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?

#71

Post by absolut_todd » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:06 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #30

RealGeek wrote: post #28

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…

If you're interested in this theory there is a novel worth reading that covers this ground, almost from first principles. 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.

so THATS what it was all about!!!!

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

#72

Post by etherael » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:10 AM UTC

russellallen wrote: post #5

The most mind-blowing things in my life have mostly not been facts.

Ok, I'll bite. What have they been?

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

#73

Post by podperson » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:10 AM UTC

Cantor's diagonal argument -- proof that the Real numbers are more infinite than the Integers (or Naturals). Slightly more mind-blowing than the algebraics are no bigger than the naturals.

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

#74

Post by podperson » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:11 AM UTC

AndrewO wrote: post #17

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…

Whoops just said the exact same thing.

OK how about the Axiom of Choice?

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

#75

Post by known » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:15 AM UTC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin in Japan

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

#76

Post by astrofinch » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:15 AM UTC

This doesn't answer you're question, but I'm really impressed that someone was clever enough to invent hash tables. Lagrange interpolation is also something I'm not sure I could have invented.

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

#77

Post by dmfdmf » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:19 AM UTC

For me it is the fact that all life appears to have originated from one common ancestor and that life appeared fairly quickly after the earth formed and that there is an unbroken chain of life between me and that first molecule that replicated and transformed itself using energy from its environment.

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

#78

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:23 AM UTC

The second time I read Cryptonomicon, the implications of evolution finally dawned on me -- I have an unbroken line of ancestry stretching back 4 billion years. Most of my ancestors weren't even human...

(http://www.sffworld.com/authors/s/stephenson_neal/excerpts/c..., bottom of page)

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

#79

Post by philwelch » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:24 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #55

danielrm26 wrote: post #49

Over half of people in the U.S. don't believe in evolution.

It depends how you define "don't believe". They might say they don't believe in evolution, but that doesn't mean they act in ways that are logically congruent with evolution being false.

Most people don't act in ways that are logically congruent with all their beliefs. You're lucky if their beliefs are consistent with each other.

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

#80

Post by mkramlich » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 5:32 AM UTC

WillyF wrote: post #44

"Michigan’s forests yielded more money and created more millionaires than did all the gold mined during California’s Gold Rush." It may not be the most mind-blowing fact I've heard in my life, but it's one of my favorites. It shows how much a good story can change perceptions.

And those trees can grow back. The gold underground won't.

(Yes it takes much longer for a new tree to grow to replace a chopped down one, but still. It's much more renewable than gold.)