;colony/science / Myth-Busting
⚖ Myth-Busting
Myth-Busting
Claims everyone repeats — tested in your browser, with a verdict and the real science written twice.
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Try it now · Plate 53
Is glass a slow-flowing liquid?
Old panes are thick at the bottom by manufacture, not by flow.
PLATE 53 · GLASS IS NOT A LIQUID
Show
verdict BUSTED
You've heard that old cathedral windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is a
super-slow liquid that has oozed downward over centuries. It's a great story and
completely wrong. Glass is a solid — its molecules are locked in place, just in a
jumble instead of a neat crystal grid. The old panes are thicker at the bottom because
glassmakers couldn't make them perfectly even, and they sensibly installed the
thick edge at the bottom. Brand-new glass would sag in… roughly never.
Every question
Myth-Busting, answered twice.
Plate 53Open → Is glass a slow-flowing liquid? The famous 'fact' that old cathedral windows are thicker at the bottom because glass slowly flows downward — repeated everywhere, and flatly untrue. Plate 54Open → Can a penny dropped from a skyscraper kill you? A staple of movies and playground lore: a coin flicked off the Empire State Building hits the street like a bullet. Air resistance has other ideas. Plate 55Open → Is your blood blue inside your body? Look at the veins in your wrist — they're blue. So surely the blood inside is blue until it meets the air? It's one of the most common myths about the body, and it's false. Plate 93Open → Does lightning never strike the same place twice? The proverb is so common it gets used to mean "rare misfortune won't recur". As physics, it is exactly backwards: lightning loves a repeat. Plate 94Open → Is the five-second rule real? Drop a biscuit, grab it inside five seconds, eat it guilt-free. It is the most cheerfully ignored rule in any kitchen — and the clock has almost nothing to do with it. Plate 95Open → Can you see the Great Wall of China from space? It is repeated in textbooks and tour guides alike: the Great Wall is the only human structure visible from space, or even from the Moon. The eye says otherwise. Plate 151Open → Does sugar make kids hyper? Every parent has watched a birthday party melt into chaos and blamed the cake. It feels obvious. It is also one of the most thoroughly tested ideas in nutrition, and it does not hold up. Plate 152Open → Does cracking your knuckles cause arthritis? Pull on a finger, hear the pop, and somewhere an adult winces and warns you that you are giving yourself arthritis. The pop is real. The warning is not. Plate 153Open → Does shaving make hair grow back thicker? Shave, wait a few days, and the regrowth feels coarse and looks darker. Everyone has felt it, and almost everyone draws the wrong conclusion from it. Plate 173Open → Does your tongue have separate zones for each taste? No. The famous map, sweet at the tip, bitter at the back, is a myth from a mistranslated study. Every part of your tongue can taste every flavour, because taste buds everywhere carry receptors for all five basic tastes. Plate 177Open → Do bulls really hate the colour red? Bulls are red-green colourblind, so they cannot even see red the way we do. What makes a bull charge is the cape's movement, not its colour. Wave any colour and it charges; hold a red cape still and it ignores it.
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