Science stuff that blew your mind when you first heard of it

[Pinkamena]

We all know that science is a wonderful thing, but are there certain things that amazed you when you were first made aware of it?
For me, its black holes. I was rather young when I heard about it, and the notion that something can be so massive that not even light escapes really captivated me. A while after, when I was about 8 years, my father let me borrow some of his books on astronomy, which is probably one of the reasons I got into physics.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle] is also something that boggles my mind. If you are not familiar with it, its basically a result of quantum mechanics. It's a "law" that puts an upper limit to how precise we can measure both the momentum and position of a particle. If we know the velocity of a particle with zero uncertainty, we have can have absolutely no knowledge of its position, it could literally be anywhere in the universe. And that's not because we don't have good enough system of measure, it's an intrinsic property of matter. It allows for such wonderful and mind-blowing things like virtual particle pairs and quantum tunneling [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling].

 

[JoJo]

Damn, ninja'd by the OP, when I saw the thread title I immediately thought "uncertainty principle"

Okay, got to add finding out that birds are almost certainly descended from dinosaurs, meaning from a cladistic point of view Dinosauria never really went extinct. Also considering there were a good number of feathered dinosaurs, chances are we would consider birds as a proper sub-group of dinosaur if the non-avian ones were still around today.

 

[Hoplon]

That a closed electrical circuit essentially creates an electron probability shell.

 

[Dinwatr]

There are three for me.

First, there are the walking bryozoan colonies. I'm more or less convinced that, given enough time to evolve, they'll become a new domain of organism. Each polyp in the colony acts like a cell in us, with some specialized in digestion, some in locomotion, some in reproduction, etc.


Second, there are walking crinoids. Up until I saw that video I had always considered crinoids to be kinda like trees--they're in the background, and stationary. Turns out now, they can up and walk away when they feel like it. Imagine seeing an ent in real life and you'll understand what I felt like.

Third, there are heterodontid dinosaurs. Not just heterodonts--but they had teeth that look like primitive horse teeth. And fangs. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. The teeth make sense, the body makes sense--but there's no way they should go together. But they do.

 

[Ljs1121]

Everything, really. Science fascinates me. I absolutely love learning about new advancements and findings, as well as postulates defined years ago which still hold true.

At best, I could narrow it down to one certain field, which would be astronomy. In my whole life, there hasn't been a fact relating to astronomy that I can remember reacting to with anything less than slack-jawed amazement.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

One thing that I found fascinating...

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

You'd think it would be very cold in space, but it isn't, that is to say, not as cold as some of the coldest places on Earth.

There's nothing in space, ergo, nothing to take heat away from your body. So you can, in theory, hold you breath and walk in space for a few moments, unscathed.

[sub]I heard this somewhere, so if I'm wrong, do tell me.[/sub]

 

[Popadoo]

Time Dilation.
You travel through time at a different rate to someone else depending on where you are, and how fast you're going.
THAT IS INSANE! We have to reset satellites every day because they're atomic clocks (very VERY precise clocks) are out of syncing with ours, due to being in a lower gravitational field.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Virtually any seemingly unintuitive organic chemistry reaction... pretty much...

When the penny drops... holy shit that's possible?! -_-

 

[Lucem712]

One thing that I found fascinating...

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

You'd think it would be very cold in space, but it isn't, that is to say, not as cold as some of the coldest places on Earth.

There's nothing in space, ergo, nothing to take heat away from your body. So you can, in theory, hold you breath and walk in space for a few moments, unscathed.

[sub]I heard this somewhere, so if I'm wrong, do tell me.[/sub]

I thought you would explode because its a vacuum (or some science-y gobble-y gook)? I'm probably wrong though. :\

My mind gets blown everytime I look at the formulas behind said theories

 

[Luftwaffles]

One thing that I found fascinating...

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

You'd think it would be very cold in space, but it isn't, that is to say, not as cold as some of the coldest places on Earth.

There's nothing in space, ergo, nothing to take heat away from your body. So you can, in theory, hold you breath and walk in space for a few moments, unscathed.

[sub]I heard this somewhere, so if I'm wrong, do tell me.[/sub]

not unscathed im sure. Your eardrums will burst, you become bloated, the moisture in your sinus evaporates and stuff

OT: we were made from stars.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

One thing that I found fascinating...

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

You'd think it would be very cold in space, but it isn't, that is to say, not as cold as some of the coldest places on Earth.

There's nothing in space, ergo, nothing to take heat away from your body. So you can, in theory, hold you breath and walk in space for a few moments, unscathed.

[sub]I heard this somewhere, so if I'm wrong, do tell me.[/sub]

not unscathed im sure. Your eardrums will burst, you become bloated, the moisture in your sinus evaporates and stuff

OT: we were made from stars.

Well, maybe not unscathed...

But certainly not dead

One thing that I found fascinating...

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

You'd think it would be very cold in space, but it isn't, that is to say, not as cold as some of the coldest places on Earth.

There's nothing in space, ergo, nothing to take heat away from your body. So you can, in theory, hold you breath and walk in space for a few moments, unscathed.

[sub]I heard this somewhere, so if I'm wrong, do tell me.[/sub]

I thought you would explode because its a vacuum (or some science-y gobble-y gook)? I'm probably wrong though. :\

My mind gets blown everytime I look at the formulas behind said theories

The human body is actually quite resistant to vacuum effects, it would take longer than you can hold your breath before it would become lethal.

 

[Vault101]

spacehsips technically don;t have to be aerodynamic...never even ocured to me

 

[Heronblade]

Quantum Entanglement.

By the time I heard of it, I was well familiar with the SOL limit on both energy and mass. Then I discover that certain paired particles are capable of "communicating" instantaneously, over any arbitrary distance

 

[Daystar Clarion]

You can walk in space without a suit and live.

I thought you would explode because its a vacuum (or some science-y gobble-y gook)? I'm probably wrong though. :\

not unscathed im sure. Your eardrums will burst, you become bloated, the moisture in your sinus evaporates and stuff

As always, QI is here to answer this rather pertinent question . . .

That's actually where I heard it from

Stephen Fry.

Educating the masses.

 

[mad825]

The double slit experiment.

Still gives me headaches today.

 

[BrassButtons]

A lot of things in science have that affect on me. I spent some time doing the Ice Hunters project at Galaxy Zoo, looking at pictures of space trying to find Kuiper Belt Objects. The pictures were black and white and kind of grainy, with little white dots being the KBOs and larger white cross-like things being stars. And every now and then I'd realize that the telescope that took the photo is on earth, and that image spans several billion light-years. It gave me an incredible sense of awe.

One of the first times I can recall getting that "wait, REALLY?!" feeling was when I learned about chemotrophs in high school. For my entire life up until then I had known that food chains all start with plants that get energy via photosynthesis. This was how the world worked. Chemotrophs proved that what I had held to be an irrefutable fact, wasn't.

 

[Quaxar]

Insects can breath under water, but not because they have gills because they don't. They breath oxygen through tubes that go directly to the organs and that have openings through the exoskeleton. Not only is each tiny tube part of the exoderm and as such has to be shed along with the exoskeleton during ecdysis but also water-dwelling insects have developed special structures like hair around those tube openings that creates some kind of oxygen bubble while they're under water.
Very clever now they can take a few breaths under water, yes? Oh, but that's just the tip!
Because each breath takes a bit of the oxygen away the oxygen's pressure in the bubble decreases and because of that oxygen will diffuse from the water back into the bubble, while CO2 diffuses into the surrounding due to its solubility.

Aquatic insects are fascinating animals.

 

[Jamieson 90]

Feynman's Formulation on particles and how they move, yep crazy just crazy. You'd think if you shot particles at a sheet with two holes in it then you'd get the same amount if you only had one hole right? Nope because particles go where they want when they want.

 

[Dryk]

Supersonic flow accelerates as it expands
White dwarfs explode because they don't expand with temperature
The limit of the observable universe is further away than the sections of the universe that are moving away at the speed of light

Time Dilation.
You travel through time at a different rate to someone else depending on where you are, and how fast you're going.
THAT IS INSANE! We have to reset satellites every day because they're atomic clocks (very VERY precise clocks) are out of syncing with ours, due to being in a lower gravitational field.

And you have to actively compensate for it with GPS clocks because otherwise you lose about 400m of accuracy every hour.

 

[thiosk]

Quantum Entanglement.

By the time I heard of it, I was well familiar with the SOL limit on both energy and mass. Then I discover that certain paired particles are capable of "communicating" instantaneously, over any arbitrary distance

Pretty much this.

I'm trying to entangle molecules with a probe microscope.

No luck so far.