Every time I learn something new, I am more acutely aware of how much else I DON’T know. Furthermore, I continually discover how much MISINFORMATION I thought I knew, as well as realizing how some of my basic ASSUMPTIONS were off-base.

We all do it. We all assume things that we don’t really know, or take something for truth because we were told it was so, without verifying the facts and/or multiple sources.

For instance:

• Florida oranges are not naturally orange
• Leonardo da Vinci did not paint the “Mona Lisa”
• Noah did not take two of each animal aboard the ark
• George Washington was the ninth president of the United States
• Cinderella did not wear glass slippers to the ball

There’s five examples to start; misconceptions that many believe, but are not actual. Therefore, I hereby declare Mondays “Methinks Mondays” where I tackle a different everyday truth in which actual truth is contrary to what most have been told to believe.

Here’s a heavily held misconception:

Although Roman works of art and the sculpture at Rockefeller Center in New York depict Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, Zeus condemned the Greek Titan to hold the SKY – not the EARTH – on his shoulders.

According to the Theogony, ascribed to the Greek poet Hesoid, Zeus sentenced Atlas: “to bear on his back forever the cruel strength of the crushing world and the vault of the sky. Upon his shoulder, the great pillar that holds apart the Earth and the heaven, a load not easy to be borne.”

For those of you getting your scales out to establish: Which is heavier – the Earth or the sky – I’ve got your back. Well, sort of…

Weighing the Earth is tricky business. While an exact number is impossible to establish, scientists estimate Earth’s weight to be somewhere around 6 quadrillion kilograms – 6,000,000,000,000,000. (That’s 15 zeros for those of you who need to know ).

Attempting to weigh the sky is even tricker. Personally, I do not have enough Advil in the house to perform the equation. As a point of reference, however, I’ll reveal the average weight of a cloud:

A typical cumulus cloud (most common) is about 1 cubic kilometer in volume and 2 km above ground. There are estimated to be 1,000,000 cubic meters of droplets in an average cumulus cloud. After doing some fancy-schmancy math, that comes out to be over a billion kilograms of droplets or close to 2.2 billion pounds.

As another point of reference, assuming a  blue whale is close to 160 tons  in weight, one cumulus cloud weighs as much as 6,268.75 blue whales. That’s right. ONE cloud.

If you ask me, the depictions and misconceptions of Atlas bearing only the weight of the world is a rather whimpy representation of what he truly had to contend with…

Cheers,

~ Dolores Harrell, braintipple.com

P.S. By the way, the archaic expression “methinks” is a linguistic fossil, preserving a common phrase of Middle English times, me thinketh, meaning: it seems to me.