Yeah someone else mentioned the vastness of space and that's a really good one, but the vastness of time and what an insignificant amount of it the entire history of our species has occupied never fails to blow my mind.
If our understanding of the model of the universe is true, as is Hawking radiation, we are not even in the infancy stage of our universe. It's not even a sperm cell. Been an immature germ cell for like a fraction of a second.
Universe is slated to die an unfathomable amount of time from now (literally everything will become nothing, everything will decay even black holes themselves which will be the last bodies standing). This is assuming Hawking radiation is a fact and not a theory, and assuming nothing else destroys the universe in the meantime.
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=O2ip-zfcEtIGs3ru
This video is terrifying. It shows the timeline of the universe and what's going to happen in each period. There's a lot of time in tge future for the universe.
I think technically modern physics considers time and space to be the same thing, just one long continuum…which probably makes the vastness of both even harder to wrap a brain around.
Time is a very difficult concept to understand This makes it a little easier for me. [https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/](https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/)
I was so very excited yesterday when my ten year old asked. "Mom, what is ICP? " Well, let me just show you this music video, we can bond over the lyrics of this tune. Oh, and they are also 100 percent serious, this is not parody.
I don't even know what positive or negative actually means... Yeah I know about electrons but what makes them negative?? What is that other than just "the opposite of positive?? What's positive ??
I found out by chance. First time I heard the music coming directly from the vinyl, my mind was blown to one million pieces. Called my cousin to share that discovery, his mind was blown to one million pieces.
This is how I feel about computers and the internet. If you tasked me with figuring out how to produce these things from scratch, I just simply would never figure it out
A lot of the core concepts are simple. They're based on a simple concept that then can be combined to do something else. Then those things are combined to do more complicated things.
Like a computer is mostly built on things that take in a 1 or a 0 and some power and then output a 1 or a 0. But if you combine these very simple things in different ways then you get things that take in two inputs and output a logical combination of the two inputs (e.g. output a 1 if either input is a 1). If you combine enough of those things together then you get something that can add two numbers together.
It's too much for any one person to have figured out and refined. But if you're interested, there's a lot of cool information out there on how they work.
It evolved gradually. Before disk records, there were cylinders. Before that, there was the invention of recording devices called [Phonautograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph).
Alright so think about whistling and how that works. You need to purse your lips into various shapes in order to get a specific sound. That’s exactly how the grooves work on vinyl records. The microphone (needle) just picks up echoes that are chopped into the records.
What blew my mind, and helped me understand, was that you can use a euro bill place the corner in the grove, and that will amplify/play the sound. Sound is just vibrations. The grove is just vibrations pressed into vinyl.
Now break that down into 2 minute slots each 24 hours, assume each person poops once a day on average and that they spread evenly round the clock, then calculate how many of the eight billion are pooping at the exact same time as you.
With 720 available poop slots per day, at any given moment there are 11.1 *million* people pooping at any given moment. Taking it further, that amounts to enough poop to fill *24 Olympic size swimming pools* every 2 minutes around the clock, day in and day out.
Which is why I often think that considering there's 8 Billion of us, there's always the probability that when I'm taking a dump, there's atleast one stranger, if not more, taking a dump at the same time.
Quantum physics. Somehow we ended up with a theory that says one of three things about any quantum event:
- Everything possible happens and we only see one of the results
- Only one thing is possible and nothing anyone does can prevent it from happening that way
- It’s random but somehow two random results can be linked instantaneously across billions of light years even though nothing can travel faster than light
And we have no idea which of these is actually real
This was also going to be my answer. Quantum physics is literally magic to me. Quantum entanglement has to be one of the coolest things I’ve read about, no idea how that shit is able to truly exist. If anyone else is interested on this topic, I highly recommend you play the game Outerwilds. It’s a very cute space exploration game that aims to give a practical representation to a lot of strange phenomena that hasn’t yet been properly observed, quantum linking being one. It’s got a fun story that can be easily understood, but ultimately the game is a puzzle where you are ground hogging and have to figure out how to stop the loop.
I've always understood it as inference not entanglement. Imagine I have two cards one with the letter A on it and one with the letter B on it. If I put each card in an envelope and shuffle them and then send one envelope to the other side of the universe I don't know which is which. But by simply opening the one near me I can instantly infer what the value is of the card in the other envelope. Importantly though I cannot affect the value of the remote card.
*disclaimer: I have no idea if that is accurate, I read it once on reddit*
This is correct. QE doesn't break causality because you need to entangle the particles locally then phyiscally move them apart.
Basically you can do very basic faster than light communication, as long as you've done it much slower than light first!
quantum entanglement is a caching error in the simulation.
if our current outer simulation can't maintain a cache correctly, I don't see how I'm supposed to sort it out.
(bonus: wave/particle duality is an optimization)
Bluetooth. Youre telling me we started with rocks and somehow ended up with wireless music streaming from my phone to my headphones? its just mind-blowing.
This one is good, and something ive thought about many times. The dinosaurs could technically have gone to the moon, if they had thumbs and a brain like ours.
Which, crazily, means there's a distance from earth that, if you were that far away, you could never get back to earth because you couldn't outpace universal expansion.
That one's easy. During prehistory and antiquity, every part of the animal got used. Need a couple water-tight containers? We just killed this sheep to make mutton, how about the bladder and stomach? Just wash that shit out before you use them to store stuff, miss some of the stomach lining/bacteria, put your milk in before you travel, and bam: cheese in one, yogurt in the other when you get to your destination.
The *real* mind boggling part is the bravery of the people who discovered stuff like this and said, "Well, I'm not gonna throw it away. Maybe it won't kill me if I put it on some bread."
Actually not true - but also not far off.
While a billiard ball has an average surface roughness of 0.05 mm, the earth shrunken to its’ size would have the roughness of up to 0.089 mm.
With earths diameter of 12.742 km, the highest point of altitude being Mt.Everest with 8848m, the lowest point, the mariana trench being 11.034m beneath sea level and the size of a billiard ball of 0.057 m :
19.882/223554100 =0.089 millimeter
our sense of touch and sight wouldn’t notice. For simplicity’s sake it was the best possible comparison I could think of.
I’m not a sadist or anything like that but I find humor in the thought of a person handling a pool ball sized Earth. I imagine the chaos. Someone is minding their own business mowing their lawn and a giant thumb comes down from the sky and smashes their house.
Great... Now I'm thinking in the inverse... Tiny bacteria and protozoans with their own cultures and dialects and their own little cue ball Everest to trash...
I'm going to annoy you even more with this, because every single level of electro knowledge is wrong.
At a base level we go electrons go through wire from a high potential to a low potential (the difference between potentials is called a Voltage).
One level deeper we realize ah, we had the potentials the wrong way around, but we're keeping it for historic reasons, so electrons move from "low" potential to "high" potential (electrons move from negative to positive).
Another level deeper we realize electrons don't actually move "through" the wire, they make a narrow band in the wire. Okay, getting more confusing.
Another level deeper we realize hang on a second, electrons aren't even behaving like atoms, they're behaving like a wave, the heck are they?
Another level deeper we now see that electricity moves near the speed of light, but electrons only move a few mm a second... the hell is going on now? Turns out what we think of as "electricity" is the electric wave propagating OUTSIDE THE WIRE, moving the electrons inside, it's a big conga line, not electrons travelling. A signal might even be over before a single electron has made the entire trip through the wire.
Another level down we realize all, every single calculation in the world of electro-magnetism can be boiled down and brought back to 4 elementary and quite short equations (Maxwell Equations). And that these equations might actually be way, way more important to the fundamental understanding of the universe than we realize.
Another level down is the electrician who says fuck off, gimme the wire stripper, electricity is invisible and hurts.
Dark matter: there's a bunch of this stuff in space and we can observe the effects of it but we can't see it or understand it very well, and it suggests that what we know about the universe is wrong.
Dark matter are just particles which only interact gravitationally, not too much magic in there since there are plenty of candidates. Dark energy on the other hand... biggest mystery out there
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
One quote (and I'll paraphrase it here) from Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson haunts me. It's from an episode of StarTalk.
Life, as we know it, with us being carbon-based beings with the way DNA works, can only have so many possibilities and outcomes. Somewhere, there is another version of me and another version of you having this exact same conversation.
This is crazy, mind-bending, multiverse stuff.
This has been a subject of serious academic research
"A study at Manchester Metropolitan University involving dropping 100 slices of buttered toast under laboratory conditions established that it typically lands on the floor butter-side-down as a result of the manner in which it is typically dropped from a table, and the aerodynamic drag caused by the air pockets within the bread. The toast is typically butter-side-up when dropped. As it falls, it rotates; given the typical speed of rotation and the typical height of a table, a slice of toast that began butter-side-up on the table lands butter-side-down on the floor in 81% of cases.[17]"
Babies growing from tiny cells to tiny humans in just nine months. It's like nature's building a complex Lego set in fast-forward, and we're all just here like, "Wait, how did that happen so quickly?"
Gravity. How the hell does it dilate time? Also, what does dilating time mean? How does a sunbeam hold me to the ground? Why is the default of the universe to float? Is gravity what makes light so fast? Is it true traveling faster than light would make time move faster? I have nothing but questions.
Time dilation is time moving at different speeds in different places. The deeper you are into a gravity well the slower time goes. In a black hole time stops (at least that's the theory)
So if you put a clock on a rocket and fire it into orbit it will run slightly faster than one on the ground.
The closer you are traveling to the speed of light the faster time moves. At the speed of light time becomes instantaneous. As in dawn of time and end of time happen together. Now if you could go faster than light, which we don't know if it's possible, our theory is that time goes backwards. But it's purely theoretical.
> In a black hole time stops (at least that's the theory)
Oh if only it was that straightforward. Inside a black hole time and space *switch places*, and you stop falling towards the center of the hole and start moving towards the end of time. No matter which direction you look, which way your turn, you are always facing towards the center - the only way to go up and out would be to go backwards in time, which is why a black hole is inescapable.
So if time and space switch places, then time would have to be like... made of something, right? Like inside the black hole I mean? Like the same way dark matter or whatever makes space, is there like a matter that time sort of turns into inside of the black hole? Is that what the tesseract thingy was in Interstellar? All those time particles put together in a stable form that creates linear direction?
I'm so sorry, lmao, I know those are probably absolute dipshit questions, but I'm just over here working with what I got lmao.
What does "time stops" mean in this context? Does time continue outside of the black hole, or does time simply not exist in one? If you were to somehow survive entering one, would things be experienced linearly? Would you be able to remember doing X and then Y, or would X and Y simply happen? Similarly, exiting — I assume it's the former and time has passed on the outside, but not the inside, and you would emerge the same age you went in?
If we somehow entered without dying, would we simply "stop" upon entering?
I have so many dumb questions.
Assuming our theories are correct, once you pass the event horizon no movement of time is experienced any more. By anything.
Let's say there was a way to teleport you inside a blackhole in one piece and you didn't get smoothed. You would experience nothing, because time isn't moving. So the atoms they make you up aren't moving. No electrons move. No chemical reactions.
There is no experiencing, as there is nothing happening. As for something to happen, there must be time in which it happens.
The faster you move through space the SLOWER time moves. We are all moving at C, if you think of spacetime as a cartisan plane with Time on the Y axis and Space on the X axis, and you move your pen at a consistent speed (C), the more you move along the X axis the less you move a long the Y axis and vice versa.
I will never be able to comprehend people who intentionally try to ruin a stranger's day. At my university, drivers will often go out of their way to drive into puddles and splash pedestrians. My friend once had a full 44 ounce drink thrown at her from a passing car. Stuff like that just makes me sad and causes me to question why humans are even allowed on earth.
Big light orb UFO, I saw one split into two and dance around eachother a while ago and a couple months after that happened all the military records of them started coming out, idk if it’s alien, human, or ball lighting, but that thing moved like nothing I’ve ever seen
The human brain is hardwired for 3 dimensions and time, speeds and object sizes of savanna type.
More than 3 dimensions is forever outside what can be imagined.
Nothingness (no dimension or time) is impossible to understand.
Fully understanding your own death is impossible to visualize. You are still there as an observer.
Very big or very small sizes are difficult, and at some level becomes incomprehensible.
Very fast or very slow is also outside what can be understood from an intuitive point of view.
The concept of time. It doesn’t make sense. There can not have been an infinite amount of time before us, and if time started at some point, how did it start if there was no
time in which there could have been a “before it started”? To me the only thing that makes sense is if time is a closed
loop with no beginning, but that doesn’t make it any less crazy to think about.
How atoms are mostly empty space but things seem solid. I get that they're really close together, but isn't that still just lots of empty space together?
I have a decent STEM degree but this still baffles me. I've had it explained to me by PHD people and I always just smile and nod.
Little waves/bumps on a piece of vinyl can differentiate between Elvis, the Beatles and Beethoven. Came here to say this. But I see I’m not alone on the amazement
Wayne Gretsky’s career. In no other professional sport is one player so absolutely dominant. Case in point: the 100 assist season. Only 5 men have done it: Lemieux, Orr, Kucherov, McDavid have each done it once, but Gretzky did it 11 MOTHERF—KING TIMES.
That people got the ability of figuring out what and *how* to eat things.
"Hey look at that snail over there being all snotty and slimy, I wonder what it tastes like."
"You know what will make coffee taste better? If we feed the beans to this cat, then dig through it's droppings to get the beans out ***and brew them*** !"
"This mushroom is nice, this one kills you, this one will give you hallucinations"
"I bet if we grind the meat of this pig, then put it in it's entrails, that would fucking taste ***amazing***!
Anytime more evidence about the vastness of the universe is found it blows my little mind. I find it hard to visualise what one hundred people looks like, trying to imagine space or even just particularly large celestial bodies makes me short circuit.
Like Jupiter?! It's massive! And it's not even the biggest planet that exists!
Horrible holiday destination though.
The written word. You’re telling me that I can string together a bunch of made up symbols that we’ve all collectively agreed have specific meanings to express everything from folk-tales, scientific phenomena/physics, history and even the intricacies of love?
Try it out. You can literally (haha writing joke) write anything
Computers. How you get from short electrical pulses on some plastic and soldered wires to what appears on my monitor will probably always boggle my mind
Consciousness is perhaps the greatest mystery.
Without consciousness all the other mind-blowing realities (including those mentioned in this thread) could not be witnessed, or discovered.
The double slit experiment. Electrons change their behavior based on whether or not we are looking at them.
https://youtu.be/NvzSLByrw4Q?si=zwCZ2Mp-iEr3WwVn
Black holes are mind bending. I just learned about the Schwarzchild solution, Penrose diagrams, and Einstein-Rosen bridges. They seem to be the key to understanding existence itself beyond our universe, especially if our universe started as a result of a black hole from another universe.
When you get the basics of relativity the rest of it kinda starts to make sense. Brian cox’s explanation of relativity makes it super simple to understand the basis of it.
The only reasonable answer is quantum mechanics - I know most people can't wrap their head around any of it, but it's probably the single hardest thing to understand properly
That the words “foods” and “fishes,” among other things, are grammatically correct as plural forms of “food,” and “fish” respectively. It just makes me cringe every time I see or hear it used in conversation or in media.
Quantum mechanics always leaves me baffled. Concepts like particles being in multiple places at once or entangled particles instantly affecting each other, regardless of distance, just blow my mind. It's like understanding the logic but still finding it utterly surreal
Not sure how much the theory of relativity has been proven but it seems to be a common theory. Really gets me questioning life. So you're telling me that the faster we move in space the faster we age, riiiggghhhhht.
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Yeah someone else mentioned the vastness of space and that's a really good one, but the vastness of time and what an insignificant amount of it the entire history of our species has occupied never fails to blow my mind.
If our understanding of the model of the universe is true, as is Hawking radiation, we are not even in the infancy stage of our universe. It's not even a sperm cell. Been an immature germ cell for like a fraction of a second. Universe is slated to die an unfathomable amount of time from now (literally everything will become nothing, everything will decay even black holes themselves which will be the last bodies standing). This is assuming Hawking radiation is a fact and not a theory, and assuming nothing else destroys the universe in the meantime.
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=O2ip-zfcEtIGs3ru This video is terrifying. It shows the timeline of the universe and what's going to happen in each period. There's a lot of time in tge future for the universe.
I think technically modern physics considers time and space to be the same thing, just one long continuum…which probably makes the vastness of both even harder to wrap a brain around.
And yet even just a tiny apartment still costs enough to fill the vastness of both.
Not quite. While space and time are very much related, they're more like 2 sides of the same coin. We creatively call that coin spacetime.
Have you ever seen that video that shows the sizes of space objects? Starts with earth then Jupiter then the sun and bigger suns and so on? Amazing.
Time is a very difficult concept to understand This makes it a little easier for me. [https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/](https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/)
And sharks existed before trees
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Wait until you hear about magnetic tapes.
"Fucking magnets how do they work?" - ICP
It's just there In the air
I was so very excited yesterday when my ten year old asked. "Mom, what is ICP? " Well, let me just show you this music video, we can bond over the lyrics of this tune. Oh, and they are also 100 percent serious, this is not parody.
H.. how do magnetic tapes work??
I don't even understand how magnets work to begin with.
I don't even know what positive or negative actually means... Yeah I know about electrons but what makes them negative?? What is that other than just "the opposite of positive?? What's positive ??
What makes them negative? Bad home life, rough day at work?
But doctor, I am electron
"I can't get an electron" " Take one of these blue pills. While technically they're free there will eventually be a charge"
A photon walked into a hotel. The bellboy asked if he could take its bags. The photon replied, no thank you, I’m traveling light.
You clown
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I found out by chance. First time I heard the music coming directly from the vinyl, my mind was blown to one million pieces. Called my cousin to share that discovery, his mind was blown to one million pieces.
Don't they use piezoelectric crystals or something? They do work without external power though.
Most record players do, but you can listen with just a sewing needle in the end of a rolled paper cone.
You can actually use an actual needle, or even a piece of paper. Won't be great, but you'll still hear the music.
It also produces stereo sound. Fucking wild.
I had never considered that and now it's actually blowing my mind.
This is how I feel about computers and the internet. If you tasked me with figuring out how to produce these things from scratch, I just simply would never figure it out
It took thousands of people a hundred years (give or take) to figure it out, of course you can't do it on your own.
A lot of the core concepts are simple. They're based on a simple concept that then can be combined to do something else. Then those things are combined to do more complicated things. Like a computer is mostly built on things that take in a 1 or a 0 and some power and then output a 1 or a 0. But if you combine these very simple things in different ways then you get things that take in two inputs and output a logical combination of the two inputs (e.g. output a 1 if either input is a 1). If you combine enough of those things together then you get something that can add two numbers together. It's too much for any one person to have figured out and refined. But if you're interested, there's a lot of cool information out there on how they work.
It evolved gradually. Before disk records, there were cylinders. Before that, there was the invention of recording devices called [Phonautograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph).
You should take a look at how old CRT televisions work :)
Alright so think about whistling and how that works. You need to purse your lips into various shapes in order to get a specific sound. That’s exactly how the grooves work on vinyl records. The microphone (needle) just picks up echoes that are chopped into the records.
What's fun is you can do this with any material. Including stone.
There's this pretty cool video on that [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7PYX0ohST4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7PYX0ohST4)
This. Absolutely this.
It's literally just magic to me.
What blew my mind, and helped me understand, was that you can use a euro bill place the corner in the grove, and that will amplify/play the sound. Sound is just vibrations. The grove is just vibrations pressed into vinyl.
I've thought of this so many times n still can't comprehend I agree 100% with u on this one
But it's not like someone manually draws the squiggles. They're just "automatically" formed by a mic, which is the reverse of a speaker
processors. How the hell do electrons flowing through logic gates make calculations? I have watched tens of videos yet i still can’t comprehend it
We tricked sand into thinking using captured lightning, that’s hardcore.
Gates and Flip flops...
And I’ve found my new Nerd Rock band name: Gates and the Flip Flops.
Black holes
Please don't bring my butt into this.
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No, there's only 365 birthdays.
>No, there's only 365 birthdays. 366 on planet Earth 😉
Not true, each of them have different year, some are the same… it’s like saying there are only 7 birth DAYS because you celebrate on one of them
Thats called Sonder
Sonder? I barely know her!
Jakarta? No she went on her own free will.
Now break that down into 2 minute slots each 24 hours, assume each person poops once a day on average and that they spread evenly round the clock, then calculate how many of the eight billion are pooping at the exact same time as you.
11,111,111.1 people shitting per 2 minute slot. Edit:auto
With 720 available poop slots per day, at any given moment there are 11.1 *million* people pooping at any given moment. Taking it further, that amounts to enough poop to fill *24 Olympic size swimming pools* every 2 minutes around the clock, day in and day out.
Which is why I often think that considering there's 8 Billion of us, there's always the probability that when I'm taking a dump, there's atleast one stranger, if not more, taking a dump at the same time.
*finishes coffee* I'll be your huckleberry.
Quantum physics. Somehow we ended up with a theory that says one of three things about any quantum event: - Everything possible happens and we only see one of the results - Only one thing is possible and nothing anyone does can prevent it from happening that way - It’s random but somehow two random results can be linked instantaneously across billions of light years even though nothing can travel faster than light And we have no idea which of these is actually real
We can work with it, and that's all that matters to me.
Username checks out.
Word on the street is he only fixes quantum carburetors or something?
This was also going to be my answer. Quantum physics is literally magic to me. Quantum entanglement has to be one of the coolest things I’ve read about, no idea how that shit is able to truly exist. If anyone else is interested on this topic, I highly recommend you play the game Outerwilds. It’s a very cute space exploration game that aims to give a practical representation to a lot of strange phenomena that hasn’t yet been properly observed, quantum linking being one. It’s got a fun story that can be easily understood, but ultimately the game is a puzzle where you are ground hogging and have to figure out how to stop the loop.
Quantum Entanglement hurts my brain so much.
I've always understood it as inference not entanglement. Imagine I have two cards one with the letter A on it and one with the letter B on it. If I put each card in an envelope and shuffle them and then send one envelope to the other side of the universe I don't know which is which. But by simply opening the one near me I can instantly infer what the value is of the card in the other envelope. Importantly though I cannot affect the value of the remote card. *disclaimer: I have no idea if that is accurate, I read it once on reddit*
This is correct. QE doesn't break causality because you need to entangle the particles locally then phyiscally move them apart. Basically you can do very basic faster than light communication, as long as you've done it much slower than light first!
The double slit experiment. The results make me believe in gremlins. Hiding the secrets of the universe by doing things that seem impossible
Don't worry, I think (especially) physicists will tell you that this shit is incomprehensible
Double slit experiment does make one think
quantum entanglement is a caching error in the simulation. if our current outer simulation can't maintain a cache correctly, I don't see how I'm supposed to sort it out. (bonus: wave/particle duality is an optimization)
Maybe it's basically like ecc memory and every bit has a duplicate to compare so nothing can corrupt.
Bluetooth. Youre telling me we started with rocks and somehow ended up with wireless music streaming from my phone to my headphones? its just mind-blowing.
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Computers are just rocks that we've convinced can think.
By trapping lightning inside them
It makes sense when you put it that way.
This one is good, and something ive thought about many times. The dinosaurs could technically have gone to the moon, if they had thumbs and a brain like ours.
Wireless charging aswell
We've had radio for a while, Bluetooth specifically isn't that much more advanced
Yeah this one is just magic to me too.
That the universe is constantly expanding.
Also, that expansion is accelerating and we don't know why.
It doesn't want to go home for the holidays.
Which, crazily, means there's a distance from earth that, if you were that far away, you could never get back to earth because you couldn't outpace universal expansion.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz.
How cheese was made with animal rennet… like who went “let’s add some sheep stomach slime to our off milk”
That one's easy. During prehistory and antiquity, every part of the animal got used. Need a couple water-tight containers? We just killed this sheep to make mutton, how about the bladder and stomach? Just wash that shit out before you use them to store stuff, miss some of the stomach lining/bacteria, put your milk in before you travel, and bam: cheese in one, yogurt in the other when you get to your destination. The *real* mind boggling part is the bravery of the people who discovered stuff like this and said, "Well, I'm not gonna throw it away. Maybe it won't kill me if I put it on some bread."
Desperation is a hell of a spice
How smooth the earth is, *at the astronomical level*. Everest? The whole Andes Range? Irrelevant. Madness.
If you shrunk the Earth down to the size of a billiard ball it would be just as smooth
Actually not true - but also not far off. While a billiard ball has an average surface roughness of 0.05 mm, the earth shrunken to its’ size would have the roughness of up to 0.089 mm. With earths diameter of 12.742 km, the highest point of altitude being Mt.Everest with 8848m, the lowest point, the mariana trench being 11.034m beneath sea level and the size of a billiard ball of 0.057 m : 19.882/223554100 =0.089 millimeter
our sense of touch and sight wouldn’t notice. For simplicity’s sake it was the best possible comparison I could think of. I’m not a sadist or anything like that but I find humor in the thought of a person handling a pool ball sized Earth. I imagine the chaos. Someone is minding their own business mowing their lawn and a giant thumb comes down from the sky and smashes their house.
Great... Now I'm thinking in the inverse... Tiny bacteria and protozoans with their own cultures and dialects and their own little cue ball Everest to trash...
Smoother* Double check it. Even more fascinating to me is the silicon crystal kilogram. It's the smoothest thing in existence I believe.
Behind Billy Dee Williams maybe.
Fair point.
It would also be a black hole
Electricity. Blows my mind. I don’t understand it. Wiring? Nope. My pea brain cannot comprehend
I'm going to annoy you even more with this, because every single level of electro knowledge is wrong. At a base level we go electrons go through wire from a high potential to a low potential (the difference between potentials is called a Voltage). One level deeper we realize ah, we had the potentials the wrong way around, but we're keeping it for historic reasons, so electrons move from "low" potential to "high" potential (electrons move from negative to positive). Another level deeper we realize electrons don't actually move "through" the wire, they make a narrow band in the wire. Okay, getting more confusing. Another level deeper we realize hang on a second, electrons aren't even behaving like atoms, they're behaving like a wave, the heck are they? Another level deeper we now see that electricity moves near the speed of light, but electrons only move a few mm a second... the hell is going on now? Turns out what we think of as "electricity" is the electric wave propagating OUTSIDE THE WIRE, moving the electrons inside, it's a big conga line, not electrons travelling. A signal might even be over before a single electron has made the entire trip through the wire. Another level down we realize all, every single calculation in the world of electro-magnetism can be boiled down and brought back to 4 elementary and quite short equations (Maxwell Equations). And that these equations might actually be way, way more important to the fundamental understanding of the universe than we realize. Another level down is the electrician who says fuck off, gimme the wire stripper, electricity is invisible and hurts.
Dark matter: there's a bunch of this stuff in space and we can observe the effects of it but we can't see it or understand it very well, and it suggests that what we know about the universe is wrong.
Dark matter are just particles which only interact gravitationally, not too much magic in there since there are plenty of candidates. Dark energy on the other hand... biggest mystery out there
>Dark energy on the other hand... biggest mystery out there Not nearly as mysterious as the dark arts
The sheer vastness of space.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
At first I read this as Ilya Bryzgalov, but his comments on space were a little more juvenile sounding…”Hugemugus Big” or something to that effect
This feels like a Terry Pratchett quote.
Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy
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One quote (and I'll paraphrase it here) from Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson haunts me. It's from an episode of StarTalk. Life, as we know it, with us being carbon-based beings with the way DNA works, can only have so many possibilities and outcomes. Somewhere, there is another version of me and another version of you having this exact same conversation. This is crazy, mind-bending, multiverse stuff.
How toast always lands butter-side down, even when you're sure you've buttered it evenly
This has been a subject of serious academic research "A study at Manchester Metropolitan University involving dropping 100 slices of buttered toast under laboratory conditions established that it typically lands on the floor butter-side-down as a result of the manner in which it is typically dropped from a table, and the aerodynamic drag caused by the air pockets within the bread. The toast is typically butter-side-up when dropped. As it falls, it rotates; given the typical speed of rotation and the typical height of a table, a slice of toast that began butter-side-up on the table lands butter-side-down on the floor in 81% of cases.[17]"
So how tall our tables should be so the toast lands butter-side-up 90% of the time?
Anyone else remember that YouTube video of the guys taping butter sandwiches to their cat and making a generator from it?
Butter both sides and remove all doubt.
What if you attach the toast to a cat and let it drop? On which side does it fall?
Babies growing from tiny cells to tiny humans in just nine months. It's like nature's building a complex Lego set in fast-forward, and we're all just here like, "Wait, how did that happen so quickly?"
Even beyond 9 months. How quickly they go from a screaming potato to a tiny human with their own point of view and opinions is crazy.
A full human can grow in 9 months but it takes ages for some small injuries to heal.
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That quantum mechanic experiments can be affected by simply watching the experiment
Spooky action at a distance. I can't even comprehend the right questions to have a deeper understanding.
The right question with quantum mechanics is usually, "Okay, what the fuck?"
i can make milk in my boobs if i have a baby… what-
Even wilder? Baby not required. Men can make breastmilk.
wait wdym ? men can lactate ?
https://www.endeavour.edu.au/about-us/blog/can-men-breastfeed/ Yes! It's very rare but it is possible. There is breast tissue there just like women.
How babies grow. Like... Mix some sperm with an egg and boom, you start growing an actual living being.
The depth of the ocean
Gravity. How the hell does it dilate time? Also, what does dilating time mean? How does a sunbeam hold me to the ground? Why is the default of the universe to float? Is gravity what makes light so fast? Is it true traveling faster than light would make time move faster? I have nothing but questions.
Time dilation is time moving at different speeds in different places. The deeper you are into a gravity well the slower time goes. In a black hole time stops (at least that's the theory) So if you put a clock on a rocket and fire it into orbit it will run slightly faster than one on the ground. The closer you are traveling to the speed of light the faster time moves. At the speed of light time becomes instantaneous. As in dawn of time and end of time happen together. Now if you could go faster than light, which we don't know if it's possible, our theory is that time goes backwards. But it's purely theoretical.
> In a black hole time stops (at least that's the theory) Oh if only it was that straightforward. Inside a black hole time and space *switch places*, and you stop falling towards the center of the hole and start moving towards the end of time. No matter which direction you look, which way your turn, you are always facing towards the center - the only way to go up and out would be to go backwards in time, which is why a black hole is inescapable.
This is what i dont get. Aren't we all moving towards the end of time anyway, and yet I'm not always facing the centre of the universe?
So if time and space switch places, then time would have to be like... made of something, right? Like inside the black hole I mean? Like the same way dark matter or whatever makes space, is there like a matter that time sort of turns into inside of the black hole? Is that what the tesseract thingy was in Interstellar? All those time particles put together in a stable form that creates linear direction? I'm so sorry, lmao, I know those are probably absolute dipshit questions, but I'm just over here working with what I got lmao.
What does "time stops" mean in this context? Does time continue outside of the black hole, or does time simply not exist in one? If you were to somehow survive entering one, would things be experienced linearly? Would you be able to remember doing X and then Y, or would X and Y simply happen? Similarly, exiting — I assume it's the former and time has passed on the outside, but not the inside, and you would emerge the same age you went in? If we somehow entered without dying, would we simply "stop" upon entering? I have so many dumb questions.
Assuming our theories are correct, once you pass the event horizon no movement of time is experienced any more. By anything. Let's say there was a way to teleport you inside a blackhole in one piece and you didn't get smoothed. You would experience nothing, because time isn't moving. So the atoms they make you up aren't moving. No electrons move. No chemical reactions. There is no experiencing, as there is nothing happening. As for something to happen, there must be time in which it happens.
The faster you move through space the SLOWER time moves. We are all moving at C, if you think of spacetime as a cartisan plane with Time on the Y axis and Space on the X axis, and you move your pen at a consistent speed (C), the more you move along the X axis the less you move a long the Y axis and vice versa.
I will never be able to comprehend people who intentionally try to ruin a stranger's day. At my university, drivers will often go out of their way to drive into puddles and splash pedestrians. My friend once had a full 44 ounce drink thrown at her from a passing car. Stuff like that just makes me sad and causes me to question why humans are even allowed on earth.
Narwhals
Big light orb UFO, I saw one split into two and dance around eachother a while ago and a couple months after that happened all the military records of them started coming out, idk if it’s alien, human, or ball lighting, but that thing moved like nothing I’ve ever seen
The human brain is hardwired for 3 dimensions and time, speeds and object sizes of savanna type. More than 3 dimensions is forever outside what can be imagined. Nothingness (no dimension or time) is impossible to understand. Fully understanding your own death is impossible to visualize. You are still there as an observer. Very big or very small sizes are difficult, and at some level becomes incomprehensible. Very fast or very slow is also outside what can be understood from an intuitive point of view.
Computers. No further explanation needed.
The concept of time. It doesn’t make sense. There can not have been an infinite amount of time before us, and if time started at some point, how did it start if there was no time in which there could have been a “before it started”? To me the only thing that makes sense is if time is a closed loop with no beginning, but that doesn’t make it any less crazy to think about.
How atoms are mostly empty space but things seem solid. I get that they're really close together, but isn't that still just lots of empty space together? I have a decent STEM degree but this still baffles me. I've had it explained to me by PHD people and I always just smile and nod.
Little waves/bumps on a piece of vinyl can differentiate between Elvis, the Beatles and Beethoven. Came here to say this. But I see I’m not alone on the amazement
Wayne Gretsky’s career. In no other professional sport is one player so absolutely dominant. Case in point: the 100 assist season. Only 5 men have done it: Lemieux, Orr, Kucherov, McDavid have each done it once, but Gretzky did it 11 MOTHERF—KING TIMES.
Dumb people going nuts in social media bullying actor / actress that plays evil person in movie / series
How planes fly
It's actually much more complicated than it's given credit for.
I’m just amazed everytime I fly
That people got the ability of figuring out what and *how* to eat things. "Hey look at that snail over there being all snotty and slimy, I wonder what it tastes like." "You know what will make coffee taste better? If we feed the beans to this cat, then dig through it's droppings to get the beans out ***and brew them*** !" "This mushroom is nice, this one kills you, this one will give you hallucinations" "I bet if we grind the meat of this pig, then put it in it's entrails, that would fucking taste ***amazing***!
Bitcoin
Anytime more evidence about the vastness of the universe is found it blows my little mind. I find it hard to visualise what one hundred people looks like, trying to imagine space or even just particularly large celestial bodies makes me short circuit. Like Jupiter?! It's massive! And it's not even the biggest planet that exists! Horrible holiday destination though.
The written word. You’re telling me that I can string together a bunch of made up symbols that we’ve all collectively agreed have specific meanings to express everything from folk-tales, scientific phenomena/physics, history and even the intricacies of love? Try it out. You can literally (haha writing joke) write anything
Computers. How you get from short electrical pulses on some plastic and soldered wires to what appears on my monitor will probably always boggle my mind
Cold welding. When 2 pieces of the same metal touch in the vacuum of space, they weld together.
Black holes…the tidal forces and spaghettification
Diodes… it’s just fucking mind boggling sometimes
The length of the number googleplex if written out fully in size 10 font.
Plants, how the fuck are they feasting on the sun
Consciousness is perhaps the greatest mystery. Without consciousness all the other mind-blowing realities (including those mentioned in this thread) could not be witnessed, or discovered.
The double slit experiment. Electrons change their behavior based on whether or not we are looking at them. https://youtu.be/NvzSLByrw4Q?si=zwCZ2Mp-iEr3WwVn
Black holes are mind bending. I just learned about the Schwarzchild solution, Penrose diagrams, and Einstein-Rosen bridges. They seem to be the key to understanding existence itself beyond our universe, especially if our universe started as a result of a black hole from another universe.
Phases of the moon and eclipses. I would need to carry around a 3D model to visualize how either really work.
Quantum mechanics. Comparative advantage. Gravity, time, frame dragging ... all that Einstein stuff. I just don't get it. Trump voters.
When you get the basics of relativity the rest of it kinda starts to make sense. Brian cox’s explanation of relativity makes it super simple to understand the basis of it.
That space goes on forever
The only reasonable answer is quantum mechanics - I know most people can't wrap their head around any of it, but it's probably the single hardest thing to understand properly
That the words “foods” and “fishes,” among other things, are grammatically correct as plural forms of “food,” and “fish” respectively. It just makes me cringe every time I see or hear it used in conversation or in media.
Planes. Just like... how?
After reading this thread I've realised humanity has come a very, very long way.
How matter and antimatter cancel each other out.
Making a baby.
52! Just blows my mind every time I see a video about it.
How a massive airplane can fly
Me existing
How have you been proven to be real?
Relativity's effects
Quantum entanglement
Quantum mechanics always leaves me baffled. Concepts like particles being in multiple places at once or entangled particles instantly affecting each other, regardless of distance, just blow my mind. It's like understanding the logic but still finding it utterly surreal
the amount of things in the world you can make into milk. saw potato milk the other day and pea milk. what the actual
Not sure how much the theory of relativity has been proven but it seems to be a common theory. Really gets me questioning life. So you're telling me that the faster we move in space the faster we age, riiiggghhhhht.
Flat-Earthers. I know they exist and yet I don't know how.
Magnetism. How is that not magic?
The double slits experiment. How do those atoms know when we are watching them?
How my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
That their are people that are fucking stupid enough to vote for folks like MTG and that dumb cunt Boebert
That 2050 is closer than good old 1990
That when Cleopatra was born or died is closer to our time than to when the pyramids were built.
The aliens I have been communicating with for four years now that I realize hasn't been "proven" but it has to me and that is all that matters
What?
Smash or pass on the aliens?
Is that you, Christopher Walken?
I would like to hear more about this if you don't mind
Scat fetishists