For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
Tides are a phenomenon where the height of the edge of a body of water shifts relative to the shore. A phenomenon is a thing. Why should explaining its cause in those terms have any effect on that?
I’m confused: you say there’s no such thing as tides, and then explain what tides are?
- Moon pulls the earth.
- Earth pulls away from moon due to centrifugal force.
- In the center of the earth it pulls the earth with the exact same force as the centrifugal force.
- On the side closer to the moon the gravity is more than centrifugal force.
- So water get’s pulled towards the moon or “upwards” from earth’s perspective.
- That’s high tide.
- On the other side centrifugal force is more than gravity.
- On the other side it’s the same thing except gets pulled away from the moon.
So since it’s pulled on both sides of the earth water is essentially “lighter” and on the sides it’s “heavier” if that makes sense. The water flows from the heavier places to the lighter places like down a small slope due to gravity.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I understand how tides work; the source of my confusion is the person I replied to both stating that they don’t exist and explaining how they work, which is mutually contradictory: if they don’t exist, how can they work at all?
The sun could’ve gone nova 8 minutes ago and we wouldn’t know for another 20 seconds or so.
Interesting fact: the sun becomes 1 million tons lighter every second.
Lighter or brighter?
The ton is not a unit of brightness
Yes.
I might be misremembering but I believe our sun can’t go nova, it’s too small. It will, however, expand and swallow the Earth towards the end of its life.
When exactly would that be? I gotta add it to my calendar.
Don’t worry, your calendar doesn’t go that far
The Sun is not a big enough star to ever go nova. Neither are any of our close neighbors. We’re pretty safe from that kind of disaster.
Earth is just gonna slowly cook to a cinder and probably get swallowed when the Sun starts expanding in a couple billion years.
Fine! Geez.
Space aliens could teleport in next to sun, fling a bunch of Star Trek red matter at it like Spock did to the Romulan star, destabilize the star, and cause a, I think it was a black hole? where the star was. And we wouldn’t know for 8-ish minutes.
Well, we’d know by now
37 minutes later…still here.
Any moment now! Hopefully…
Here’s one: Iron doesn’t have a smell. It acts as a catalyst in the reaction of bodily fluids or skin oils, which is why you can’t smell coins after washing them
A solid that isn’t undergoing any sort of chemical reaction isn’t going to smell because there isn’t anything to smell. You need a molecule to enter your nose to smell. That’s my basic understanding, someone smarter than I can explain it better.
Also I’m not sure any country still uses iron for coins.
Iron would be a terrible metal for coinage, since it would shed rust all over everything after being handled. Some coins might be cast from iron (if it’s cheaper than alternatives, idk) but plated in other metals to prevent that.
Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
Can you elaborate on the math here? (I believe you, I just want to understand the simulation parameters better).
Not OP, but this website should explain everything.
Thanks! This article really clears up a lot of the details that help the simulation make sense.
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Also, in this simulation are the customers arriving in equally spaced intervals or is random arrival time within the bounds assumed?
Assume the bank opens up to a long line and it makes sense.
Intuitive way to see why is that 6.1 customers per hour would mean infinite waiting time (when it reaches a steady state)
The combustion engine. I know technically it’s not but ultimately we as humans found a way to harness the power of explosions and make them do our bidding. honestly, one of humanity’s finer achievements. yes, it’s not without its barbs like emissions, but that’s a small price to pay for the workload any vehicle can provide.
We can’t touch objects, ever. Most of the space “occupied” by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I’m not willing to go down), and when we “touch” an object, it’s just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It’s the same reason why we don’t fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
That’s just semantics. For any real definition of “touch”, we do touch objects.
“to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with (something) to feel it”
The electromagnetic fields of your hand come in contact with those of the object, and you feel it.
It’s taking semantics from one frame of reference and trying to apply them in the frame of reference of an entirely different scale, realizing that it doesn’t work the same way, and then claiming that it is therefore “wrong”.
“So what I’m trying to say, your honor, is that no, I did not inappropriately touch this child”
So how does cutting an apple in half work? The knife must be touching the apple to cut it, right?
The apple was never whole… it was simply tightly grouped and a subgroup has been severed from another
And it was severed by a thin slice of atoms that used their force field as a wedge to force them apart.
You can kind of visualize it as wire EDM manufacturing. Although not a fully accurate depiction, but it fractures the connection between the two sides.
That analogy relies on the reader having any idea what wire EDM manufacturing is. ;) Not exactly an everyday topic.
Don’t know if it’s bizarre but I was shocked when I found out I’d been lied to my whole life… a leap year isn’t every 4 years.
So leap years happen when the year is divisible by 4, but not when the year is divisible by 100 but then they do again when the year is divisible by 400.
So the year 2000 is a perfect example of the exception to the exception. Divisible by 100 so no leap year, but divisible by 400 so leap year back on…
No one (!) alive today experienced a year divisible by 4 that was not a leap year. The oldest living person was born in 1907.
quite a few people alive today might be around to experience 2100, though
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It’s amazing that they calculated it down to that detail in the 1700s. Before that they were just a hares breath off for 1000 years (Julian calender -> Gregorian calender). It became a real issue for the church that the start of spring didn’t align with the calendar anymore, and they needed to know exactly when Easter was to be held.
It why George Washington is credited with 2 birthdays, depends on which calender you’re going by. I think Russia was the last major country to adopt it.
But the earth is flat and pyramids=aliens. Uh huh. Yup.
FYI it’s “hair’s breadth”
Y’know, I stopped on it when I was typing and thought to double check, but I figured if I wrote it out intentionally wrong I’d get corrected.
I do appreciate it, tho, no joke. Thank you
Also when the leap years were introduced, the priests (who were to take care of the calendar) didn’t understand what dis “every four years” mean, and used to put a leap year every three years.
And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to four, no more, no less. Four shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be four. Five shalt thou not count, neither count thou three, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Six is right out. Once the number four, being the fourth number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.”
It’s interesting that the following centuries all calculate correctly, maybe fixed along with y2k
Similar metal in the human body one, Vitamin B12 has cobalt in it. Absolutely wild. I guess that’s not really commonly known but it’s still worth mentioning
May I ask what is special about cobalt in B12 specifically? I’ve come to realize there are numerous inorganic substances inside my body like copper, gold etc. so cobalt by itself doesn’t really stand out anymore.
Cobalt by itself is toxic and damages the nervous system.
Interesting
I think your idea of what is organic or inorganic is a little off. Organic things can and do involve metals and gases in various forms. According to wikipedia, “About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.” These are elements that also appear in minerals and other rocks, but that doesn’t mean the same elements can’t be in organic compounds. Everything is made of all the same stuff on the periodic table, organic or inorganic.
huh, thank you for leading me to find out about organocobalt compounds, and complicate my understanding of organic/inorganic chemistry. I still that fits the simple definition of “organic” = “contains carbon” that most chemists would use, though.
Time relativity always boggles my brain, I accept the fact but I find crazy that if I strap my twin and his atomic clock to a rocket and send them out to the stratosphere at the speed of light, when they return he’ll be younger than me and his clock will be running behind mine. Crazy
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This doesn’t make it any less crazy
Here’s something I just ran into looking stuff up for my comment: GN-z11 is one of the farthest galaxies we’ve ever seen. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, at a distance of over 30 billion light-years, it has to be moving away from us at over twice the speed of light.
What the fuck does that mean, temporally? Like, forget the speed of light, time dilation has to do with space and relative speeds. If I’m moving at near the speed of light relative to you, then my clock will physically tick more slowly. What happens if I’m moving over twice the speed of light? Is the real life GN-z11 in our reference frame moving backwards in time at over twice the rate we’re moving forward?
From my understanding, this is caused by the universe itself expanding between the 2 objects, not that the object itself is moving that speed relative to us. It’s still completely insane to think about, either way.
It’s even crazier because you don’t need to reach the speed of light. It’ll happen in a smaller degree for any speed. Even in mundane conditions.
For example, if your twin spent four days in a 300km/h bullet train, for you it would be four days plus a second.
Usually this difference is negligible, but for satellites (that run at rather high speeds, for a lot of time, and require precision), if you don’t take time dilation into account they misbehave.
(For anyone wanting to mess with the maths, the formula is Δt’ = Δt / √[1 - v²/c²]. Δt = variation of time for the observer (you), Δt’ = variation of time for the moving entity (your twin), v = the moving entity’s speed, c = speed of light. Just make sure that “v” and “c” use the same units.)
Yes I knew about that and I’m glad that doesn’t make it crazier for me, instead it makes it easier to accept. If it were something that happened only after hitting some arbitrary speed value I’d be a lot more mentally damaged
To be fair the only ones that don’t get mentally damaged at all with this stuff are theoretical physicists. After all being crazy makes you immune to further madness.
Probably one of the most memorable and pivotal moments in my life was when my college professor showed us the origins of relativity and how Einstein came to the conclusion that E = mc^2
It’s a proof that only took about 10 minutes to explain, and the mathematics really aren’t that difficult to understand by most people. The geniuses in the fact that Einstein started by explaining how calculating relative motion meant that time had to be a variable that could be different depending on who the observer was. This in itself is an incredible observation, but you can take this to the extent to literally prove that mass and energy are directly related to each other. It’s absolutely wild and one of the most sublime equations ever made.
I wish we could test this out with only simple apparatus. Unfortunately the common people do not have access to satellites or nonstop bullet trains.
From what I understand, you are always travelling at the speed of light through space/time, but when you move at high speeds through space that shifts the proportion of your speed out of the time dimension. And a photon travels only through space, experiencing no time between the time it was emitted and the time it was absorbed. What I just can’t wrap my head around is the concept of travelling at some speed without involving the time dimension at all.
there’s people that don’t like music.
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Can you tolerate it at least, or you get annoyed if it’s playing at an event/Uber/supermarket etc?
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I see. I totally get what you mean, it’s taken me years to learn how to tolerate a lot of music I don’t like. Thanks for sharing
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I have since changed my tune.
Ba-dum tsh
I thought my significant other was one of these to a certain extent. It does weird things to me as a DJ. Turns out that she just likes the limited music that she likes and cannot stand most everything else.
that just makes it easier to make a playlist with all their favorite songs.
Chipmunks and Avett Brothers, a playlist only rose colored glasses can help with.
As a person who was born liking music, I indeed find it too bizarre to believe to be true.
For me it’s not like I don’t like music, but there are large stretches of time, where I do not care so much for it. I would guess that I haven’t actively choosen to hear music for weaks, possibly months, now. Obviously excluding the music you can’t avoid, like background music in movies and video games etc.
I love music so much that i can admit that Silence speaks Volumes…i find the worst culprit to be advertisements. they play ‘classic hits’ when they really mean the top5 songs without consideration for any other of the artists 2nd or third tier bangers.
Honestly so much music is lost to the aether because soliciting has used it so much that a lot of people generally attach that relationship to music
How disappointing… Music can make you feel any which way you want, it’s like the perfect drug. once you find that one banger, you can’t stop. I spend a huge amount of my time on Music Discovery. It’s the same thrill you’d get from say, eating those jelly beans in harry potter; a lot of them are bad tasting but oooh boy when you find that magical flavor that hits you right in the feels? magnifico!
I know people that don’t have necessarily poor taste in music, but certainly underdeveloped. there is a reason most talented musicians will at one point make a ‘parody’ piece that will skyrocket to the charts. a lot of classical music pieces were made to be cheeky and ‘dumb’ but, people liked those songs so much it was a case of ‘the customer is always right’.
Concepts coming from quantium mechanics take you into a rabbit hole. 2022 Nobel winning experiment that proved universe is not locally real.
Can you elaborate on what that means? “Universe is not locally real”? How do we know what is real? What precisely does ‘local’ mean? Real relative to what?
Ok. I’m gonna give an example that will be slightly wrong if we nitpick, but it will give you an idea.
Lets take the old philosophical idea “if a tree falls in a forrest and theres nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?” and modify it for this example.
“If you are not there to observe will the tree in the forest fall?”
If you are not there to observe the tree will be in all possible states. Two notable states being “it has fallen” and “it is still standing” that exist simultaneously.
If you go in to the forest and observe, one of the states will randomly become your reality according to certain probability amplitude.
You don’t necessarily have to go in to the forest to observe the tree. You can send your buddy who will then tell you the state.
As your friend is returning back from his observation, there’s actually two friends walking back to you. He is “entangled” with the tree. When he opens his mouth, one of them is randomly selected as your reality.
Entity checking the state of the tree does not have to be a living consciousness. It can be a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with a particle, that interacts with you. You are not conscious of the trees state, but the information is delivered to you and for you there is now only one state for the tree.
So quantium level information is constantly delivered to you and your reality is weaving itself around you through this “decoherence”
now you see how my first two examples were false. Quantium decoherence is so much faster than you or your buddy, that you can only catch this mechanism at work on quantium level.
…and “local” basicly just means that the experiments result is true, as long as nothing can transfer information faster than light. So far nothing has.
Heard about it. I initially thought the universe should exist regardless whether someone is there to observe it or not…
…but then I also studied quantum mechanics, so I am not really in a position to say anything…
There’s a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren’t supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!
I’ve seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It’s an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it’s so far away.
“You look unhealthy! You should go stand in that really large room and absorb the radiation from that gigantic space-based fusion reactor more!”
You’re right, that sounds like a great idea.
I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn’t let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.
I had the same thought so I looked directly at it everyday during an hour at sunset for a year, it was intense and an interesting feeling, it is called sungazing.
Scientists look at it. That’s where they get all their sciencing from. The forbidden knowledges comes from the sun.
Using engine brakes can cause your car to not use fuel in some cases.
I’ve read and heard this from different sources (even driving instructors) and I don’t get how it’s possible. Your engine is still running, doesn’t it use at least as much as it does while it’s idling?
Edit: thank you all for your answers. I knew how the engine brake effect worked, my confusion was about exactly why the engine didn’t consume fuel in the process. I now understand so thanks all.
the inertia from the cars current speed is used to spin the engine rather than the engine spinning the wheels, the resistances of the engine is what causes the slowing effect
modern cars with fuel injection can complete disable injecting fuel when not needed and can also adjust the timing of the injections for maximum efficiency
Usually your engine uses fuel to turn your wheels.
When you engine brake, your wheels turn your engine.
The most difficult part lf stanrting a car is gettinf the pistons to move, if your engine still has inertia (if you are going downhill for example) you can completely cut the fuel injection and it can starts again because the pistons that are still moving will compress the gas (and for diesel engine that’s enough to ignite given enough temperature in the block, for gasoline the spark plugs will work as usual).
Of course if the engine has low inertia (it’s spinning too slowly) the car will stall, but probably the electronic injection will compensate.
If you drive manual you can go down a hill without burning a single drop of fuel, not sure if automatic are smart enough to do it.
The fuel injectors are off when engine braking. It is the momentum of the car that keeps the engine running/rotating. That is why you are slowing down more rapidly because you’re losing momentum into the engine.
It’s not putting fuel into the cylinders. So it’s spinning, but there are no explosions.
And don’t engine brake a two-stroke engine, as fuel is mixed with oil. No fuel, no oil… No more engine for you.
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they’re right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think “wow that’s pretty,” but every once in a while I let it hit me that I’m looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it’s, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they’re right there. I can point at one and say “look at that pretty star” and right now, a long distance away, it’s just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there’s life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It’s over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there’s more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
In the same vein, I like to remind myself that every field in physics is literally happening all around me, right now, and it always has been, in fact, I’ve never seen anything without these invisible fields in it and for some reason, that really makes me super aware of our place in the order of magnitudes.
It’s wild we can see so much further down than up.
You should try Space Engine. It’s a program to explore the universe, based on real telescope data. It also has the ability to procedurally generate galaxies, planets, and stars in unobserved parts of the universe.
What’s even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
That doesn’t seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.
Thinking about it further, if we’re talking about stars that we can see with telescopes, Hubble, James Webb etc, then you’re on the money. Stars in remote galaxies far outnumber the ones in our galaxy and show us glimpses of the early stages of the universe. And many of those stars are long gone
Not too sure where you got that number from. From what I can find, the radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years.
Edit: I see now that you are talking Galaxy. That’s different.
The original comment was about stars we can see in the sky, so I was assuming naked eye
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First time I saw Jupiter through a telescope I got hit hard by the feeling: “Oh shit, that giant monster is real”.
Samesies. You aren’t alone. We have a support group.
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I can really relate to this. I remember a weird night in my teens where I must’ve spent at least an hour staring out of my bedroom window at the moon, because really for the first time I’d had the exact same thought. It’s right there. It’s so easy to get desensitised to that and to just think of it all as an image projected on the sky. The thought has never really left me and even now I still linger on the moon every time I see it and try to acknowledge that it is a 3 dimensional object lol.
