You know why movies seem to be continuous motion even though they’re really just static images being shown at 48 frames per second — persistence of vision, right? Well, there’s a great article on the Grand Illusions site about how that explanation is ‘simple to understand’, ‘elegant’, even ‘poetic’… and also fundamentally incorrect.
Apparently psychologists have known for almost as long as film has been around that the explanation was bunk, but somehow film historians find it too compelling an explanation to give it up. Somehow, the image that images persist… persists.