Half-Truths

You have heard the saying your entire life, and you have heard it with the confident tone of a person sharing a piece of folk wisdom that has the force of a natural law. The saying is not folk wisdom, and the physics is so simple that the National Weather Service has a page debunking it, and the Empire State Building has been hit roughly twenty three times a year for ninety years.

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You have been told since childhood that the sun is yellow, and the children's drawings, the emoji on your phone, and the weather icon all agree. The colors are slightly wrong, and the reason is one of the most beautiful small pieces of nineteenth century physics, Rayleigh scattering.

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You have heard for years that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, and you have probably heard it with the satisfied confidence of someone who knows a fun fact about the world. The number, as best the historical record can determine, was four when it was first written down, and a chain of journalists, textbook writers, and lazy scholars spent a hundred and ten years inflating it.

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A modest 1993 study with thirty six college students and ten minutes of a Mozart sonata briefly improved their scores on a paper folding puzzle, and a few years later the State of Georgia was giving every newborn a free Mozart CD. The journey from one short paper to a national baby industry is one of the cleanest case studies in modern science writing, and one of the most damning. The original finding was small, the follow-up research never replicated it, and the popular story, the one about babies and genius and classical music, is essentially a case study in how a single careful little paper can be inflated, beyond all recognition, by the media that ran with it.

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You were told as a child that if you picked up a toad you would get warts, and the toad itself seemed to confirm the warning, sitting there in the grass covered in little bumps that looked like the things you were trying to avoid. The bumps were never warts, and the half truth has been dutifully passed down for centuries.

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For a century and a half the popular imagination has been sure that the ancient Romans had a special room at every feast where they could throw up their dinner and start over. There was a word for it, and the Romans used the word too, but the Romans meant something completely different by it. A five hundred year old piece of crowd engineering is the thing the world has been calling a puke closet.

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You have probably said, or at least thought, that Chinese food gives you a headache, and that the culprit is the MSG. Half the world agrees. Sixty years of research say the culprit is something else, and the story of how a one-paragraph letter to a medical journal became an international panic is one of the strangest case studies in modern science.

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In a thousand Chinese restaurants there sits the same golden figurine, the fat man laughing with his belly exposed, and everyone from the waiter to the menu calls him Buddha. He is not. He is a specific historical person, and the story of how he got that seat by the register is stranger and warmer than any mistake.

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You have known since childhood that diamonds are one of the rarest substances on Earth, which is why one costs two months of your salary. But geologists have been quietly saying something else for a century. This is the story of how a common stone became a fortune, and what an advertising agency had to do with it.

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Somewhere in your memory, a teacher or a documentary told you that in the Middle Ages nobody lived past thirty. The average life expectancy really was somewhere in the thirties, but the reason is almost the opposite of what you picture. Most people did not drop dead at thirty. The truth has to do with who was counting, and when they started counting.

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