A kids view of science. Your view in fact.

[Karza]

Not exactly a view of science, but there was a time when I thought there were enormous walls between all countries, so that the only way to travel from one country to another was by ship or airplane. This thing passed when I passed a border in a car for the first time (I think I was 6 years old). Even then it took a few hours to wrap my mind around the idea that I was in a different country, even though I hadn't flown over an enormous wall (or circumvented it by sea) .

Clouds were also quite baffling for a time. First I wondered why they don't fall down, and when I saw them from an airplane I asked if I could go outside to play on the clouds (after all, they were clearly solid yet soft material, sort of like snow).

At some point I reasoned that since a car's battery recharges when driving, it should be a trivial task to simply make a bigger battery for the car to run with, and thus get rid of the combustion engine and all of its woes. After all, the battery recharges when you drive, so you don't need gasoline at all! I pondered long and hard why no one had come up with this blindingly obvious thing .

[Karza]

Ghetto edit: An addition to the clouds-like-snow thing: Going out of the airplane to play in the clouds should've been a trivial matter, since looking out the window I could clearly see that we weren't moving fast at all, so I could just catch up with the plane later by running on the clouds. Simple, right?

[Dakarne]

When I was 6-7 I once asked if there was a ring around Uranus (the planet, I was addicted to space-travel at the time) and my pronounciation was muddled a bit by my accent... needless to say that there were many laughs that day.

Another thing I had a slight problem with was exactly how plants photosynthesised, and to be honest, I only really ever half got that.

[Lusankya]

I managed to convince my sister that the reason pigeons squeaked when they took off was because they were too fat and they were at the limit of their wings capacity. Then my entire family convinced her until she did biology in year 10 that there was something wrong with her because she couldn't roll her tongue into a circle.

Of course, I also managed to beat her at chess in 3 moves ten times in a row, and my cousin and I once got her to eat mud cakes, so I wouldn't call it that much of an achievement.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I understand the cloud thing, i think little kids just dont grasp what a cloud IS till they're older.

I recall, the first time i saw a plane i was terrified, as it was headed right for a cloud and was gonna 'hit' and 'crash'. When it didnt...i remember instantly concluding that it had to be a huge hole up in the sky somewhere made by the plane. I assumed, you see, that clouds were solid constructs like mountains or walls, built in the sky for some reason i wasnt old enough to understand. 100% true. I was really young, cant remember exactly when but i recall looking up at my grandma and since she's 4'10 that means i was little. I think about three or four, maybe.

And as a young boy, 12 or so, i actually for quite a while--swear to God--believed that someday the events of Star Wars would be possible. The concepts of FTL, hypermatter and such didnt strike me until much later. At the time, having learned about space shuttles and real lasers and such, i fully expected to have my own spaceship like Han Solo by the time i was 'an adult', which from my perspective then was about 17-18.

[Duckie]

I was also rather convinced of Scientific Progress by Decade. That is, I expected all scientific advancement occurs instanteneously in between New Year's Eve and the new Decade.

Which led to a bit of confusion as to why nothing was new on Jan 1, 2000, compared to Dec 31, 1999. Erm, I was 9, give me a break.

[aerius]

Thought I could have perpetual energy using a battery and a transformer. Transformer can step up the voltage and recharge the battery while having power left over to power stuff.

Didn't know the concepts of voltage, current, power loss, and the fact that transformers don't work on DC.

[Dooey Jo]

Hmm... I can't really think of anything. Then again, I was pretty young back then so it's hard to remember. I'm fairly certain that I at an early age deduced that clouds cannot be solid objects (although a certain Winnie the Poo episode tried to convince me otherwise) because they sometimes touch the mountains, which causes fog (on the mountains), thus clouds must be some sort of fog. They also don't look solid at all (yeah I studied clouds pretty closely when I was a kid. So?).

When I started 4th grade I reasoned my way to the conclusion that I could get extra sleeping time by not saying nightly prayers. The reasoning was like this:
If I don't pray every night I can sleep longer. If god does not exist, it's not going to matter if I pray, and if he does exist, why would he give a damn wether I pray to him every day or not.
It's like Pascal's wager, only different!

But the things I read most when I learned to read was scientific books (mostly about dinosaurs. I was quite excited when Jurassic Park came, when I was seven), and before then I watched cartoons about the human body and various sci-fi movies, like Star Wars and Ghostbusters. But maybe one silly thing I believed back then was that both SW and GB was, or at least could be, real. So I dedicated a year or so trying to learn the ways of the Force, and built ghost traps and stuff.

Oh yeah, I also had a fairly good grasp on how atomic bombs work, when I was eight. I'm sure I weirded out a teacher or two by drawing strange schematics in stead of numbers in my math books

[The Silence and I]

I had a real tough time grasping the idea that perpetual motion with a positive net gain is impossible; not aware that it took effort to turn a generator shaft (I knew there were magnets and coils inside, but I had no idea spinning magnets inside a coil can take effort) I simply couldn't understand why one couldn't hook up a number of car alternators to an electric motor and run a car that way.

I have also yet to see a diagram that spells out to me why permanent magnets cannot be set up in a manner that will continously spin a shaft. I'm still waiting for a physics class to tell me the answer to that one.

[CaptJodan]

Up until 5th grade, I always thought kissing was what sex was. I was sheltered from such things, though, and sex ed was my first experience with what sex was, and naturally it wasn't much of an experience (this is what you do, it's purely for getting children, and there is no such thing as condoms or fun in sex.)

I never had problems with planes. Was practically raised in them, as my father flew Cessna's on his off time, and would take me along. Any plane I'd see in the sky I'd point to and go YA until someone noticed, otherwise I'd be mad (this was apparently before I could talk). Always loved them.

But I was one of those that was convinced that the world was moving far too slowly, and that when I grew up, I'd build the Enterprise. It was so simple, after all. In fact, I'd probably be able to do it in my back yard. The old people were just wasting so much time on stupid things, why can't we just build starships?

Other things. If God forgives you for sins like cursing, then why can't I curse and ask forgiveness later? Apparently it doesn't work like that and that little nugget remained until college, where I didn't curse and felt deeply guilty when it slipped out. (Middle school and highschool was bad like that. Darnit and crap didn't cut it sometimes) I was even afraid to say Hellcat when refering to the fighter plane cause it had the word Hell in it.

That's all I can remember at the moment.

[wolveraptor]

That reminds me: I once questioned my father at a young age on how kissing exchanged the necessary genetic information to produce a baby. I understood the development of the fetus on a basic level, but I never understood conception. Naturally, he waved it aside.

I regret to inform you all that I learned how sex worked from Garrison Keiler (sp?) on NPR. "Tab A into Slot B..." as I recall. That was when it all fit together.

[Zero]

Tab A into Slot B has always seemed completely natural to me.. I can't remember a moment when it didn't seem apparent to me... that brings horrifying thoughts. Maybe I was witness to my parents having sex before I had the ability to really form memories... what else makes sense? Ugh...

[wolveraptor]

But how did you know slot B existed? I had never seen a female vagina at the tender age of 9.

[CaptJodan]

Where I actually learned the real meaning of sex was more from a radio show on Real Radio 104.1. I don't remember what it was called, but it was on around 9pm, and I usually tucked under my covers and turned the radio down real low so I could hear what weird thing they were talking about each night. I remember the first was about masterbation, and it got more invovled from there. I found it all quite fascinating from a biological perspective, as well as social. That was just before my own hormoes hit so I was still in the learning process.

[Ender]

I didn't know how they prevented people on the west coast from cheating at the lottery and why those people let bad things happen. After all, for them the 9 o'clock news came on at 6 o'clock, that gave them 3 whole hours to buy tickets or warn people.

I was 6 ok?

[CelesKnight]

When I was very young, I simply assumed that all cars were made by the same company. As I grew older, I thought that they all *should* all be made by the same company. Then I learned economics.

For a long time, I assumed that in an earthquake, the ground actually ripped open leaving a trench to the center of the Earth. Moreover, I thought that that was all that happened in an earthquake (i.e. I didn't know about the shaking).

I kept several stupid idea until fairly late in life (high school or so) because they were told to me by people I thought we experts. For instance, I once asked my second grade teacher if it was possible to make water. She said no. So it wasn't until high school that I grasped that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water.


This next one is kinda silly: I had a hard time grasping the paradox part of the Twin Paradox. Since I grew up watching a lot of time travel shows or reading SciFi books with time dialation it never occured to me people ever though that time was an absolute.

[Adrian Laguna]

I had never seen a female vagina at the tender age of 9.

I distinctly rember once seeing my sister naked (my mother was cleaning an infection in my sister's genitals) when I was a young kid and noticing that there where two holes. I wondered why would there be another hole besides the urinary tract. Don't really rember asking about it, so I either thought it wasn't that important and would eventually know the answer or dismissed it as my eyes playing tricks on me.

Later on, in a museum, my father found a video of the kind they show in Health Class. It had a rather clear diagram which explained the prossess of reproduction. Until then my parents had told me that making babies involved two adults getting toguether and agreeing to have a baby. There was a big 'special' hug and a seed went from the father to the mother where it eventually developed into a baby. I knew there was a part being ommited, but never really bothered to find out what it was.

[Pick]

When I was younger, I couldn't figure out how the guy would make sure that he was injecting sperm and not peeing.

It would have been an easy answer, but no-one would tell me; they'd just say something ambiguous and useless.

[wilfulton]

I used to think the baby came out of the mother's belly button. Then again, I was cut out.

I was about ten before I figured out how the reproductive system works.

Something else that always mystified me as a kid, why is dad so lazy?

New word: WORK!!!

I was 20 before I had that one down.

[drachefly]

I remember asking why gravity worked, being told we don't (it just IS), and writing a story for school based on the supposition that it was caused by the Earth's spinning.
To summarize:

The earth stopped spinning one day, and we were floating. Quickly, the governments of the world rectified the problem by firing a large number of rockets (but attaching them to the ground and aiming them all west). As the Earth resumed spinning, gravity was restored.

I knew at the time that spinning was not a plausible explanation for gravity, but the other massive scientific issues with this story were not clear to me.

[Peregrin Toker]

When I was younger, I couldn't figure out how the guy would make sure that he was injecting sperm and not peeing.

I vaguely recall having a similar misconception.