Discrepant Events

Discrepant Events

A discrepant event is a scientific phenomenon that behaves in a counter-intuitive manner and generates a "need-to-know".  Discrepant events pique students’ interest so that they ask "what's going on?", or "why did it behave in that manner.  The following a are a few discrepant events. 

Activities: BlackBox Science

Color mixing

What Color is this dress?

Remember, the dress is actually blue and black, though most people saw it as white and gold, at least at first. My research showed that if you assumed the dress was in a shadow, you were much more likely to see it as white and gold. Why? Because shadows overrepresent blue light. Mentally subtracting short-wavelength light (which would appear blue-ish) from an image will make it look yellow-ish. Natural light has a similar effect—people who thought it was illuminated by natural light were also more likely to see it as white and gold. Why? Because the sky is blue, daylight also overrepresents short wavelengths, compared with relatively long-wavelength artificial (until recently, usually incandescent) light. Just as mentally subtracting blue light leaves the image looking more yellow, mentally subtracting yellow light from an image leaves an image looking more blue, which is what I found empirically.