People are, by nature, very gullible, naive and borderline ignorant. There are very few who make the effort to understand. Most accept without question what they are told by friends, the media and the government. Let's take calories for example. Millions of Americans read food container labels and worry incessantly about the number of calories a food contains. This is a classic example of human ignorance. How is it possible to worry about something and not know what it is, where it comes from and what it does? A French scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, coined the term calorie, or rather caloric, in the 18th century. Mr. Lavoiser observed that the chemical reactions gave off heat. He believed that this heat was a form of fluid, much like water, that carried the heat away from the reaction. (Rothman, 69) Antoine was on the right track; he simply took the wrong train. Benjamin Thompson, also an eighteenth-century scientist, observed that while drilling brass with a blunt tip he could produce enormous amounts of heat but not penetrate very deeply into the brass. This led Mr. Thompson to the conclusion that heat was the product of labor, not the invisible caloric fluid. Joseph Black, another seventeenth century scientist, discovered that several substances, varying amounts of heat, were needed to raise one gram of a substance. one degree Celsius. He called this specific heat. Mr. Black also noted that when fifty-degree mercury is mixed with equal quantities of zero-degree water, the resulting mixture would be only one degree. From this he concluded that heat and temperature were not the same thing. To give the scientific world a measurement standard, Black defined the quantity of heat needed to increase the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade as a calorie. the same as Mr. Blacks. The calories listed by the Food and Drug Administration are actually kilocalories. These are a thousand times larger than those discovered by Mr. Black. When Americans sit down to breakfast and eat a serving of Frosted Flakes, they ingest not one hundred and sixty calories but one hundred and sixty THOUSAND calories...