Mind boggling facts that make you go..
- Thread starter Merlin5
- Start date
Soldato
If you sneeze while doing a pee, the stream will stop involuntarily.
Soldato
Did you know that there are no Dutch elms left in Britain? Completely wiped out. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.
Soldato
That's an old Dorothy Parker line. The original was "If every girl at that party were laid end to end..." Another of Ms. Parker's: "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Understanding Quantum Physics is simple. Just accept it and don't attempt reconcile it with anything you know. It's the attempting to connect it to everything else that makes you crazy.
Well okay, the maths is pretty horrifying too. But at least that doesn't drive you mad.
This the one that always gets me with open airlocks etc in space dramas.
There would be none of this hanging on with one hand while you operate the emergency close with the other. All the air would be gone in a flash.
That depends very much on the size of the aperture and the size of the air pocket it is bridging. The classic example if Aliens. That ship is HUGE. It's entirely plausible that it would be blowing out through the airlock for a sustained period of time.
I weep that without looking this up I cannot be certain it isn't true.
Correct. Your mass remains the same but your weight reduces. Or to be clearer, your weight begins to point in opposite directions.
Caporegime
"given a big enough piece of paper" ?
how about a piece of paper the size of the universe, then you don't even need to fold it at all...lol
That totally defeats the purpose of the whole thing, big enough piece of paper...
Man of Honour
this one is mind boggling.
If you could take all the empty space out of a human being, every human who has ever lived could fit in something the size of a sugar cube.
If you could take all the empty space out of a human being, every human who has ever lived could fit in something the size of a sugar cube.
I knew it
Permabanned
How about the empty space between your ears, you just made that up didn't you ?
Soldato
Days of the week are derived from norse/viking gods. Thursday= thors day.
Man of Honour
On a plane? I don't know. How accurate does GPS have to be on a plane? The GPS system itself requires frequent compensation for time dilation. The time dilation effect is extremely small when comparing a GPS satellite to the surface of Earth, but GPS relies on very accurate timing and would lose accuracy pretty badly without frequent compensation.
Time dilation is bizarre. It's proven in multiple ways, measurable and is precisely as predicted by the theories of relativity...but it's bizarre.
Man of Honour
He probably didn't and it might be sort of true in a sense.
If you think of subatomic particles as physical objects like marbles, then virtually all of the volume of a person (or anything else with the same density) is empty. Generally speaking, there's a vast distance between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom and a vast distance between atoms (compared with the size of a subatomic particle). If you just had the particles jammed together touching each other and packed as tightly as possible, then yeah, maybe all the particles from every human who ever lived would be as small as a sugar cube. I don't know off the top of my head, but it would certainly be tiny.
In English, they're a mix of Norse, Teutonic, Roman and astronomical:
Sun's Day
Moon's Day
Tiw's Day
Woden's Day
Thor's Day
Frig's Day
Saturn's Day
The original naming was all Roman, since the idea of a week of 7 days is Roman. You can still see this to a larger extent in Romance languages, e.g. in French Tuesday to Friday retain the names of the Roman gods (Mars, Mercury, Juno and Venus).
EDIT: I might be wrong about the mix of Norse and Teutonic. I can never remember which is which. Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frig might all be from one or the other.
And some more stuff added on...not mind-boggling but I think an interesting example of the mixture of superstition and practicality of ancient Roman culture:
There was a superstition that if a married woman tripped entering her marital home for the first time after getting married, it would bring bad luck for some unknown reason. Rather than just saying "that's a silly superstition and we don't even know why it exists, let's just forget about it", the solution to the "problem" was for someone to carry her.
I haven't checked that so don't take my word for it, but I think it's plausible. Superstition and practicality went hand in hand in ancient Rome in many ways.
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thats not true
When will light be able to travel through these empty spaces and why doesn't light go through these empty spaces making objects transparent?
That is actually a good question.
The empty spaces are filled with incredibly powerful and complex electric fields.
Sometimes light can pass through them (EG Glass) sometimes it cant (Steel)
But you have to remember that there is no such thing as light. It is just EM radiation. some configurations of electric field will allow certain wavebands of EM radiation to pass unhindered, some wont
I am sure that somebody will come along with a better explanation. But this is really no different as to why microwaves can pass through (non-transparent) plastic but are blocked by (Transparent) Water
its all about the electrons - metals have a huge delocalised layer of electrons and so they absorb a very broad range of em radiation (but not all as you said, especially the higher energy waves).
edit - actually i've realised i haven't mentioned scattering and ordered scattering (reflection) - the huge electric field changes when hitting a metal causes some em radiation to be physically bounced off, hence metals being reflective (to visible em radiation in particular but also other wavelengths). Its a bit complicated.
edit2 - actually a more accurate description would be that the electron band in the metal absorbs the photon (so it is effectively destroyed), but because the electrons have no electronic transition that can dissipate the energy it is forced to create another photon and spit it back out at the angle of incidence. Because no transition has occurred the emitted photon is of the same wavelength. Maybe a physicist can explain it better - organic molecules and their absorption is more my area.
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