I was a bit of a precocious science nerd child and spent a lot of my time as a kid reading science, doing chemistry and bugging my parents for equipment. I must say that in my early teens I wasn’t very familiar with spacetime and relativity and hadn’t even heard of quantum mechanics.
Anyway, when I was twelve my teacher told me that the Einstein mass energy formula was violated by some particle called a ‘calutron’. Needless to say, I tried to find some reference to something that sounded vaguely like calutron (could it be kalutron, which I believe is a device not a particle) and never did. Was my teacher merely misinformed or was he just trying to shoo me out the door?
Fast forward a few years, now I’m in high school and reading as much physics as I can lay my hands on. After a class one day I asked my chemistry teacher a question about neutron decay. To my amazement, he said something like “Boy, no one knows anything about the nucleus.” I stood their in disbelief, this was in the late 70’s and the Yukawa theory of the strong nuclear force had been proposed in the 1930’s. Moral, some chemistry teachers don’t know jack about the nucleus.
The following year, another chemistry teacher nearly throttled me over the relative abundance of isotopes. He did not understand that relative abundances are measured quantities and not constants of nature. If the ratios of isotopes were constant (as he maintained) then carbon dating wouldn’t be possible, nor would a whole host of other technologies based on isotope ratios. This guy was marking university chemistry papers and he was pissed off that a 16 year old nerd was questioning his facts. For the record, I was right. He did however hate my guts and make my classes with him a living hell for the next year. Moral: it does not pay to be a smart-arse.
About the same time I asked my maths teacher about Riemannian geometry. His response was, “Why the hell do you want to know about Riemannian geometry?” This guy actually sat down and explained it to me - what little I could comprehend. He knew his stuff, in all sorts of areas and seemed to really enjoy teaching. If only all my teachers were like him.