The most common misconception that people have had and will still remain very much in the present world for the years to come is that of Women being unable to work. This is definitely not true. Women are definitely capable of earning their own bread and better and at times even running the family single-handedly.
But at times misconceptions can be hilarious and adorable too. I still remember that me and my group of friends always used to feel that a pregnant lady had a huge stomach because she ate a lot. Some of them even felt that she took in lot of air and released much less in comparison. Its funny when we think about it now as we realise how stupid we were back then.
Another big misconception is that of Danish pastries. Most of the people feel that Danish pastries come from Denmark but this is not true. Danish pastries were originated in Austria inspired from the Turkish Baklawa. Also they were named Danish because the Pastry chef who made the pastry was Danish himself.
Coming back to those funny misconceptions which kids generally have is that if they have a red coloured cape they would become super heroes or maybe if they wore their underwear over their pants. Little did we all know as kids that such supernatural heroes are a mere part of fiction and do not even exist in reality.
I can go on and on on the various misconceptions which we had has kids and which society has had since decades. But just to end it on a short and simple note. I believe that we should not have any misconceptions or myths in our mind and should always be open-minded and have a broader vision of understanding and seeing things.
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ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the biggest misconception is a preconception. Especially in the scientific field, scientists develop the preconception that certain parts of Science are "well-settled", and will not change significantly by any future development.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of quasicrystals, the discoverer of which was awarded the Nobel prize in 2011, this discoverer was asked to leave his post when he suggests that crystals that don't have a unit cell that repeats in 3D may exist.
He did find these crystals, and because of this discovery, the basic definition of a crystal, which was established over a century ago, had to be changed. This shows how scientists had developed preconceptions about crystals, and couldn't look at this discoverer's claims without a bias that provoked them to ask him to step down from his post.
Daniel Schechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology is the person who made this discovery back in the 1980s. It just shows how much time it takes for a controversial but correct theory to gain acceptance.
Since you have no new posts, I'm just posting another reply on this one.
ReplyDeleteOne cannot talk about misconceptions in an isolated sense. Its relationship to other related things has to be explored. I choose to explore one such relationship, namely, between misconceptions and facts.
Clearly, one is the antonym of the other. Similar to the relationship between God and the opposite of God, the relationship between misconceptions and facts is that one does not exist without the other.
We wouldn't know what facts are, if we didn't define misconceptions first (and this argument works the other way round too). Misconceptions have always led to facts.
It was to refute Aristotle's idea of motion requiring a constant application of force that Galileo investigated the true nature of motion, which eventually led to Newton's laws of motion. In particular, the first law states that an object has the tendency to remain in its state of motion, so if a body is moving, it doesn't require any force to continue moving.
In economics, successively accurate models of the economy are made only when misconceptions in previous models are discovered and rectified. In accounts, double entry bookkeeping was introduced only because of the misconception that single entry bookkeeping would be fault proof. If the previous line is false, don't blame me, because I was only guessing the reason for the introduction of double entry bookkeeping.
I'm short of more examples, but I think the idea is clear.
Misconception is a very important part of advancing understanding, because the latter can be done only when the former is recognised. If know what we don't know, then we know where to focus our research, but if we don't even know what we don't know, then no further progress can be made. It's the same with misconception and fact.