Common (yet false) places of science and Columbus´egg

For some reason which is always a bit misterious to me, there are plenty of common places of science which are if not directly false at least the true story is far from the urban legend. For example, no apple ever fell on Newton's head (or at least it never triggered Newton's discovery of his theory of gravity, which required much more input that the impact of an apple, like years of preparation inventing the infinitesimal calculus), Galileo never said "eppur si muove" when forced to reject his copernican beliefs (or at least there is no historical proof of it, he could as well have said "I think I will not travel much from now on") and T.H. Huxley, the paladin of Darwinist evolution, never publicly humilliated bishop Wilberforce in the famous Oxford discussion (Hooker, who spoke just after Huxley, was far more aggressive against Wilberforce and his defense of creationism).

The list is almost infinite, and it is a bit disgusting, at least to me, that most of common people perception of science, his history and the way it has developed is based on things that are actually false. One could investigate the historical and psicological reasons that have caused this, but in many cases this false historical histories are used as a part of an argument to show that science is something that it is not: for example, to reason that there is an inherent contradiction between scientific knowledge and religion or theology (which does not exist at all), that scientists are not really clever people but that is most of the times luck the cause of most scientific discoveries (it is true that nature likes to surprise us, but it requires years of intensive preparation to be able to correctly interpretate this surprises), or that science is the most objective of the human activities (it is not, althought science leads to an objective knowledge of nature, the path that it follows is sometimes painful, and scientists live and work in a very precise historical, polytical and personal context, that many times influences the way the approach scientific research).

Let me comment a bit on another or this completely imaginary moments of the history of science. Many people nowadays think that during the Middle Ages the common lore was that the Earth was flat, and that if you would travel deep enough in the ocean, you would eventually fall into the abyss of horrible monsters, as sometimes represented in some medieval maps. Many people will probably also say that was the dogma of the Catholic Church who led people into a belief contrary to common sense, observation and that moreover was already known by the Greeks centuries before. Actually it is the other way round: it was very well known during the Middle Ages that the Earth was a sphere, and even it was known approximately its radius. And obviously nobody saw anything against the Bible in this well known fact, which is even discussed by one of the greatest genius of medieval (and actually of anytime) philosophy: Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Imagine if this was a well known fact that when the Catholic Queen of Spain Isabel agreed to give money to Columbus for his journey to the Indias, he had to discuss with a comitee of priests and monks about the feasibility of this trip. The argument was not as one would naively think Columbus trying to convince the ignorant priest that the earth was not flat, but rather the priests tried to convince Columbus that his estimation for the Earth radius was too small, and he would never reach the Indias by circumnavigation. And actually they were correct! If America had not been there, Columbus trip would have been a tremendous failure!

There is nothing more attractive to man that the very truth of reality, inventing myths, even if this is done in principle for well inspired reasons concerning the promotion and developement of science, in the long terms has always the opposite consequences.