What Science related misconception or myth irks you the most? Why?

I have a few (in no particular order):

  1. "Atoms are mostly empty space" Incorrect. This has been known to be incorrect for years now. Electrons have particle-wave duality and the entirety of the orbital space is occupied by the electron wave.

  2. "Black holes are like cosmic vacuum cleaners": Very, very wrong. Our solar system is orbiting a black hole. The place you could be where you probably would worry about getting sucked up into one is in the accretion disk. Inside the accretion disk is very chaotic in comparison to outside of it. Things start colliding into each other, and when these collisions happen, things start to lose gravitational energy. That throws off their stable orbit and continued collisions eventually result in them falling into the black hole.

  3. Absolutely anything referring to light years or parsecs as units of time: They are measures of distance. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year (at a speed of roughly 3 ⋅ 1010 cm/s). "Parsec" is short for "parallax of one arcsecond".

  4. "It says that wormholes can be made using exotic matter with negative mass - why don't we just use antimatter?": Antimatter does not have negative mass, it has negative charge. The energy released in its annihilation with matter is proof of this - it's proportional to the total matter and antimatter mass.

and on THAT note:

  1. "Matter cannot be created or destroyed": Absolutely wrong. Matter does not need to be conserved at all, mass does. Mass and energy are pretty much two different ways of expressing the same concept. E = mc2 isn't just a fancy thing to write when you want to sound smart, mass and energy are proportional to each other via the use of a constant value, c2. As long as energy is conserved, so is mass. Matter can be turned into energy, and the laws of physics are still all being followed.
/r/AskReddit Thread