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Personal misconceptions you have about science and other things that you know are wrong, but can't seem to shake off.

For me, one of them is that whenever I think of antimatter, I automatically think of some kind of glowing, translucent blue material, even though I know that realistically, antimatter wouldn't necessarily look any different from normal matter.

I'm guessing this is from watching so much Star Trek where the warp core which contained antimatter was blue and glowing.

Whenever i think of neutronium, i imagine it as a liquidy silver material, like what the T1000 was made of in T2. I dont really know why, to be honest.

Also when i think of Antimatter my mind's eye sees it as this rock of craggy, jagged black stuff with glowing red 'cracks' like cooling magma. And again, I dont know why.

I've somehow convinced myself that the temperature must reach 0 Fahrenheit before snow can gather on the ground, though I have recently just lived through a week in Maine that should have refuted that little brainbug.

OmegaGuy wrote:I'm guessing this is from watching so much Star Trek where the warp core which contained antimatter was blue and glowing.

That warp core contains antimatter mixing with normal matter to produce energy, so the bluish glow could be attributed to them annihilating each other and making energy.

Moving to OT, because the topic is more about "Misconceptions I held.".

Not a misconception, but every time I think of "Chicago" I automatically also think of "Chicaka" and thus Ace Ventura 2.

I don't know if it's a brainbug or not, but I just can't get my head around the whole 'space is curved' thing.

^regarding the above, I think of curved space as being like a donut For the purposes of this thread, why not?

Antimatter is pure, darkest black to my mind. No idea why. I think when I was younger I got it confused with dark matter.

I imagine antimatter as black because of SMAC.

Whenever I hear the term "quantum leap", I imagine it as being very small.

When I think of gamma rays, I think of them as green.

tim31 wrote:^regarding the above, I think of curved space as being like a donut For the purposes of this thread, why not?

I also do this. I think it was a diagram in a text book that lead to it for me.

NomAnor15 wrote:Whenever I hear the term "quantum leap", I imagine it as being very small.

That's not so much a brain bug as using the term correctly in defiance of common usage.

NomAnor15 wrote:Whenever I hear the term "quantum leap", I imagine it as being very small.

Whenever I hear the term "quantum leap" I think of Dean Stockwell and Scott Bakula.

And for whatever reason, I always imagine lasers as being like they are in Star Wars, GI Joe, or any of a million other such examples. This is despite having owned a laser pointer and knowing better, the little visible bolts of energy is always what pops into my mind whenever I hear talk of laser weaponry.

EDIT: Typos and such eliminated.

Flagg wrote:I don't know if it's a brainbug or not, but I just can't get my head around the whole 'space is curved' thing.

I tend to envision it as stretching more than curving, per se. For example, imagine the "bowling ball on a rubber sheet" example. Now imagine it's been permanently deformed by the bowling ball -- if you flatten it out again, it might be flat, but it's still stretched out, kind of like a used condom that someone might want to flatten back into its original shape.

This is the first time I've heard the universe compared to a used condom.

Congratulations, Surlethe, you just ruined astronomy and physics for me.

I just discovered a brainbug that has wasted me countless hours of programming time: I always thought that Fortran can't evaluate x^y if y is a real number, i.e. x^2 is fine, but not x^3.65.

So all this while I've written x^y as exp(y*logx) in my code, which is an absolute bitch when I need to exponentiate complicated explressions.

I mixed up the amount of seconds in a minute and cents in a dollar once. It led to me trying to add up several 60's in an attempt to find how many cents were in $5. Naturally, I thought there were 100 seconds in a minute.

@Uber-Amoeba: HA-ha.

Antimatter is black to me too.