What scientific fact blows your mind the most?
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My old school had a scale model of the solar system. It used the same scale for the planets size and distance. The sun was a 12" ball on one end of campus. Around campus were poles with little glass domes on top inside were tiny pins with little planet models on them.
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...homo sapiens sapiens: so wise we named ourselves twice...
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Because this is a science thread I'll be a bit pedantic. Mostly because I think it's an interesting topic. It's a mass-energy equivalence (≡) and not just an equality (=) they are the same thing.
So it's meaningless to say convert mass into energy. It's like saying I want to convert this stick from being 12 inches long to being 1 foot long.
You can convert matter (the solid form of energy) into other types of energy that are not solid. But the mass stays the same.
It's like when people say a photon is massless. It has energy and therefor mass. It just has no rest mass. So from the photos frame of reference no mass but from every other fame of reference there is mass.
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Like someone flipped a bathtub over and made it fly.
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I'm terrified of going into lakes and rivers because of what might find its way into my skin.
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thanks! love me some science pedantry.
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Engineers never really claimed that. Motivational speakers did.
Scientists admitted that their models don't show how bumblebees can generate enough lift to fly. By now, they've improved their models, taking into account that at an insect's scale, air behaves much more like water. It "appears" to be thicker because the air molecules are larger in relation to an insect than to a human. -
Exactly! If it was just magic, things seem underwhelming all of a sudden - like why couldn't you give zebras wings or laser vision? Why not have a grizzly bear with chainsaw arms on wheels? Makes nature seem arbitrarily limited and uncreative in comparison to what unlimited magic could accomplish.
(Just to be clear, this is not an argument against God btw, you could always just say "god did evolution and has reasons for not going all out with creativity)
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alien planets could be purple
So the prophecies are true...
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A shotgun
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This fact blows my mind the most.
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Yes, but have you considered [INSERT OUTGROUP] are bad? /s
To play devil's advocate, considering that in evolutionary terms we just left the trees now, we're doing okay, honestly. I just don't know if it will be enough.
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Actually, there's some contradicting evidence that came up recently-sh. If you factor in the challenge of not being fried by the very incoming light you need, every photosynthesiser is about the right colour for it's environment.
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I saw that recently too. There's some bug somewhere.
If you downvote it it goes back up to zero and everything.
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I mean, you'd have to be right near a neutron star or black hole for it to add up to much AFAIK.
Even being on the moon is enough to mess up clocks, though.
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Yep. The Higgs field interacts with matter, both holding the waves "in place" so it can seems like not a wave, and carrying a bunch of energy.
There's also mass-energy just in the very fast and powerful internal movements and fields of the nuclei and individual protons and neutrons (which are made of gluons and quarks). Not sure about the breakdown off the top of my head, though.
If you blew up an atomic bomb in a sealed container, it would stay the same mass, just with a noticeable contribution from pure electromagnetism.
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The false thing they teach is that air has to go over the longer side faster. Actually, it's under no obligation to meet back with the same air on the other side, and doesn't in practice. The real magic bit is the corner on the back, which is not aerodynamic and "forces" air to move perpendicular to it (eventually, as the starting vortex dissipates). A lot of aerodynamics is still more art than science, though.
The pressure difference from different volumetric flow speeds is real, it's just not that straightforward to produce, because air mostly does whatever it wants.
