The giant fakes of history
When science got it wrong
Tricks of the mind and eye
The media's wildest fabrications
Spotting the fake in the digital age
YOUR GOAL
Master of The great crumble and how falsehoods fall apart
007skaty Geocentric Model
We don't stand still at the center of it all (oh no we don't!) / We spin around the sun as the old illusions fall (yeah they fall!)
007skaty People believed rotting meat created maggots and sweaty shirts with wheat made mice, until Pasteur proved broth needs airborne dust to spoil.
007skaty The collapse of the ghostly phlogiston falsehood in the 1770s launched modern chemistry.
Mice recipe: A popular 17th-century scientific recipe claimed you could spontaneously generate mice by mixing sweaty underwear with wheat husks.
The tendency to search for, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs. In 1904, physicist Robert Wood exposed this error by secretly removing the prism during an N-ray experiment.
Which philosopher first coherently synthesized the theory of spontaneous generation?
What unique shape of glass flask did Louis Pasteur design to disprove spontaneous generation in 1859?
Which scientist isolated the cholera bacterium in 1883, providing definitive proof for germ theory?
Which astronomical observation by Galileo in 1610 directly disproved the Ptolemaic geocentric model?