THREAD
Weird and wrong beliefs that humanity held onto for way longer than we should have.
These days we enlightened denizens look back on those simpletons and giggling fools of old and tut-tut at their hilarious beliefs.
*Record Scratch*
Here's some stuff we got wrong until recently.
1/19
Weird and wrong beliefs that humanity held onto for way longer than we should have.
These days we enlightened denizens look back on those simpletons and giggling fools of old and tut-tut at their hilarious beliefs.
*Record Scratch*
Here's some stuff we got wrong until recently.
1/19
Comments
Imagine the span of human history is a month, and you are alive during the last second of that month. In that last second someone will have just finished saying to you that tooth decay is caused by worms instead of bacteria. It's that recent.
Paper: https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1053356671
2/19
https://altmetric.com/details/2023706/blogs
The image from that blog is also part of this fascinating thread too:https://bsky.app/profile/drlindseyfitz.bsky.social/post/3lep57gskg22w
3/19
Thanks to a rogue decimal point in a german chemist's article which overstated the iron in spinach tenfold, the whole world believed spinach was magic until a chap called Hamblin revealed the error in a 1981 paper simply titled "FAKE":
https://www.bmj.com/content/283/6307/1671
Except...
4/19
Woah, a self-referential thread with self-correcting mechanism! That's right, Mike Sutton did what we all should do and tried to track down the original citation for Hamblin's claim. It doesn't exist.
5/19
https://www5.in.tum.de/persons/huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popeye_March_2010.pdf
6/19
https://altmetric.com/details/2576812/news
7/19