besides "you and everyone you know are going to die" at age 3, or "there is no santa claus" which logically led to "God is an imaginary friend for grown ups" at age 10.
The fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling.
I considered the stories of Santa Clause and God to be pretty mind-blowing when they were presented as fact. So the realization that both were made up was kind of a return to sanity.
the santa claus/god realization could have been like 12 or 13, I don't remember exactly when I was told there was no santa, I'm estimating. I know I was three with the death thing, my parents remember me crying myself to sleep repeatedly moaning about it. of course they could be mistaken.
anyway, the ages were only there because I hadn't seen anyone referencing anything other than facts they heard recently. in reality nothing you've heard recently could be as earth shattering as the facts you learn when you're a kid that pull the veneer off your rosy fantasy world.
Back in the 1920s Hubble did photographic surveys of the sky with long exposures. Here is what he found. Pick a random spot in the sky. Take a long exposure. Count the stars you can see. Take a magnifying glass. Count the galaxies you can find. With a few obvious exceptions, there will be more galaxies than stars. A lot more. (Obvious exceptions would include things like nebulae that you can't see through to see galaxies behind them.)
Every light there is a galaxy (okay Like and 7 stars).
I remember seeing that photo when it came out and sort of brushing it off because it wasn't some sweeping nebula. Four years of an astrophysics degree later it nearly brought me to tears just thinking about looking at 10000 galaxies and the full weight of that sight. It's one of those things thats more powerful the more you understand it.
It's like the total perspective vortex but some how completely backward. I remember explaining it as much as possible to my brother; he looked at it for a bit stopped and said
I find it comforting. You look at that photo and all of a sudden your stupid problems and worries seem laughingly insignificant. It's better than religion.
The one that I just read ten minutes ago, that my childhood hero Wade Boggs once drank 64 Miller Lites on a cross-country flight (without dying) has to be up there.
There is the classic story of David Boon (Australian cricketer) logging 52 beers on a flight. I don't think he would've touched anything but full strength:
Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist, in some form or another. Whoa!
Another one: Assuming peak efficiency, the turbines in the Grand Coulee Dam generates 1 gram of heat and light every 3.7 hours. All that water for one measly gram of something! Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence
"Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist, in some form or another." The physicist richard feynman in the first lecture of "the feynman lectures on physics" says that the most important fact, that would convey the most information would be the atom hypothesis or fact. Which is essentially what you said except with the additional bit of information that "... all matter is made of indivisible particles that both repel and attract each other depending on the distance between them"
It was pointed out [1] that this thread was the source of a controversy that lead to a Florida law student and political candidate losing his position writing for the student paper:
It was pointed out [1] that this thread was the source of a controversy that lead to a Florida law student and political candidate losing his position writing for the student paper:
I'm not sure if this is the most, but Cantor's Diagonal Argument[1] is the first that comes to mind, probably even more as an example of a creative approach than for its implications (although those are pretty huge too).
Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing" has a great run down of this and a bunch of the other mind-blowing things that came out of math in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
I remember clearly in elementary school when I suddenly understood that gravity is just a constant acceleration; if I were in a box in space accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, it would feel exactly the same. For some reason, I found that absolutely mindblowing at the time. I spent all day trying to explain it to everyone else, and I don't think I've ever been so excited about knowing something again.
Do you also find it weird to think about how without gravity we couldn't walk? That one gets me especially hard because it's a such a tangible example of how we've evolved to take advantage of laws of the laws of physics, and how if these laws were even slightly different then we wouldn't be here, or at least not the same as we're here now.
The first day of a robotics class, my teacher explained that we don't really walk. Each step is graceful falling. Place one foot forward, tilt and fall till the foot hits and repeat.
I hate to be the one to break to this to you, but your robotics teacher was off his or her rocker or was trying to make a much larger point with a bad example.
If walking was simply graceful falling, it would imply that once we begin the process of "falling" onto the next foot, we couldn't significantly affect the outcome. However, because I can start walking and then stop with a single leg half way between it's highest point and the ground, this explanation of walking as falling becomes very problematic.
"Third place: There are only around one and a half thousand people signed up for cryonics worldwide."
This is a lot more surprising once you learn that because you can pay for cryonics with your life insurance, it literally costs only a few bucks a month.
The point when I realized that most things I hear are probably bs and I need to think for myself, regardless of the source.
What naturally followed was the realization that there are an infinite amount of things not yet solved or understood and I have the power to try to discover any bit of it.
My uncle was smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table near the cookie jar at Grandma's house during Thanksgiving.
He showed me how small our sun is by showing me the tip of his cigarette and comparing it to the top of his coffee cup i.e. the size of larger stars in the universe.
I was about six years old and the universe suddenly became a drastically larger place.
Parallel Universes, I literally fell of my chair when I heard a scientist telling, "There are infinite versions of our universe, all slightly different".
Many-worlds interpretation:
Many-worlds is a postulate of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the reality of wavefunction collapse, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real —each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). It is also referred to as MWI, the relative state formulation, the Everett interpretation, the theory of the universal wavefunction, many-universes interpretation, or just many worlds.
Many-worlds claims to reconcile how we can perceive non-deterministic events, such as the random decay of a radioactive atom, with the deterministic equations of quantum physics. Prior to many-worlds, reality had been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, rather, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised.
158 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadThe fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling.
http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introducti...
anyway, the ages were only there because I hadn't seen anyone referencing anything other than facts they heard recently. in reality nothing you've heard recently could be as earth shattering as the facts you learn when you're a kid that pull the veneer off your rosy fantasy world.
Back in the 1920s Hubble did photographic surveys of the sky with long exposures. Here is what he found. Pick a random spot in the sky. Take a long exposure. Count the stars you can see. Take a magnifying glass. Count the galaxies you can find. With a few obvious exceptions, there will be more galaxies than stars. A lot more. (Obvious exceptions would include things like nebulae that you can't see through to see galaxies behind them.)
Every light there is a galaxy (okay Like and 7 stars).
I remember seeing that photo when it came out and sort of brushing it off because it wasn't some sweeping nebula. Four years of an astrophysics degree later it nearly brought me to tears just thinking about looking at 10000 galaxies and the full weight of that sight. It's one of those things thats more powerful the more you understand it.
Yeah... it kind of blows my mind.
"Well, I have to live forever now."
http://www.thefanatics.com/content.php?id=330
And, of course, ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for drinking 1.7 L of beer in 11 seconds in 1953:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Hawke
Another one: Assuming peak efficiency, the turbines in the Grand Coulee Dam generates 1 gram of heat and light every 3.7 hours. All that water for one measly gram of something! Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence
http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-lo...
[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...
http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-lo...
[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...
Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing" has a great run down of this and a bunch of the other mind-blowing things that came out of math in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument
OK how about the Axiom of Choice?
If walking was simply graceful falling, it would imply that once we begin the process of "falling" onto the next foot, we couldn't significantly affect the outcome. However, because I can start walking and then stop with a single leg half way between it's highest point and the ground, this explanation of walking as falling becomes very problematic.
Close runner-up: There are zillions of slightly different versions of me. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0302/0302131v1.pdf
Third place: There are only around one and a half thousand people signed up for cryonics worldwide.
This is a lot more surprising once you learn that because you can pay for cryonics with your life insurance, it literally costs only a few bucks a month.
What naturally followed was the realization that there are an infinite amount of things not yet solved or understood and I have the power to try to discover any bit of it.
*Hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium aside.
He showed me how small our sun is by showing me the tip of his cigarette and comparing it to the top of his coffee cup i.e. the size of larger stars in the universe.
I was about six years old and the universe suddenly became a drastically larger place.
Now it appears to be a [self] post.
Many-worlds interpretation:
Many-worlds is a postulate of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the reality of wavefunction collapse, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real —each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). It is also referred to as MWI, the relative state formulation, the Everett interpretation, the theory of the universal wavefunction, many-universes interpretation, or just many worlds.
Many-worlds claims to reconcile how we can perceive non-deterministic events, such as the random decay of a radioactive atom, with the deterministic equations of quantum physics. Prior to many-worlds, reality had been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, rather, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
It is Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
Great book. Like most Stephenson books it gets a little weird at the end but is nonetheless well worth reading.
This really blew my mind when I was six.
d/dx (e^x) = e^x