“Facts” that are not quite correct: 1) There is no gravity in space 2) Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. 3) Bees shouldn’t be able to fly according to physics. I will explain this using Physics 4) Humans evolved from chimps, and 5) The Big Bang explains the creation of the universe.
You’ve probably been told that there is no gravity in space. That’s not true. Gravity is everywhere in space. It has infinite reach. The force of gravity on the international space station, which is 400km away in space, is almost the same as on the surface of the earth. They feel no weight because they are in freefall. The effects of gravity travel at the speed of light, that is, the speed of photons, so our gravity extends out to everything that we can see.
#speedoflight
#bees
Another common misconception is that nothing can break the speed of light because physics said so. Physics never put in such a limit. You might say, but Einstein’s law of relativity says so! It doesn’t actually say that. What physics tells us is that a massive particle cannot be accelerated to the speed of light, because it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it to the speed of light. Most importantly, due to causality, information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. So the speed of light can be exceeded, as long as information does not exceed it. Space can expand faster than c, and there is something called the group velocity of light that can travel faster than c.
In 1934 the French zoologist and aeronautical engineer, Antoine Magnan, came to the conclusion that Bees should not be able to fly according to the laws of aerodynamics. But there was a mistaken assumption in Magnan’s original calculations that the wings of a bee work in a similar way as the wings of a bird.
Birds flap their wings up and down. But the thrust or lift that enables the birds to fly is only generated during the downstroke. No lift is generated in the upward stroke. Bees don’t fly like this. Bees flap their wings back and forth, not up and down. And lift is generated in both the forward and backward stroke. So the rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, combined with a very fast wing beat creates more than enough lift for bees to fly.
Another common science fact that’s wrong is the idea that humans evolved from chimpanzees. They did not. They are cousins because they share a common ancestor, that lived between 6 and 8 million years ago. This common ancestor, over time, diverged into two different species probably due to, among other factors, environmental variation that suited different evolutionary paths in different geographic locations. How do we know? The strongest evidence is inside us, in our DNA. Chimps and humans share 98.8% of their DNA. There was not a smooth line from the common ancestor leading directly to humans on one branch and chimps on the other. The fossil record shows that there were many other branches in between on the 8 million or so year journey to modern humans. And the same is likely true for modern chimps.
Evolution is not controversial among scientists. It’s the cornerstone of modern biology. It is widely observable in laboratory and natural populations as they change over time.
The best theory we have on the evolution of the universe is the Big Bang theory. But it does not explain how the universe was created or where it came from. What the theory describes is how we got the universe we see today from a much hotter and denser universe near the beginning. It describes everything that happened after the beginning, not at the beginning nor before the beginning. It explains everything that happened after the moment of creation, not how that creation took place.
