What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?
For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
Short: It completes a full 360° of the sun before the planet itself does a full 360° spin.
A few sentences longer:
In planet Earth human terms, we have defined one day as "how long it takes the planet to do a full 360 degree rotation". Example: You spin a basketball on your finger and it does one full rotation.
A year to us is "how long it takes the planet to go around the sun". Example: You hold a basketball out in front of you and you do one full rotation.
It doesn't. Gravity is caused by mass not spin. The planet's rotation about it's own axis will create a centrifugal effect that offsets gravity, but the effect is negligible for anything rotating as slow as planets.
The others already said the core aspect, but to get specific: the difference between your weight on the pole and your weight on the equator differs only by like .5% or something like that. This is the difference between spinning and not spinning (centrifugal force and no centrifugal force). (And also the difference in radius, since the Earth's rotation makes it a tiny bit flatter than a perfect sphere would be)
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they're right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think "wow that's pretty," but every once in a while I let it hit me that I'm looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it's, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they're right there. I can point at one and say "look at that pretty star" and right now, a long distance away, it's just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there's life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It's over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there's more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
What's even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
That doesn't seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
You should try Space Engine. It's a program to explore the universe, based on real telescope data. It also has the ability to procedurally generate galaxies, planets, and stars in unobserved parts of the universe.
I can really relate to this. I remember a weird night in my teens where I must've spent at least an hour staring out of my bedroom window at the moon, because really for the first time I'd had the exact same thought. It's right there. It's so easy to get desensitised to that and to just think of it all as an image projected on the sky. The thought has never really left me and even now I still linger on the moon every time I see it and try to acknowledge that it is a 3 dimensional object lol.
In the same vein, I like to remind myself that every field in physics is literally happening all around me, right now, and it always has been, in fact, I've never seen anything without these invisible fields in it and for some reason, that really makes me super aware of our place in the order of magnitudes.
It's wild we can see so much further down than up.
There's a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren't supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!
Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he'll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy
It's even crazier because you don't need to reach the speed of light. It'll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.
For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.
Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don't take time dilation into account they misbehave.
(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Δt' = Δt / √[1 - v²/c²]. Δt = variation of time for the observer (you), Δt' = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity's speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that "v" and "c" use the same units.)
I wonder how long it would have taken for us to figure out time dilation in Einstein hadn't predicted it. I wonder if it would have taken until we observed it with satellites.
Yes I knew about that and I'm glad that doesn't make it crazier for me, instead it makes it easier to accept. If it were something that happened only after hitting some arbitrary speed value I'd be a lot more mentally damaged
Here's something I just ran into looking stuff up for my comment: GN-z11 is one of the farthest galaxies we've ever seen. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, at a distance of over 30 billion light-years, it has to be moving away from us at over twice the speed of light.
What the fuck does that mean, temporally? Like, forget the speed of light, time dilation has to do with space and relative speeds. If I'm moving at near the speed of light relative to you, then my clock will physically tick more slowly. What happens if I'm moving over twice the speed of light? Is the real life GN-z11 in our reference frame moving backwards in time at over twice the rate we're moving forward?
From my understanding, this is caused by the universe itself expanding between the 2 objects, not that the object itself is moving that speed relative to us. It's still completely insane to think about, either way.
I can't find any reference that says it's moving away from us at twice the speed of light, which would violate Relativity. The fact that it is further away from us in light years than the age of the universe in years, is due to the fact that the space itself is expanding.
The part that I understand in the intellectual sense, because I know or at least used to know how it follows from the math, but which just doesn't feel like it should be the case, is the whole "relativity of simultaneity" aspect of it. That there isn't an objectively true order in which events happen in, if the events in question aren't linked by cause and effect. That is to say, it is possible for one person to see an event A happen before another event B, a second person to see the two happen at exactly the same time, and a third to see event B happen first and then event A, and for all three of them to be equally right. It just feels like, on some level, there ought to be one objectively true order to time, a single valid timeline that all events can be placed in relative to eachother, and for time not to work that way feels so absurd as to not even be able to articulate why the idea feels wrong.
Probably one of the most memorable and pivotal moments in my life was when my college professor showed us the origins of relativity and how Einstein came to the conclusion that E = mc^2
It's a proof that only took about 10 minutes to explain, and the mathematics really aren't that difficult to understand by most people. The geniuses in the fact that Einstein started by explaining how calculating relative motion meant that time had to be a variable that could be different depending on who the observer was. This in itself is an incredible observation, but you can take this to the extent to literally prove that mass and energy are directly related to each other. It's absolutely wild and one of the most sublime equations ever made.
From what I understand, you are always travelling at the speed of light through space/time, but when you move at high speeds through space that shifts the proportion of your speed out of the time dimension. And a photon travels only through space, experiencing no time between the time it was emitted and the time it was absorbed. What I just can't wrap my head around is the concept of travelling at some speed without involving the time dimension at all.
Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.
And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.
EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!
It's one of those things that feels really obvious if you cook a lot of east/south Asian dishes - shrimp sauce and mushroom soy sauce have a pretty similar aftersmell to them because they're so concentrated
Huh. Oddly I am allergic to shrimp and lobster, but love mushrooms. To me they don't smell the same though. Though this fact probably explains why veg oyster sauce is mushrooms.
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you'd need "terabytes of storage, and that's probably not possible". And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn't the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit 'thicker' than the rest; that's the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives... Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The "Fly height" or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.
Individual "bits" on a SD card are electron buckets that are either "full" (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
I really get the feeling that this question isn't being asked seriously but here goes.
Floppy disks are an older removable storage format for a computer. The media inside the disks was flexible like a piece of paper, hence the term "floppy". There were three different common sizes, there was an 8", a 5.25", and a 3.5". The 8" and 5.25" had the flexible media in a sort of heavy fabric and plastic sheath that was itself flexible, amd the 3.5" disks had a hard plastic cover on the outside, with a sliding metal door, and some people erroneously called these "hard disks".
That "I" am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That we are always only 2min or so away from death, if we stopped breathing.
That everything I eat actually gets digested into mousse and bacteria are in my body, digest it and I get the elements into my blood.
That our world is so big, but you could also walk to China Japan from the EU, if you had enough time. But also its crazy how huge our common trade routes are.
That a weird minicomputer in my pocket can store 128GB of information, access a wireless network from across the whole planet, and can remember so much more than my brain
That you need to lay down K.O. for many hours every day, otherwise you get insane.
That's not true though. You need REM sleep. Sleeping doesn't mean you're K.O. You're processing things and regenerating. That's like the exact opposite of being K.O.
That “I” am pretty much just the construct of electrons flying around my brain.
It's even weirder than that. "You" are a story that your brain tells itself so that you can explain your needs to other people. Without other people, or at least the pretend image of other people, there's nothing like what we think of as a human personality.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
I don't have iron issues so I haven't completely fact checked this, but I have read in various places that using cast iron skillets to cook with does add more iron to your foods to help supplement.
Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]
So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).
Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.
In the same sense that we contain a massive volume of gas, because there is a lot of hydrogen in our bodies. Yes, hydrogen is a gas, and yes, there is a lot of it on our body. But it's bound, so it doesn't count.
It would be more accurate to call it stone than metal, because the calcium in our bones is also bound to other elements, which means it does not exhibit its usual metal characteristics.
They have their own separate genetic code, yes, but that doesn't make them a separate species, because they aren't a distinct organism at all. They don't exist in the absence of our cells.
Basically, it looks like a single cell, predatory amoeba of some sort engulfed a parasitic bacterium that was the ancestor to mitochondria, and instead of being digested, it ended up living inside the amoeba, helping to produce energy.
This is a big deal because the way that cells harness energy is by doing some cool biochemistry across a membrane. When a cell has to rely on its main, cell membrane to do this, then the energy production is proportional to the cell's surface area, which means that it's proportional to the cell's radius squared (E ∝ r^2 ) . However, the energy requirements of the cell are determined by its volume, which means that energy requirements are proportional to cell radius cubed ( E ∝ r^3 ). For small numbers the difference between r^3 and r^2 isn't much, but as radius increases, the cell volume far outstrips its surface area, which means that there was an upper ceiling on how big a cell could get while still fulfilling its energy requirements.
Mitochrondria allow cells to break this size limit by decoupling energy production from cell size, because scaling up energy production is as simple as having more Mitochrondria. Mitochrondria have their own independent genome - in the years since the endosymbiotic event, the mitochrondrial genome has shrunk a lot, because it's sort of like moving in with a friend who already has a house full of furniture - no sense in having duplicates.
Don't know if it's bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I'd been lied to my whole life... a leap year isn't every 4 years.
So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.
So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on..
Also when the leap years were introduced, the priests (who were to take care of the calendar) didn't understand what dis "every four years" mean, and used to put a leap year every three years.
And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to four, no more, no less. Four shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be four. Five shalt thou not count, neither count thou three, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Six is right out. Once the number four, being the fourth number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."
But basic math means that those are the exact same thing. Divisible by 4 means multiples of 4 means every 4 years, right? It seems more likely that they "happen when the year is divisible by 4" came about after they said "let's do it every four years, but we have to phrase it more officially when we write it down."
Not really. 1896 was a leap year, but 1900 was not.
The leap year after 2096 will be 2104.
Edit: an interesting way to put this is, 2000 was the only year in 4 centuries where the year starting the century was a leap year. Next such occurrence will be in 2400
There is about 8.1 billion people in the world. Assuming romantic cliches to be true and that we all have exactly one soulmate out there, we would have a very hard time sifting them out. If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment, which due to human life span being significantly shorter and the influx of new people makes the task essentially impossible without a spoonful of luck. Moral of the story: If you believe you have found your soul mate, be extra kind to them today.
Soul mates are made, not found. You get with someone compatible to you, and through the sharing of experiences and affection, if nothing goes excessively wrong, they become unique for you.
If you were to use exactly one second at meeting a person it would take you 257 years to meet everyone alive on earth at this moment
Well I don't need to meet everybody. There's no need to meet anyone who doesn't match my sexual preferences, so that's half right there. Then we can also cut everyone who's sexual preferences I don't meet, as well as anyone outside of a given age range (most of the people on earth are much younger than me and would be inappropriate for me to date). We can probably get that down to about 50-60 years. (At one second per person).
The thought experiment was just an attempt to show how hard it is to wrap our minds around big numbers. Even a tangible number such as the amount of people in the world.
I might be misremembering but I believe our sun can't go nova, it's too small. It will, however, expand and swallow the Earth towards the end of its life.
Space aliens could teleport in next to sun, fling a bunch of Star Trek red matter at it like Spock did to the Romulan star, destabilize the star, and cause a, I think it was a black hole? where the star was. And we wouldn't know for 8-ish minutes.
I used to be like this, but with movies. When I first met my wife, she was utterly baffled at the concept of somebody not enjoying movies, and she made it her mission to make me enjoy them.
Come to think of it, she actually doesn't like music much. I've failed to change her opinion on that though because my taste in music is shit (and I'm proud of it.)
I thought my significant other was one of these to a certain extent. It does weird things to me as a DJ. Turns out that she just likes the limited music that she likes and cannot stand most everything else.
For me it's not like I don't like music, but there are large stretches of time, where I do not care so much for it. I would guess that I haven't actively choosen to hear music for weaks, possibly months, now. Obviously excluding the music you can't avoid, like background music in movies and video games etc.
I suppose it is for the best, but nonetheless I find it uncomfortable how our bodies have the ability to manipulate our brains' memories and our consciousness residing in the same place cannot do anything about it
I always thought it interesting that every time we talk about when our kids were born, I remember all these details and my wife's like huh, weird, can't remember a thing.
Every time that comes up, I think to myself "Something I've gone through must be more painful, right? I've gone through some pretty hellish things, and you're trying to tell me something MORE painful exists? Not just a little more, but dramatically more? For my own sanity, I'm gonna have to live in denial of that."
We can't touch objects, ever. Most of the space "occupied" by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down), and when we "touch" an object, it's just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It's the same reason why we don't fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
It's taking semantics from one frame of reference and trying to apply them in the frame of reference of an entirely different scale, realizing that it doesn't work the same way, and then claiming that it is therefore "wrong".
You can kind of visualize it as wire EDM manufacturing. Although not a fully accurate depiction, but it fractures the connection between the two sides.
Here's one: Iron doesn't have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can't smell coins after washing them
A solid that isn't undergoing any sort of chemical reaction isn't going to smell because there isn't anything to smell. You need a molecule to enter your nose to smell. That's my basic understanding, someone smarter than I can explain it better.
Also I'm not sure any country still uses iron for coins.
Iron would be a terrible metal for coinage, since it would shed rust all over everything after being handled. Some coins might be cast from iron (if it's cheaper than alternatives, idk) but plated in other metals to prevent that.
Tides are a phenomenon where the height of the edge of a body of water shifts relative to the shore. A phenomenon is a thing. Why should explaining its cause in those terms have any effect on that?
Earth pulls away from moon due to centrifugal force.
In the center of the earth it pulls the earth with the exact same force as the centrifugal force.
On the side closer to the moon the gravity is more than centrifugal force.
So water get's pulled towards the moon or "upwards" from earth's perspective.
That's high tide.
On the other side centrifugal force is more than gravity.
On the other side it's the same thing except gets pulled away from the moon.
So since it's pulled on both sides of the earth water is essentially "lighter" and on the sides it's "heavier" if that makes sense. The water flows from the heavier places to the lighter places like down a small slope due to gravity.
That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which is an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
Hydrogen and oxygen and very reactive, which is exactly why they are so necessary for survival. Our bodies function off of chemical reactions, it makes sense to power that off of the most reactive elements it can easily find.
Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.
I've read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don't get how it's possible. Your engine is still running, doesn't it use at least as much as it does while it's idling?
Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn't consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.
the inertia from the cars current speed is used to spin the engine rather than the engine spinning the wheels, the resistances of the engine is what causes the slowing effect
modern cars with fuel injection can complete disable injecting fuel when not needed and can also adjust the timing of the injections for maximum efficiency
For the car to be "running" in those cases, the engine just needs to be turning to keep the alternator and potentially the power steering pump going. When engine braking, the rotation of the tires is locked to the rotation of the engine, so the inertia of the car keeps the engine turning without needing to use fuel.
Depends on the ignition system and everything of course, but it can be true.
The fuel injectors are off when engine braking. It is the momentum of the car that keeps the engine running/rotating. That is why you are slowing down more rapidly because you're losing momentum into the engine.
If you take an engine out of a car and try to spin it by turning the crank shaft, it will be hard to turn because the cylinders need to compress air (it's required before adding fuel and spark to explode that compressed air so it expands).
When that engine is in the car, and you don't add fuel and spark, then the cars wheels have to turn the engine and compress that air, thousands of times per minute. That force that the wheels have to send to the engine to spin that engine slows you down.
I'm thinking you think the engine itself has a brake on it.. No.
I'm thinking you think the engine itself has a brake on it.. No.
Of course not. I know it's not an actual brake but it comes from the engine's resistance to spin on higher rpms, so when you shift to a lower grear the rpm goes up, which "activates" this resistance.
What I'm confused about is the relation between idling and engine brakes.
Even without giving it additional gas the engine is still idling, so on a level road you could travel with a certain speed without pressing the gas pedal.
So what happens when you're going downhill, you don't press the gas pedal and the engine brake effect kicks in? Does idling not consume fuel anymore?
I think I'm missing some information that would put everything in its place for me.
The most difficult part lf stanrting a car is gettinf the pistons to move, if your engine still has inertia (if you are going downhill for example) you can completely cut the fuel injection and it can starts again because the pistons that are still moving will compress the gas (and for diesel engine that's enough to ignite given enough temperature in the block, for gasoline the spark plugs will work as usual).
Of course if the engine has low inertia (it's spinning too slowly) the car will stall, but probably the electronic injection will compensate.
If you drive manual you can go down a hill without burning a single drop of fuel, not sure if automatic are smart enough to do it.
In my car with automatic CVT transmission, I have to downshift using the paddle shifter in order to force it to do engine braking. It doesn't do any engine braking if I simply let the gas pedal go.
The combustion engine. I know technically it's not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity's finer achievements. yes, it's not without its barbs like emissions, but that's a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.
Hate to burst your bubble, but the calcium inside your bones is not in a metallic form but as calciumphosphate. So no metal frame but one made of a salt I guess.
The thing that started this conversation is hemoglobin, which is also not metallic but a protein. I don't think anyone was confused and thought that there's actually shiney silvery elemental metallic calcium in our body.
Your bones are not dead rocks! They are living organs that happen to have a lot of sturdy calcium structures in them. They do a lot of other stuff besides hold your body up. They store minerals for all the other stuff your body needs minerals for; that's why osteoporosis is even a possible failure mode. Your bone marrow produces white blood cells for your immune system, too.
The fact that things are able to float, despite of gravity pulling all objects towards the big mass of Earth. You would think that the push of gravity should be more than enough to overcome the slight fluid displacement that allows balloons and boats to push away from the Earth's surface.
So when your rowboat is floating, it can displace a certain volume of water and if it displaces more than that volume the water spills over the sides and it sinks. We talk about how many tons of water it’s displacing because that tells us what the total weight of the boat, you, cooler, beers, tackle and oars can be before the boat sinks.
You already knew that though. What might not be clear is what that weight measurement actually is.
Weight is the acceleration due to gravity that an object experiences. So if your rowboat is able to displace a volume of water that experiences more acceleration due to gravity than it and all it’s contents do, it will stay on top of the water in a state we call floating even though it and some of the contents may be more dense than water!
Now your rowboat is different than the balls in that floating glass ball thermometer your aunt bought out of sharper image in one very unique way: it can’t function when submerged! Those little suckers will go up and down all day, but once water starts coming in over your gunwales you gotta get rid of it or the boat sinks and won’t come up.
So there’s a point of no return where your boat can’t stay afloat any more.
When it displaces a volume of water that experiences less acceleration due to gravity than it and all its contents do, it and all its contents are pulled under the surface of the water. At that point, density determines what happens to the boat and it’s cargo. The boat itself may be denser than an equivalent volume of water and sink, but the beers and cooler are less dense than water and they float. You may be more dense than water, but instead of sinking you tread water and push your head up above the surface.
When the swamped boat sinks, it experiences more acceleration due to gravity than the water around it and pushes that water aside on its way to the bottom of the lake. The beers experience less acceleration due to gravity than the water around them so the water is pulled underneath them and they float. The air pocket inside each can also lends some displacement to the cause.
So the volume of fluid displaced isn’t “slight”. It’s exactly what gravity itself requires for objects to sink or float!
It's actually interesting because when you consider the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, weak nuclear) gravity is by far the weakest one. It's not intuitive because gravity is the one we interact with most day to day and it has connotations of large objects like planets and stars. But it's only a significant force when you have such large objects. Two magnets technically are gravitationally attracted to each other (like all things that have mass) but it pales in comparison to the magnetic forces.
Gravity makes up for what it lacks in force with its range and also the exponential nature from things getting attracted to each other forming a point of more potent attraction and so on (it was more relevant in the beginning of the universe, but we're still feeling its effects)
Think of the fact that pressure increases with depth, so when something is floating there's a higher net pressure at the bottom than at the top which results in an upward force as the fluid tries to equalize.
Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I'm mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Huh, I always thought of us having free will in response to cause and efect, not in place of it. But maybe I'm understanding free will differently?
If the universe is deterministic, it means that every particle has an infinitely predictable path. And our body and brain are full of particles which could only ever move in the predetermined way. And because our thoughts are only movements of neurone, which in turn, as everything, are made of particles, every action of ours would be predetermined and we could never decide otherwise than we did.
I think Camus might have summed it up best when he said the only real choice (therefore, freedom to exercise will) humanity has is whether or not to commit suicide.
The USA has 157 million workers, shuffling 140,000 years of work a day. One in 4 has an idea. One in five of those is a good idea. Two thousand stakeholders can make it an innovative idea. So, they can pump 3.5 years of brute force innovation into the world every single day. That's well over a thousand years of advancement per year.
Critical mass populations that can keep up with their own development are a serious creative force to be reckoned with. And human evolution has been exceeded by innovation, dramatically.
Can you elaborate on what that means? "Universe is not locally real"? How do we know what is real? What precisely does 'local' mean? Real relative to what?
In quantum mechanics, the concept of "locality" and "realism" are often discussed in the context of the EPR paradox and Bell's theorem. In a "locally real" theory, the properties of particles are well-defined independently of measurement (realism), and no influences can propagate faster than the speed of light (locality).
Realism: In a "realistic" theory, the properties of a system exist independently of observation. For example, if you have an electron, the idea is that it has a definite spin direction whether or not you measure it.
Locality: The principle of "locality" holds that physical processes occurring at one place do not depend on the properties of objects at another place that is spacelike separated, which would require information or influence to travel faster than the speed of light.
However, quantum mechanics challenges these intuitive notions. Experiments with entangled particles suggest that the properties of one particle can instantaneously affect the properties of another distant particle, seemingly violating locality. Meanwhile, the superposition principle suggests that particles don't have definite properties until measured, challenging realism.
In my opinion, the breakdown of "local realism" is one of the most unsettling and fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. It forces us to reconsider our intuitive understanding of reality and has implications for fields like quantum computing and quantum cryptography.
— ChatGPT4
As physicists, I can confirm, this is not bad explanation.
Ok. I'm gonna give an example that will be slightly wrong if we nitpick, but it will give you an idea.
Lets take the old philosophical idea "if a tree falls in a forrest and theres nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?" and modify it for this example.
"If you are not there to observe will the tree in the forest fall?"
If you are not there to observe the tree will be in all possible states. Two notable states being "it has fallen" and "it is still standing" that exist simultaneously.
If you go in to the forest and observe, one of the states will randomly become your reality according to certain probability amplitude.
You don't necessarily have to go in to the forest to observe the tree. You can send your buddy who will then tell you the state.
As your friend is returning back from his observation, there's actually two friends walking back to you. He is "entangled" with the tree. When he opens his mouth, one of them is randomly selected as your reality.
Entity checking the state of the tree does not have to be a living consciousness. It can be a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with you. You are not conscious of the trees state, but the information is delivered to you and for you there is now only one state for the tree.
So quantium level information is constantly delivered to you and your reality is weaving itself around you through this "decoherence"
now you see how my first two examples were false. Quantium decoherence is so much faster than you or your buddy, that you can only catch this mechanism at work on quantium level.
...and "local" basicly just means that the experiments result is true, as long as nothing can transfer information faster than light. So far nothing has.
To be fair, the single iron atoms are surrounded by a lot of carbony goodness. There's a few metals that have minor biological uses in humans like that, and even sodium and potassium are metals in pure form.
It's hella weird to me how we suddenly developed democracy and industrialisation after thousands of years of kind of the same thing. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation; right now I'm playing with Lanchester's laws as a theory.
How would Lanchester's law apply? I admittedly never heard of it before, but I don't see equivalents for army size and damage ratio here...
Anyway, the answer to your question is probably just population growth. We needed a critical mass of "useless" people not preoccupied with subsistence for science-y stuff to gain enough traction and spread.
There were democracies before industrialisation by the way, e.g. in ancient Greece.
There were democracies before industrialisation by the way, e.g. in ancient Greece.
Yeah, they called it that, but most of the population was literal slaves and like 1% of the population was actually rich and male enough to participate in the political process in any way. Same story with the Republic of Venice and all the other pre-modern republics, it was basically monarchy by council. Power actually derived from the masses is new within the last couple centuries or so. I don't think people realise this enough.
The British Empire started the same way, but suffrage fairly continuously expanded over the decades, whereas Athens had a tendency to slip back into a dictatorship for spells.
Anyway, the answer to your question is probably just population growth. We needed a critical mass of “useless” people not preoccupied with subsistence for science-y stuff to gain enough traction and spread.
That's probably part of it - science started creeping along with the invention of agriculture, although it was too slow for contemporary people to notice - but don't forget Europe wasn't the most happening place to start with and had just dealt with the black death. If it was population the Enlightenment should have long since happened in China or India. Actually, I think Roman Europe might have been more populous than early modern Europe, but I'm not sure.
Same story for wealth, and most cultural explanations.
How would Lanchester’s law apply?
It's not obviously connected, but it shifted at about the right moment in history and military matters flipping on their head could have had enough of a political impact to completely change everything like that. My working theory is something like, non-linear attrition for smaller groups favours the side that has more mass support. Before projectile weapons were dominant the French Revolution might have been crushed like every other peasant rebellion, basically.
Similar metal in the human body one, Vitamin B12 has cobalt in it. Absolutely wild. I guess that's not really commonly known but it's still worth mentioning
May I ask what is special about cobalt in B12 specifically? I've come to realize there are numerous inorganic substances inside my body like copper, gold etc. so cobalt by itself doesn't really stand out anymore.
I think your idea of what is organic or inorganic is a little off. Organic things can and do involve metals and gases in various forms. According to wikipedia, "About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus." These are elements that also appear in minerals and other rocks, but that doesn't mean the same elements can't be in organic compounds. Everything is made of all the same stuff on the periodic table, organic or inorganic.
Although "commonly accepted" may be pushing it, i can't imagine a finite universe(, i.e., 'with a positive curvature'/spherical), with the old question : what happens at the edge if i push it with a stick ?
(I.i.r.c., the answer is that the edge is expanding faster than the speed of light or sthg)
(And, kinda unrelated, fractal universes piling upon each other may make sense)
You're probably picturing the inside 3D sphere, but it would actually be the surface of a 4D sphere. Just like how Earth doesn't have an "edge", if you walk in a straight line you just end up where you started, so there's nothing to "push" at all
Yep, just read some stuff on Quora about 4D spheres, and still don't get it 🤷♂️
You have an edge on the Earth, both above and below, i can't imagine the material part of the All circling upon itself, how would you visualise from outside ?
I still see an edge with an hypersphere, well, w/e, thanks for the answer anyway :) !
So Isaac Brock has been right for like 20 years? "The universe is shaped exactly like the earth. If you go straight long enough you end up where you were."