Science "FACTS" that are Widely Believed...but WRONG!

There are many so-called science facts we take for granted, but I can think of at least five widely believed facts that aren't true. These misconceptions are so ingrained in our psyche that you might not believe what I'm saying. You’ll probably want to Google them to double-check, and I encourage you to do so. Here are the facts I'm going to refute:

There's no gravity in space.

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

Bees shouldn't be able to fly according to physics.

Humans evolved from chimps.

The Big Bang explains the creation of the universe.

If you want to know why these facts are wrong, stay tuned, because that’s coming up right now.

1. There's No Gravity in Space

The most visible force on cosmic scales is gravity. It keeps our feet firmly planted on Earth and the Earth in a stable orbit around the sun. You've probably heard that there's no gravity in space, but that's just not true. Gravity is everywhere in space; it has infinite reach. This can be seen in Newton's law of universal gravitation, where the distance between objects can be as large as you can imagine, and gravity would still be present. It would be weak at very large distances from massive objects but never zero.

This means the sun has a non-zero gravitational effect everywhere in the universe, and so does the Earth. So do you. Again, this effect is extremely weak the further away you go, but it’s never zero. Close to massive objects like Earth, gravity is quite strong. For example, the force of gravity on the International Space Station, which is 250 miles (400 kilometres) away in space, is almost the same as on the surface of Earth.

So why are astronauts floating? You feel your weight on Earth because gravity pulls you down, and your feet exert a counteracting force upward. In space, the astronauts and the space station have mass, so Earth's gravity still acts on them. But because of their orbital motion, there is a force component going away from Earth, which is equal and opposite to the force of Earth's gravity. Gravity is still there, about 90 per cent of what it is on Earth's surface, but because there's no external contact force pushing or pulling on their bodies, they feel no weight. They are in free fall, like an untethered falling elevator.

2. Nothing Can Go Faster Than the Speed of Light

Another common misconception is that nothing can break the speed of light because physics says so. The truth is that physics never put in such a limit. You might say, "But Einstein's theory of relativity says so!" It doesn’t say that. We’re quite sure that the speed of light limit has been exceeded. What physics tells us is that any massless particle must move at the speed of light. Anything with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light because it takes an infinite amount of energy. So, you can only get a massive object infinitely close to the speed of light but never at the speed of light.

Most importantly, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, as this would break causality. However, space-time can expand faster than the speed of light. We believe this happened in the early universe during the Cosmic Inflation epoch. This helps explain many mysteries of our universe, like the homogeneity of the cosmic microwave background and the origin of large-scale structures.

3. Bees Shouldn't Be Able to Fly According to Physics

There’s a legend that a biologist and an engineer once concluded that bees shouldn't be able to fly according to the laws of aerodynamics. This story is more legend than fact, but it does have a kernel of truth. The problem can be traced back to 1934 when French zoologist and aeronautical engineer Antoine Magnan concluded that bees should not be able to fly based on their wing size and body mass. However, researchers at Caltech and the University of Nevada figured out in the early 2000s that bees don’t fly like birds. They flap their wings back and forth, not up and down, generating lift in both the forward and backward strokes. This rapid wing movement creates enough lift for bees to fly.

4. Humans Evolved from Chimps

Another common science fact that's wrong is the idea that humans evolved from chimpanzees. They did not. Modern chimps and humans are related, but neither evolved from the other. They share a common ancestor that lived between six and eight million years ago. This common ancestor diverged into two different species, likely due to environmental variation. Humans and chimps share 98.8 per cent of their DNA, making them our closest living relatives. However, the evolutionary path from the common ancestor to modern humans was not a straight line; there were many branches along the way.

5. The Big Bang Explains the Creation of the Universe

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Big Bang Theory is that it explains how the universe was created. The Big Bang Theory says nothing about how the universe came to be; it describes how we got the universe we see today from a much hotter and denser state near the beginning. It explains everything that happened after the beginning, not how the creation took place. The theory gives us an explanation of how protons and neutrons formed and later fused to form atoms, how the universe has grown, and how it evolved to its current state. However, it doesn’t explain the actual moment of creation or what came before.

These are just a few of the science facts that many people get wrong. Understanding these concepts correctly can give us a deeper appreciation of the universe and our place in it.