What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#11

Post by fletchowns » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 1:38 AM UTC

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

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#12

Post by texel » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:23 AM UTC

For me, it was the EPR/double slit experiment.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#13

Post by alexophile » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:26 AM UTC

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:

http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-lo...

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#14

Post by vyrotek » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:27 AM UTC

That the Minecraft creator was at one point making $250k a day.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#15

Post by alexophile » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:27 AM UTC

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:

http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-lo...

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#16

Post by CamperBob » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:39 AM UTC

Avshalom wrote: post #10

btilly wrote: post #6

My favorite isn't there. 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'…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field_hi... 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 mo…

And this is the result of pointing the telescope at the darkest, loneliest spot in the sky they could find!

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#17

Post by AndrewO » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:40 AM UTC

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#18

Post by istari » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:42 AM UTC

My boss was doing an internship at Intel, and didn't have time to verify the floating point unit because he had to go back to school.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#19

Post by mquander » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:43 AM UTC

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.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#20

Post by Avshalom » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 2:44 AM UTC

CamperBob wrote: post #16

Avshalom wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field_hi... 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 mo…

And this is the result of pointing the telescope at the darkest, loneliest spot in the sky they could find!

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

"Well, I have to live forever now."