Top 5 April Fools' Scientific Discoveries

Gravitational Parade of the Planets

April 1, 1976, the famous British astronomer Patrick Moore said in a BBC radio broadcast about a unique cosmic phenomenon. At about 10 am, Pluto, according to him, was to pass strictly behind Jupiter. The interaction of the two celestial bodies supposedly caused a decrease in terrestrial attraction. And it happened! At the appointed time, the BBC's studio was attacked by calls from gullible radio listeners who reported that they felt short-term weightlessness (for the sake of the order, let's call this phenomenon "the Kashpirovsky effect").

Judging by the surge of anxiety associated with the "superunion" on March 19 with. (the masses expressed fears that the Moon coming to Earth would cause earthquakes and other cataclysms), the public for the past three decades has not far gone in its understanding of the laws of astrophysics. How can I not remember the main "threat" to the existence of mankind and the Universe itself, which some townsfolk see in the Large Hadron Collider!

Penguin's flight

Exactly three years ago, the BBC published a video report in the style of a mokmentary: Terry Jones, one of the members of the comic band Monty Python, in the image of a polar explorer told how a flock of penguins on the weather deteriorated on the wing and departed for unknown direction.

Of course, these birds are completely incapable of flying, although their way of swimming outwardly really resembles a flight.

Twitter-telepathy

In the April issue of the 1999 Red Herring magazine, a very popular publication on business and technology at the time, an article appeared on the Pentagon's revolutionary "secret invention." The development allowed users to exchange via e-mail messages up to 240 characters ... Telepathically.

The service of exchanging short messages has become commonplace (although, for some reason, it does not support the telepathy function for some reason), and mental activity at a distance is possible: we can inform our people at least though orally, even in writing. Moreover, now we are able to manage virtual objects and even a car - thanks to special devices based on EEG, recording electrical signals of the brain and converting them into teams.

Real Dragons

In 1998, an online version of the journal Nature published an article on the origin of birds, the author of which referred to the allegedly found in the US skeleton theropod (suborder of predatory bipedal dinosaurs) Smaugia volans. This creature, as the scientist claimed, had the ability to fly. Remains of bones, some of which (cervical and rib) "were regularly exposed to fire," discovered Randy Sepulkrayev from the Museum at the University of South North Dakota.

Needless to say, such a university does not exist, that the name Sepulkraive is borrowed from the character of the fantastic novel by the English writer Mervyn Peak, and the very name of the new species comes from Smaug, the so-called fantasy dragon in Tolkien's fairy tale "The Hobbit" ...

Discovery of the pottery

In April 1996, Discover magazine reported that French physicists (both the names and the name of the scientific organization were fictitious) discovered a fundamental particle of matter - a bigo. This particle the size of a bowling ball (!) During the experiments led to the explosion of computers. The video camera accidentally fixed it on one of the frames: the human eye can not recognize it, because it exists a millionth of a second, and then it breaks up.

The use of specific terminology and the science-like style of the narrative led to the fact that the new discovery (allegedly responsible for ball lightning and spontaneous spontaneous combustion of people) caused heated debates among readers.

In general, Albert Einstein said correctly: "There are only two infinite things: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."