We trust our teachers to give us the right information, so that we are equipped to thrive in our ever changing world. And most of the time that trust is deserved. However, there are some fallacies so ingrained in our culture that even our teachers have been fooled. Here are five lies thousands of kids are still being taught in school.
5. King Tut had the only Tomb untouched by robbers.
There's only a handful pf Ancient Egyptians a modern Westerner has likely heard of. Of the, the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, whom we've nicknamed Tut, is perhaps the best known. He was a child king, ruling from approximately the ages of 9 until 19, when he died of natural causes.
King Tutankhamun accomplished little, as was common with child kings. He would have been utterly forgotten by mainstream history if not for one thing: his Tomb.
Many of us learned in school that when his tomb was discovered, it had been untouched, allowing historians to closely study him. Most Royal Egyptian tombs were robbed centuries ago. When Tut's was found in 1922, however, it offered up wondrous treasures, including a coffin, made of over 200 pounds of solid gold. That doesn't mean, however, his tomb wasn't robbed. It was probably broken into at least once before the archaeologists got there, with many small, portable items from the first chamber stolen. However, the thieves never got further into the tomb.
Tut is famous because his tomb wasn't completely ransacked, as is the case with most, but not all, tombs. In fact, there are a few completely untouched Royal Tombs, including that of Psusennes I. Psusennes lived during the less prosperous time of Egypt's history, so his goods are somewhat less impressive than Tut's. For example, his coffin is merely solid silver, rather than gold. Worse for Psusennes, however, is the fact that he was discovered in 1940, at the time Westerner's were far too busy paying attention to World War II to register the importance of the discovery.
4. Christopher Columbus wanted to prove that World was Round.
When Christopher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic in 1942, he had several reasons. However, proving the world was round was absolutely not one of them. This is because every educated person in the Europe already knew the world was round. The ancient Greeks had accurately calculated the circumference of the planet as early as 240 B.C.
Now some of the information has gotten lost over the centuries. 15th century Europeans thought the earth was only half the size it actually is, and Columbus was actually even more wrong. He thought the size of the Earth was only about half of what other Europeans thought it was. that's why Columbus was confused when he hadn't found Asia, while still siting in the middle of the Atlantic in danger of starving to death.
Columbus made four trips to the New World, and it's unclear whether he ever truly had said that he had discovered a new continent. Many of writings continue to insist that he landed on an island off the coast of Asia.
3. The Great Wall of China can be seen from the Space.
The Great Wall of China is one of the great engineering feats of the world. Covering thousands of miles, it's not unsurprising that people would consider it to be visible from space.
The problem is , while it's length is thousand of miles, it's width is only 30 feet at it's widest point. You wouldn't expect to see a human hair from across your house, even if it was a really long hair, right? The hair is just too thin to be seen at any great distance, and the same is true of the Great Wall. It's just too narrow.
Weirdly, the rumor of wall being visible from space was spread centuries before humans were even remotely close to leaving Earth's atmosphere. William Stukeley claimed it first in 1754, and in 1895, Henry Norman stated that The Great Wall enjoys the reputation of being the only work of human hands on the globe visible from the moon, which is a claim that is still repeated by teachers.
2. Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order known as Emancipation Proclamation, which freed about 3 million slaves and left another 1 million in chains.
The Proclamation was a product of the Civil War, freeing slaves held in the rebelling southern states. This theoretically robbed the Confederacy of free labor, which was being used for a number of wartime activities, although off course, in practice, the rebels simply ignored the order. Perhaps more importantly it meant Northerners were no longer to return escaped slaves to the South, as was previously the law. but 4 slave states chose to remain with the North: Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri, and they were exempt from the Proclamation. It remained perfectly legal to own slaves in those states until the passing of the 13th Amendment, which finally outlawed slavery throughout the entire United States in 1865.
1. Nicolaus Copernicus created an accurate model of the Universe.
While educated people did not think the world was flat, in the 16th century, they did believe the heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth instead of the Sun. Then came the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, who put the Sun in the middle of the universe, and we've been giving him credit ever since for getting it supposedly right.
In fact, Copernicus system i nearly as wrong as the Earth-centric system it replaced. The Sun isn't in the middle of the universe, merely our Solar System. Copernicus had the stars revolve around the sun along with everything else. His planetary orbits were circular, rather than elliptical. He also made plentiful uses of epicycles, which are orbits within orbits. When you map planetary patterns in the sky, they clearly aren't on a circular orbit. They speed up, slow down, and sometimes progress backward. Adding epicycles created patterns that better lined up with what astronomers were observing, although you often had to pile multiple epicycles onto the same orbit to even come close. So, really Copernicus' model of the Solar system suggested the planets corkscrewed around the Sun and was totally inaccurate.
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