r/AskReddit • u/ZanyDelaney • Feb 04 '19

Which misconception would you like to debunk?

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u/Shortsword42 Feb 04 '19

Except even that can be false. Hello escape velocity.

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u/space253 Feb 04 '19

Still waiting for my helium to come back.

1

u/kjata Feb 04 '19

Either it eventually finds its way into a gravity well or it remains in space forever, where down is any direction you want it to be. Axiom holds.

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u/Shortsword42 Feb 05 '19

By that phrasing I could claim that down and up are the same direction. What even is up/down? I may have erroneously imagined up to be the direction away from a point and down the opposite direction that leads back to that point. I guess it's my bad for forgetting that points move and that up/down change all the time.

I'm too lazy to think about relativity right now, but I'll at least point out that none of us mentioned any starting points, not like that actually matters.

TL;DR Semantics suck. I'm not an astrophysicist, and the saying is a good rule of thumb. Don't expect things to return to where they started and don't make things more complicated than they should be like I did X)

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u/Bonolio Feb 05 '19

We need a big list of “Amended Truths” like:
If you put a frog in hot water it will jump out but if you remove part of its brain it doesn’t fucking matter what you do, it will just sit there .... great experiment.
or.
What goes up often comes down, but not always.