21–30 of 159 posts
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.
What naturally followed was the realization that there are an infinite amount of things not yet solved or understood and I have the power to try to discover any bit of it.
*Hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium aside.
besides "you and everyone you know are going to die" at age 3, or "there is no santa claus" which logically led to "God is an imaginary friend for grown ups" at age 10. The fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling. http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introducti...
He showed me how small our sun is by showing me the tip of his cigarette and comparing it to the top of his coffee cup i.e. the size of larger stars in the universe.
I was about six years old and the universe suddenly became a drastically larger place.
Now it appears to be a [self] post.
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 —each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). It is also referred to as MWI, the relative state formulation, the Everett interpretation, the theory of the universal wavefunction, many-universes interpretation, or just many worlds.
Many-worlds claims to reconcile how we can perceive non-deterministic events, such as the random decay of a radioactive atom, with the deterministic equations of quantum physics. Prior to many-worlds, reality had been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, rather, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised.
This really blew my mind when I was six.
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…
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.