Half-Truths

For most of the twentieth century, Cleopatra VII was treated as a foreign ruler of Egypt. In the twenty first century she has been claimed as Black African. Both readings project modern categories onto a Macedonian Greek queen who spoke nine languages, ruled from Alexandria, and is buried somewhere under the Mediterranean.

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For a century the story has been that Lord Carnarvon was killed by the curse of Tutankhamun for opening the pharaoh's tomb. The 1909 car accident that wrecked his lungs, the infected mosquito bite, and a modern cohort study of the excavators all point somewhere else entirely.

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Every parent has said it, and most parents believe it, because the advice has the force of a piece of folk wisdom that has been passed down for at least three generations. Put on a hat, because you lose most of your body heat through your head. The advice is wrong, and the wrongness has been known to the relevant scientific community for at least two decades, and the wrongness is, in its small way, a perfect illustration of how a single flawed piece of military research, written up in a single official looking manual, can travel out into the popular world and take up permanent residence in the minds of parents, pediatricians, and grandparents.

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You have heard the stories since childhood, and you have heard them in the same tone people use for the worst things in the European past, the dungeons, the racks, the auto da fe, the grand spectacle of ecclesiastical cruelty, the Spanish Inquisition as a byword for a kind of religious sadism the modern world has mercifully left behind. The picture is almost entirely a picture. The actual numbers, the ones in the archives, tell a story that is genuinely brutal in some parts and surprisingly bureaucratic in others, and the gap between the popular picture and the archival record is one of the most thoroughly documented cases of successful propaganda in the early modern world.

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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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