A man can fast for more than a year without die
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
171–180 of 189 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#172I absolutely cannot psychologically deal with the Monty Haul paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem I've coded it multiple times in multiple programming languages as a cathartic exercise. Despite seeing the results obviously printed out in a console in front of me, I just can't handle it. I lose SAN just thinking about it.
If it makes you feel better, famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös didn't understand it either. One of his colleagues had to write a computer program simulating it before he accepted it to be true.
Not only him, the publication of the paradox in a column in Science (if memory serves me right) dragged thousands of condescending answers from top mathematicians (some of them apologized afterwards, including the one who called the journalist the goat of the paradox)
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#173I usually ask people to imagine they are putting a rope tight around the earth, following the equator (idealized sphere).
Then they add 1 meter to the rope (it is now longer by a meter) and spread it around the earth uniformly (it hovers above the earth, everywhere at the same distance from the earth)
Estimate that hovering distance.
Try yourself to estimate it, then make the calculation.
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#174A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).
Reminds me of doing chemistry labs at uni. You follow the experiment plan and get nothing like the expected result so you add big error bars and your result matches.
i remember getting a clear linear relationship once that as supposed to be a curve. Solution was error bars and a curve to match expectation. Pointless
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#175Black hole singularity is infinitely dense and zero size
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#176Electrons in a copper wire do not travel at the speed of electricity. Not even close. Electricity travels at nearly the speed of light. Electrons themselves travel like molasses: "In the case of a 12 gauge copper wire carrying 10 amperes of current (typical of home wiring), the individual electrons only move about 0.02 cm per sec or 1.2 inches per minute (in science this is called the drift velocity of the electrons.…
For AC, they move back as well. Thus electrons move less than 4µm from their original place (excluding Brownian movement, I assume)
Another mindblower: you can chuck a capacitor at the other end and you’ve got a circuit with one wire!
Hence you can get shocks from one live wire.
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#177Science doesn't "prove" hypotheses - it disproves them. For this to work, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. Most pseudoscience (and religion) makes non-falsifiable claims, meaning they are incompatible with scientific discourse. This simple observation is a powerful tool in any bullshit-detection kit. Once produced, a scientific hypothesis of any merit will be attacked vigorously with experiments until enough parties…
You're correct in the sense that this is what science is per Popperian definition. However, I would be careful to assume that many scientists are actually so busy refuting hypotheses. The Popperian ideal and the reality in science are two different things. To cite a paper I currently read: > "As Chalmers (1999) remarks, when we turn to history of science, the idea that falsificationism is actively undertaken borders…
I had Alan Chalmers as a teacher once. An interesting man.
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#178It never fails to amuse me that any pressure or force that we intuitively feel is "pulled" by a vacuum, is only caused by air pressure on the other sides of an object. When you see something hanging from a suction cup in your kitchen or bathroom, it's fun to imagine that the air around you is hammering the suction cup enough to keep it stuck there. With quite some force you'll notice, if you try to pull it straight o…
Wow, I never thought about that before. So, if you could draw a vacuum in your whole kitchen or bathroom, would the suction cup fall down?
Yes.
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#179You always weigh less in the morning compared to the previous night because you have exhaled carbon atoms from your body!
Isn't most of reason you weigh less in the morning than at night due to the amount of water weight you have lost while sleeping.
Re: Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?
#180Exactly anything you can think of can be represented as a segment of pi's infinite decimal expansion.
That's assuming pi is a normal number, which has not been proven.