Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: Write something that is truthful, but that sounds made-up. This came out rather essay-ish, probably since I'd been working on the book earlier.
There are things that are true that you'd never believe if not properly prepared. Like the idea that light is both a particle and a wave. Or that Euler's constant to the power of pi times the square root of minus one, works out to be one. Or that everything that you are, everything that you know and think and dream, is generated by about a liter and half of fatty meat. You hear these ideas for the first time, you think "Dude, you are full of shit. No way that's true."
Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. But the notion of "sense" encoded in the structure of our brains evolved out of the survival needs of primates on the jungles and grasslands of Africa, not out of science or technology or mathematics or art. The universe doesn't care whether or not it is sensible to our monkey-minds.
So it's common sense that objects fall down, but the idea that every particle pulls on every other one with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distances between them? Anybody who got through high school physics can write the equations, but in their hearts very few people will ever really, truly, deeply believe that the same thing makes the leaves fall as makes the avalanche crumble as holds the earth together as holds the moon in its dance around us.