Things to think about that blow your mind.

[Doclector]

I'm not sleeping very well tonight for unknown reasons, and naturally, this is a time to think. A lot.

Stuff like..."What is reality?"

Spoiler: lengthy, 5 AM rambles about schrodinger's entire goddamn world

Here's the thing. You could say that reality is whatever is "real", whatever is there in the world, but how do we know what's there? We sense it. We look at it, touch it, smell it, whatever. We percieve it, and that is the only real proof we have that it's real.

But what is it when you look away? Is it there at all? When a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound?

But let's go wilder than that. I'm looking at my DVDs. Among them, there is a band of brothers boxset, and a futurama boxset. How do I know that when I look away, the futurama boxset is the band of brothers boxset and vise versa? How do I know they haven't switched discs already and they're only in the right boxes when I open said box? How do I know that the moment I look away, both boxes won't transform into miniature purple giraffes?

Science would say that this wouldn't happen, because there is no logical reason for it to. But science is founded on evidence, and without anyone observing it, there is no proof to say the above things have not happened, are not happening, and will never happen, and you cannot possibly observe something forever.

You could say it doesn't really matter, as you'll never percieve this happening, but still, mindblowing to think that just outside your field of vision, everything's going goddamn nuts and you'll never know because you'll never percieve it happening. I think if you thought about that too much, you'd eventually go mad from not "really" knowing what anything is anymore.

So, what things blow your mind every time you think about them?

EDIT: Wow, that made so much more sense when I was sleep deprived at five in the morning.

 

[Keoul]

I never liked people that thought that way, it seemed rather egocentric to me.
It's like they believe the world revolves around them and when they turn away everything changes, things are only as they are because of them perceiving it as they are. It's certainly possible but so is every human spontaneously turning into carrots, possible but ridiculously unlikely.

Anyway, as for things that blow my mind. People, that's about it.

 

[Atlys]

You want stuff that will blow your mind? This made actual mini explosions go off in my head. You have been warned.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/c9dc71def0f9a011eed5fe1efa99547d/tumblr_mkr9fogv441r6embzo1_500.png
All the cartoon theories like this one rock my world. Except for the dumb ones.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

You want stuff that will blow your mind? This made actual mini explosions go off in my head. You have been warned.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/c9dc71def0f9a011eed5fe1efa99547d/tumblr_mkr9fogv441r6embzo1_500.png
All the cartoon theories like this one rock my world. Except for the dumb ones.

LOL i remember seeing this before, it did blow a couple fuses in a "wha...wait.WHAT.HOW DID I NEVER SEE THIS BEFORE?"

OT:

mine is pretty boring:

Spoiler

just space and time in general, i think about the expanding universe on a multigalactic scale over time, and i see how insignificant and tiny we are on the timeline, and i think about all the other things that are happening in the universe at this time (this isn't even bringing up blackholes/wormholes/multiverse stuff) and i just can't help but feel so small, and how much i WANT to know about the universe but it won't happen due to time and how so many things in the sky have already happened due to how we perceive time/light. example:

http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/clark107images/image14.html

like i understand all the physics behind it, but like i said, it just makes me feel so small knowing that what we see, is probably no longer true and that a bunch of those stars have either already exploded or who knows what. the galaxy seems like such a defeating place rather than a place for life to thrive, and to me, that is scary.

edit: also this, this just...it blows my mind a bit.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110501183605.htm

i mean, i love it, but man it'll be interesting to see what comes of this stuff in the future.

 

[Arakasi]

You want stuff that will blow your mind? This made actual mini explosions go off in my head. You have been warned.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/c9dc71def0f9a011eed5fe1efa99547d/tumblr_mkr9fogv441r6embzo1_500.png
All the cartoon theories like this one rock my world. Except for the dumb ones.

That is actually rather mind-blowing. I was surprised, I expected to come into this thread expecting the kind of crap that the OP had. Though I bet you there is at least one episode that disproves this theory.

 

[Doclector]

I never liked people that thought that way, it seemed rather egocentric to me.
It's like they believe the world revolves around them and when they turn away everything changes, things are only as they are because of them perceiving it as they are. It's certainly possible but so is every human spontaneously turning into carrots, possible but ridiculously unlikely.

Anyway, as for things that blow my mind. People, that's about it.

I didn't mean just me, I mean when NOBODY is watching something. It's not being observed, by camera or in person. How would we ever know?

 

[BrassButtons]

Geology can get pretty mind-blowing if you think about it. Just the timescales are incredible--the entirety of human history is considered short. We have rocks that formed, eroded down into sediment, created layers, and were turned into sedimentary rock. And that rock is millions of year old, meaning the process had to start a ridiculously long time ago.

And then you can add paleontology into the mix, which let's you hold the bones of creatures that died before the continents broke apart.

 

[Keoul]

I didn't mean just me, I mean when NOBODY is watching something. It's not being observed, by camera or in person. How would we ever know?

Again that's still silly since now instead of the world revolving around you, it's the world revolving around the human race only. Believing that humans are "special" in that we affect the entire universe by simply perceiving it seems ridiculous to me.

 

[Faelix]

I didn't mean just me, I mean when NOBODY is watching something. It's not being observed, by camera or in person. How would we ever know?

Again that's still silly since now instead of the world revolving around you, it's the world revolving around the human race only. Believing that humans are "special" in that we affect the entire universe by simply perceiving it seems ridiculous to me.

It's the good old "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it. Does it make a sound?" question.

It can get you thinking, because sound, as we perceive it is a transcription of waves in the atmosphere, turned into "sound" by our brains. Sound waves are not sound, it is our brains as the receiver of these mathematical waves of displacement, that has invented sound. Letting us differentiate between many different wave amplitudes and lengths.

So the perceiver of things is you. And the creator of these perceptions is also you. And without you things exist in a minimal, almost mathematical state.

In computergames, 3d worlds, the games draw only what we see. We can turn around and see other things, but the GPU draws them the moment we decide to look at them. And the drawing doesn't exist when we have our back turned. So in a regard, modern age inventions have brought the old question back. As computers get more and more advanced and virtual reality becomes more and more like real reality. How will we react to knowing the virtual reality is what we call illusion, but real reality is not we say. Maybe we will one day start to question reality again, like the ancient greek philosophers.

 

[krazykidd]

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood!

But woodchucks don't chuck wood!

OT: nothing really , i'm not knowledgable enough in ANYTHING to have my mind blown . I'm dumb as bricks .

 

[Groxnax]

You want stuff that will blow your mind? This made actual mini explosions go off in my head. You have been warned.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/c9dc71def0f9a011eed5fe1efa99547d/tumblr_mkr9fogv441r6embzo1_500.png
All the cartoon theories like this one rock my world. Except for the dumb ones.

WHOA!!!

Where did you find that freaky little tidbit of mindblowing info?

I just want to know.

 

[Angie7F]

My mind gets blown quite easily, but one of the things that recur in my life is "how the hell did a person make software like photoshop?".
Even excel makes me amazed and I think there should be a international holiday for the people that developed softwares like that.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Mine is fairly boring. You know how you look back at yourself 10, 15 years ago, and realise you were completely wrong about so many things? Another 10,15 years and you'll be doing teh same with what you are now.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Geology can get pretty mind-blowing if you think about it. Just the timescales are incredible--the entirety of human history is considered short. We have rocks that formed, eroded down into sediment, created layers, and were turned into sedimentary rock. And that rock is millions of year old, meaning the process had to start a ridiculously long time ago.

And then you can add paleontology into the mix, which let's you hold the bones of creatures that died before the continents broke apart.

Actually its only minerals that took the place of the creatures tissues through Permineralization, very little (if any) of the original creature remains.

But yeah it's amazing.

I find the stars to mind blowing, those little specks are a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength generating untold amounts of energy which even at the speed of light, will take thousands of years to reach Earth.
And that's just for our galaxy, (which happens to contain between 200 and 400 billion stars) The Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture images of galaxy's over 13.2 billion light years away, that's twice the age of our own sun. When you look up at the stars, you are literally looking into the universes past.

 

[Jonluw]

Matter is fundamentally made up of particles that we consider mathematical points. That is to say they have no dimensions. The amount of space they take up is zero, both in width, length, and depth.
[sub]This is, incidentally, why physicists have no problem imagining that the universe was at one point condensed into a single point.[/sub]

Solidity is a macroscopic concept which stops making sense when we look at the universe on the quantum level. "Solid" objects that exist in more than zero dimensions are merely the macroscopic results of the forces working between the aforementioned mathematical points.

Google entangled photons and electron self-interference.

 

[The Funslinger]

Will your answer to this question be no?

 

[The_Echo]

Over the past few months, I've had a lot of time and a lot of late nights. I'd almost always get to the questions that make my stomach sink, my heart stop, my brain... do brain things.

I don't think so much as I wonder. I pose questions to which I have no answer, could have no answer.

Spoiler: I have become very jaded to these now that I've posed them to myself so many times

"What was before the universe?"

"Is there something beyond the universe? What is it expanding into?"

"Does God exist? If so, why? How? Since when, and why bother creating anything at all?"

"What happens, truly, when we die? Why do we have consciousness, if there's no greater point to it?"

"How did it happen that everything just... worked out. Why is it that everything in the physical, observable world can be explained, has been explained? Why does everything work?"

"Why does existence exist?"

I've resolved to just spending my nights watching sitcom reruns instead.

 

[Sanshou]

Matter is fundamentally made up of particles that we consider mathematical points. That is to say they have no dimensions. The amount of space they take up is zero, both in width, length, and depth.
[sub]This is, incidentally, why physicists have no problem imagining that the universe was at one point condensed into a single point.[/sub]

Solidity is a macroscopic concept which stops making sense when we look at the universe on the quantum level. "Solid" objects that exist in more than zero dimensions are merely the macroscopic results of the forces working between the aforementioned mathematical points.

Google entangled photons and electron self-interference.

Thanks for that video, thought it was really straightforward for a non-physicist to be mindblown by.

 

[Mirthen]

I didn't mean just me, I mean when NOBODY is watching something. It's not being observed, by camera or in person. How would we ever know?

Again that's still silly since now instead of the world revolving around you, it's the world revolving around the human race only. Believing that humans are "special" in that we affect the entire universe by simply perceiving it seems ridiculous to me.

I know what you mean, but I think you might misunderstand the concept.
It's not, that nobody observing something (or someone actually observing something), does change what is happening. It's the question: "how can we be sure nothing is changing while we are not observing?"
Since we did not observe, we can't be sure.

And well, to be nitpicking, we can actually create experiments to proof, that observing something can change the outcome!
This is due to the fact, that we need at least some sort of energy(for example a single photon) to observe something. This energy will influence the "thing happening".

Maybe not the best video, but short and on the point: Edit: damn didn't see it was posted before... sorry^^

"What was before the universe?"

Frankly, I hate to think about this question... The physical answer is: "There is no before big bang, since the big bang created time. There isn't even a point 0." But somehow this is not satisfying.