For years, our secondary school physics textbooks have been awashed with several outdated and untenable scientific facts. This is due to the "static" nature of science in Nigeria. Science is progressive; things are changing every year. And we should evolve too.

Here are some scientific theories or even "facts" that we learned: crammed and recited; at secondary school that have been disproved:

1. The boiling point of water is 100 degree Celsius! This is a centuries-old lie. The boiling point of water isn't a predictable constant like the speed of light. The boiling point of water depends on the atmospheric pressure: which is the force exerted by molecules of water in air about the boiling water. At higher altitudes water boils at lower tempratures.

2. There are nine planets! Yes, there were thought to be nine. One, the last and the least-Pluto-has been demoted. There are just eight left: Mecury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune.

3. The orbits of planets are constant! No any more; modern physics says that as Earth revolves round the sun, the orbit changes. Now the orbit is like the road Earth follows. It is elliptical in shape (not like a circle). According to physics, before now, that road (orbit) is invariant; imlpying that it will remain the same for ever. But according to modern physics, that is a false. The path (orbit) changes. You know, that it takes Earth 365 1/4 days to complete a revolution around the sun (that's 365 1/4 days to move from the beginning of the road and back to the beginning of the road). Modern astrophysicists and astronomers have discovered that at some point, the earth is closer to the sun, and at that same point, at some other time, she is farther.

4. There are three states of matter solid, liquid and gas! Please, if you have this in your physics textbook, don't worry, just take your biro and change the "three" to "four" and add "plasma" after "gas". Because scientists have long discovered a new state of matter, that is neither, solid, liquid or gas; it's called plasma.

5. In science, seeing is believing! Not anymore. The greatest flaw of atheism is that if we can't see God then he doesn't exist. And some atheists use science to justify this. They are wrong. The greatest theoritical physicists of classical and modern times, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, are known for postulating the existence of things we don't see. You don't need to see a thing to know that it exist. For example-
-Do you see ultraviolet rays? No. But stand under the sun for hours and the color of your skin will tell you if they exist or not. Ultraviolet rays are invisible radiation from the sun that cause sunburn.
-Do you see gravity? No. But does it exist? Yes.
The list goes on. In fact, it is that important that scientists developed a course called quantum physics to study physical phenomena we can't see with our eyes. Even in science, the things we don't see are more powerful than the ones we see.

6. Gravity is a force! They have told you and I, that there is a force of gravity that draws everything down. My dear Nairalanders, please that is untrue. The man who said so (Isaac Newton) was proved wrong 100 years ago (in 1915) by the father of modern physics, Albert Einstein.

Newton thought that gravity was a "force", and for over 300 years the world believed, until Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity exposed that gravity wasn't a force per se, but what he described as a "distortion of space-time".

Let me break it down: according to classical physics massive bodies (natural things that have a lot of stuff in them) like the sun, create gravity (or gravitational fields) by directly pulling less massive bodies-like Earth or yourself- over space. But that is incorrect. Massive bodies, rather distort the space and time around the less massive bodies to make them behave the way they do. That generally means that you can jump and fall because the mass of the earth has distorted the space and time around you. And that the earth revolves about the sun because the mass of the sun has distorted the space and time around the earth, therefore keeping in orbit. Mass is responsible for the generation of gravity (and energy too, since mass and energy are the same thing: E=mc2).

Please don't keep this knowledge to yourself. Tell your friends, classmates and especially your physics teacher (if they didn't know).