that seemed to overturn this long-held knowledge. Neutrinos are tiny particles with very little mass that interact so weakly with other particles that they can pass straight through rock. The CERN experiment sent neutrinos from CERN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, more than 450 miles (725 km) away to Gran Sasso, Italy. The scientists recorded a speed 60 billionths of a second faster than the speed of light. These findings contradicted Einstein’s laws of physics, shocking the world.

Antonio Ereditato, a spokesman for the research team at CERN, announced: We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements, but we found nothing. Nevertheless, the results were too good to be true. Just days after the initial reports, CERN declared the findings false, blaming a faulty cable connection between a GPS and a computer.

So neutrinos aren’t faster than light—why did this make people so upset? Because Albert Einstein had famously declared that, if we could somehow find a way to travel faster than light, we could travel through time. So the faulty experiment briefly taunted scientists with the possibility of time travel. It also forced them to reconsider the most basic ideas about our universe.

The error may have been embarrassing to a few scientists, but good work at CERN still continues. In 2012, they discovered a particle that may prove to be the elusive and long-hunted Higgs boson—which scientists believe will explain several mysteries of physics.

Rough diamonds on a miner’s hand in South Africa.

Myth #2

Diamonds Come from Coal

Ask a few strangers on the street where diamonds come from, and they’ll likely respond: From coal. Intense pressure, they’ll say, turns the coal into shiny, hard, and valuable gems. You get to then revel in busting them, because they’re totally wrong.

The misconception may stem from the fact that both coal and diamonds are forms of carbon. While that’s true, most diamonds formed long before the plants that later decomposed and formed coal even appeared on Earth.

To find the origin of most natural diamonds, you have to go back billions of years, to when Earth first formed. At the time, carbon was most likely trapped inside the planet’s mantle, 100 miles (160 km) below the surface. Over time, intense pressure from the rocks above the mantle, plus temperatures reaching 2,000°F (1,000°F), made some of the trapped carbon crystallize into diamonds. The process for diamond production occurs not everywhere in the mantle, but usually beneath Earth’s relatively stable continental plates.

Some time in the past, powerful volcanic eruptions deep underground brought the diamonds to Earth’s surface. The stones sat in the magma, which cooled around them and created igneous rocks called kimberlites. While these rocks contain other minerals, it’s the diamonds within them that mining companies seek.

Although most of the world’s diamonds are found in kimberlites, tiny numbers form in other ways. Some small diamonds have been found in subduction zones, the areas where one of Earth’s tectonic plates moves beneath another. Coal could be a source of the carbon involved but other minerals could be, too. The impact of asteroids and meteorites on Earth can also create diamonds. One large deposit in Russia is the result of an asteroid collision some 35 million years ago. The gems, though, are tiny and aren’t the quality of diamonds produced deep within Earth billions of years ago.

Robert Boyle

Myth #3

Alchemy Creates Gold

Before the 19th century, alchemy was a respected pursuit. Using natural elements, alchemists attempted to transmute base metals, such as lead, into noble metals, such as gold. But the mythical substance that would bring about this change—the elixir of life or philosopher’s stone, as it was called—remained elusive. Today, the science of alchemy is ridiculed by mainstream and modern scientists.

Alchemists experimented with natural minerals, including sulfur, pyrite, lead, graphite, and more. Although their single-minded obsession with gold didn’t pay off, they did make valid scientific contributions to many fields. Their work improved metalworking, gunpowder, inks and dyes, and medicines. They perfected distillation, the process of purifying a liquid through heating and cooling, and they discovered mineral acids and alkalies, as well as superior distilled spirits. Alchemists inspired Robert Boyle, one of the fathers of modern chemistry, who defined chemical elements (including oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon) based on alchemy’s description of the four elements (earth, wind, fire, and water). And Isaac Newton built on the alchemist theory that all matter contains distinct elements when he discovered that white light contains many colors of the rainbow when shone through a prism. By today’s standards, alchemy is a pointless endeavor, but during the medieval and Renaissance periods, it provided many serious scientists with nascent ideas that led to later breakthroughs.

Another field to benefit from the early science is chemistry, which evolved from alchemy in both name and practice. Alchemists studied metals and natural minerals in the same way that chemists do today. The scientific method has improved and we now know more about the properties of metals. But alchemy did perform a miracle—transforming magic into practical science.

Myth #4

Heavy Objects Fall Faster

One of the most common misconceptions about physics is that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. At first think, it seems to make sense: Gravity surely pulls harder on more massive objects, so they should accelerate faster than lighter objects. Drop a feather and a rubber ball, and the rubber ball will reach the ground first. Case closed, right?

Not so fast. As Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton, and other physicists of the Scientific Revolution discovered, the rate of acceleration caused by gravity is independent of an object’s mass.

That heavier objects fall faster goes back to Aristotelian physics. The classical philosopher believed that it was the nature of all earthly objects to move toward the center of the universe (which back then was considered the center of our planet). Of the four common elements that scientists once believed the world was made of (earth, water, wind, and fire), earth was the heaviest. The more earth an object contained, the heavier it was and the more it would be enticed toward the center of our planet.

Aristotle had his detractors. The Roman philosopher Lucretius wasn’t convinced, arguing that weight should have no effect on a falling object’s acceleration. The Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin argued the same. It was Galileo, however, who formalized in his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences that all falling objects increase in speed at a rate of the square of the elapsed time. In other words, the velocity of two falling objects—in a vacuum—increases at a known multiple of itself regardless of how heavy the objects are.

Close to Earth’s surface, that multiple is a known value of approximately 9.8 meters per second, per second. If you were to drop two objects in a vacuum, no matter how heavy they were, after one second they would be moving at a velocity of approximately 9.8 m/s, or about 22 miles per hour. After another second they would be moving at the square of that value: about 96 m/s or 215 miles per hour.

So why did the feather accelerate more slowly than the rubber ball in our experiment? Wind resistance. Galileo’s theory requires that the objects fall in a vacuum, but in the everyday world, the air around us exerts a force on falling objects known as drag. Drag slows the acceleration of falling bodies, causing those with a greater surface area to fall more slowly—a notion of comfort to skydivers!

Myth #5

A Pinch of Salt Makes Water Boil Faster

Waiting on the water for your pasta to boil? Cooking magazines and amateur chefs often recommend a simple trick: Throw in a dash of salt to shorten the wait. But, even though Grandma swears by that pinch of salt in her famous spaghetti, this trick is not all it’s cooked up to be.

In fact, throwing in a bit of salt may have the opposite effect. Salt actually raises water’s boiling point—the temperature at which a liquid begins to boil—by a tiny amount, meaning that the salted water will come to a boil more slowly than if it were left unsalted.

But even this change is so slight that it might not affect what time dinner hits the table. The boiling point of water is 212°F (100°C). If you add 4 teaspoons of salt to a gallon (3.7 L) of water, the boiling point will rise to 212.7°F (100.4°C)—which is barely enough to make a difference in meal time.

So how did this myth find its way into the tried-and-true mantras of culinary test kitchens? Once the water’s boiling point has been elevated by salt, the water boils at a higher temperature—which can, indeed, cut down a little on cooking time.

Another benefit to this old wives’ tale? Adding salt to water after it is already boiling will provide flavor. Pasta absorbs the salty water, leading to a tastier dish.

Myth #6

The Three States of Matter

You likely learned in school that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Turns out it’s not quite so simple as your textbooks made it seem.

You deal with the three states of matter every day. Ever enjoyed homemade iced tea? You pour liquid water into a teapot, jump when you hear gaseous water screaming out of the spout, and then add solid water—ice—to your tea after you have steeped it sufficiently. But despite what you read in your middle-school science textbooks, there are more than three states of matter.

At the very least, those texts did you a disservice by leaving out plasma. Not to be confused with the biological liquid in which blood cells are suspended, plasmas are a lot like gases in that they exist at a higher temperature than the other states and are amorphous and expand to fill their containers. However, plasmas are very unlike gases in that the substance is so hot that electrons that once belonged to individual atoms in a