For me, it was the EPR/double slit experiment.
For me it was the delayed choice quantum eraser. Simply mind blowing!
What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#92When I was nine I was playing with BASIC and wrote a simple program that would enumerate all colors of all pixels on the screen. I wanted to see all possible images "fly by" so to speak. First I got frustrated because it was running so slowly, only then I started to think... If I can display a picture of a car on this monitor, then that picture would eventually also show up 'by chance' with my program! Mind blown. Th…
The infinite graphical design monkey theorem?
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#93Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#94Logic paradoxes always did (and still do) blow my mind: 1: The farther out in space you look, the farther back in time you are seeing. If you could look back all the way to the big bang, you would be looking (billions of miles away) at the inside of a universe about the size of a grape fruit (or whenever super-inflation was supposed to start). 2. You cannot move. In order to move between A and B, you must first move…
Forgive me but how is moving half way between two points not moving? Did you mean "You cannot arrive"?
I believe the idea is that the problem of moving is atomic. To move, you must know how to move (assuming the world is not discrete).
It is the same as "you cannot arrive", except in reverse. Or that "you cannot rotate one of two parallel lines", because the jump from parallel to intersecting is elusive.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#95I'm Italian, born and raise there. I moved here in Florida 5 years ago. My ex-girlfriend is American, born and raise here. One day I met her best friend from college (he lives here in Florida as well), and he told me that his father was Italian. When he told me his lastname, I told him that I know people with the same last name from my grandfather's hometown, so I asked him to ask his father where he is from. We ende…
Along those lines: * I bumped into a girl that I went to South Eugene High School with at the train station here in Padova, Italy. We were even on the same train. I was quite literally speechless for a moment or two. * I worked with a person in San Francisco whose dad had known my dad and uncle in the same small town in Montana.
I accidentally alt tabbed to a tail of a kernel log where a packet hit the wire at the exact moment that I accidentally alt tabbed. The IP address looked weird to me for some reason so I reverse resolved it and traced it, it belonged to the first ISP I'd ever used, I ran an nmblookup on the machine name and it was my first girlfriend's computer name.
Utterly freaked out I contacted her via IM, not having actually known how to do that and not having spoken to her for a very long time and verified that it was indeed her ip address and she was indeed at that computer, but she had absolutely no idea how I had managed to ascertain that fact and was about as freaked out as I was by the episode.
We talked for many hours before it finally dawned on me exactly what had happened.
On the exact day that I had been checking firewall rules on my laptop with kernel packet logging enabled, at the exact second that I had accidentally alt tabbed to a terminal window that was tailing said packet log, she had done a search on napster for a song that I happened to have.
This is very much the weirdest coincidence I've ever experienced in my life thus far.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#96The top for me would be boltzmann brains - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Better to read the wiki article, since I might not do it justice. A self conscious being might pop into existence based on random fluctuation.
Other Top contenders for me are: 1. Zeno's Paradox - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes
2. Birthday Paradox - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox
3. Twin's Paradox- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox
4. Monty Hall Problem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem
5. Stanford Prison Experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison
6. Asch Conformity Experiment - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
7. Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority figures - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
8. Placebo and Nocebo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
9. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Most people don't act in ways that are logically congruent with all their beliefs."
Do they really believe them then? Is there any reason not to say that a belief, by definition, is something (among other things) that you act logically consistently with.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#98I am made of parts. 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.
"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.
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#99[deleted]
Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
#100this place is so becoming reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m... lame.
It was originally a link to the reddit thread.
I assume you're the one that edited it?
With the link we're ostensibly talking about them, without it we're reduced to their level, and just having the same adolescent discussion again. Editing out the link makes HN more like reddit.