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Re: misconceptions in astronomy




Thanks for all the replies. I have now contacted Phil Sadler, who is
sending me the paper - about 12 hours from my first query - not bad!!

Cheers

Margaret

p.s.Incidentally, last time I said that PhysL is the most helpful
listserver in the known universe, and that reminded me of one of
Phil's list of the misconceptions.

When we asked students to identify incorrect statements in a list, they
had no trouble deciding that one of Phil's statements

"Most of the matter in the Universe has been accounted for."

was wrong. Great, they know about dark matter, we thought. When they
were asked at the end of the course to explain why it was wrong, many did
mention dark matter, but another typical response was:

"There are still many countless galaxies that human beings do not know
about as we have not been able to venture out past our galaxy."

Just goes to show how important it is to ask "why"!