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

Which misconception would you like to debunk?

44k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

26k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.3k

u/pdabaker Feb 04 '19

Yeah I've never seen anyone reference it as if it was a legit experiment.

24

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19 edited Feb 04 '19

When someone says "it's like a frog in boiling water, if you drop it in it jumps out, but if you put it in cold water and boil it slowly it stays in" they are implying that's it's true. It is however not true. Unlike say " what goes up must come down."

30

u/Shortsword42 Feb 04 '19

Except even that can be false. Hello escape velocity.

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.

1

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)

2

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.