No one knows everything, so we often have to learn “truths” that everyone accepts. Unfortunately, not all of them have been confirmed by scientists. Today there are five more examples:

In outer space, gravity is zero

We’ve all seen astronauts floating around the space station, so it’s easy for us to believe there’s no gravity. But it exists everywhere in the universe, otherwise everything would go away infinitely.

The reason that the astronauts on the space station seem weightless is that both they and the station are constantly in free fall toward Earth.

Since objects fall at the same speed regardless of their mass, the station and astronauts fall together, creating the illusion of zero gravity. Fortunately, they don’t actually fall because they are traveling at 27,600 km/h, the centrifugal force keeping them in orbit.

Water is a conductor of electricity

While it won’t end well if you drop your hair dryer in the bathtub, the truth is that pure distilled water is a poor conductor of electricity because its molecules don’t have free electrons to conduct electricity.

Pure water consists of one oxygen molecule chemically bonded to two hydrogen molecules. Oxygen has six electrons in its reactive outer shell and room for two more, while hydrogen atoms have one each, thus forming a perfect chemical bond.

But water is an excellent solvent; free ions from impurities such as salt and minerals dissolved in it cause it to conduct electricity. Interestingly, when water contains many such ions, it conducts electricity so well that it will ignore less efficient conductors, such as the human body, and take the easiest route, the many ions in the water.

There are seven colors in the rainbow

ROGVAIV is a lie that comes from Sir Isaac Newton and his superstitions. Newton believed that white sunlight consists of all the colors of the spectrum. He demonstrated this in 1660 in a series of experiments in which he refracted sunlight through a prism into shorter wavelengths. At first he saw five colors.

But Newton was convinced of the Pythagorean vision of a harmonious universe in which the number 7 was magical and involved in everything from the celestial bodies (of which only seven were known at the time) to the musical scale. Therefore, in 1704, he added orange and indigo to the five he saw.

But what we call color is only a perception of the mind. Sunlight contains a continuous distribution—hence an infinite number—of colors, and what we see depends on the stimulation of each cone-shaped photoreceptor in the eye that perceives red, green, and blue. Therefore, each of us sees a different rainbow.

The QWERTY keyboard is designed so that the levers do not get stuck

It is believed that the QWERTY keyboard has a regular layout because the inventor wanted to be sure that the levers that control the keys would not jam, so he placed the most common letters as far apart as possible.

But historians Koichi Yasuoka and Motoka Yasuoka of Kyoto University say it has something to do with 19th-century Morse code.

The first users of typewriters were telegraph operators who needed to transcribe incoming messages in Morse code as quickly as possible, so the letters they used most were placed where they were easiest to press.

Scottish bagpipe

Although they are synonymous with the Scottish Highlands, they probably originate much further east. Ancient references to the bagpipe were found in Turkey and Egypt.

A possible image appears on a Hittite sculpture dated to 1000 BC. hind limbs of dogs…”

The first known enthusiast was the Roman emperor Nero, who also minted a coin depicting bagpipes. He did this to encourage his troops before the battles.

There are several theories as to how bagpipes came to Scotland, but one of the most popular and plausible is that they were brought by the Roman army when they occupied Britain. (photo: Dreamstime)

Source: SciTechDaily

• “Scientific Truths” You Thought Were Actually Not True (Part I)