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

Post by ZeroGravitas » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 8:32 AM UTC

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…

Post by frobozz » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 8:40 AM UTC

Post by Nick_C » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 9:28 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…

Post by resdirector » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 10:06 AM UTC

TamDenholm wrote: post #86

I've no idea if this is true or not (probably not due to where i heard it) but a poll was taken in the US about foreign aid. 68% said that too much was spent on foreign aid, 59% said they thought it should be cut. Thus 9% think foreign aid is too high but shouldn't be cut. It isnt so much this specific example, but i bet pollsters get this kind of thing all the time, which i find fascinating. Bonus points if you know…

Post by listic » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 10:45 AM UTC

rsaarelm wrote: post #107

You can represent any book, any image or any sound with a large number. You can set up a cipher where anyone can write you messages using publicly available information, but only you can read them. Human DNA is essentially a digital code, has a finite number of bits, and is smaller than data sets which we routinely manipulate today. Every known way of making meaningful computations can be represented in a formal syst…