When electrical engineer William Beaty was working on the design of an electricity exhibit for the Boston Museum of Science, he decided to check out some elementary school science textbooks in search of good ways to communicate fundamental concepts on the subject.
Bad idea.
What he found was a morass of misconceptions, mistakes and misinformation in one text after another. Not one of the books, he found, even contained what he considered to be a valid definition of what electricity is, much less how it works. And he discovered something else: Even his own understanding of the subject, despite his years in the profession, was flawed; he was still the victim of deeply-help misconceptions that he had learned in grade school.
''The majority of my misconceptions had been specifically taught to me,'' he said. ''[They] were in my science textbooks long ago, and they were still in most modern textbooks.''
For a detailed look at misconceptions in physics and especially electricity, check out William's website here.
Found by Noel Cunningham
