Things to think about that blow your mind.

[MiskWisk]

Anything to do with quantum physics. Or as my physics teacher called it, MAGIC.

 

[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.

WHOA!!!

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

I just want to know.

Someone had posted that image on Facebook. That's where I first saw it at least. It's posted multiple times on tumblr.

That is actually rather mind-blowing. I was supervised, 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.

I'm sure there is an episode that tells how Frankie arrived at the house or shows her parents or something like that. I'm using that as an excuse to watch Foster's again.

 

[Autumnflame]

The ultimate truth.

Under all of our clothes we are all naked.

 

[Headsprouter]

Uh...the origins of the universe. I know, pretty generic, but think about it:

There was almost certainly something;

THAT CAME

FROM NOTHING.

HORY SHET

Does that mean that the world was created through intelligent design? But then where did the designer come from? Is there really anything that is "real" but then..

Why am I conscious?

OMG

SPACING

Another thing that blows my mind is that magic, i.e., the ability to create somethign from nothing, has the potential to exist.

 

[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.

WHOA!!!

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

I just want to know.

Someone had posted that image on Facebook. That's where I first saw it at least. It's posted multiple times on tumblr.

That is actually rather mind-blowing. I was supervised, 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.

I'm sure there is an episode that tells how Frankie arrived at the house or shows her parents or something like that. I'm using that as an excuse to watch Foster's again.

Be sure to keep me updated. Especially if it leaves it open to interpretation.

 

[Patrick Buck]

The fact that every person you've ever met, no, ever seen, and billions of other people besides on the planet have dreams, ideas, lives and wants needs and fears besides yours. Every single person.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

Well, I constantly think about whether or not I actually exist, since I?ve always had a problem with the leap from ?I think? to ?therefore I am?. How is thinking proof of existence?

Or how about the fact that this world is ridiculously vast with so many wonders, but I am still just a lone individual living in a dull city in one corner of the world who has yet (or maybe never will) realize the full potential of its true scope.

And, no kidding, I always think about whether or not the same thing I am seeing is the same thing other people are saying. Like, if I say that Se7en is my favourite film ever, and then someone else says that Se7en is the worst film ever, I often wonder if we were even watching the same thing because it?s like, ?I know everyone has different opinions, but?WHAT THE FUCK??

Furthermore, some people say something like ?Your brain only finishes developing at 21 or 25?. So, I?m 17 now, and that really blows my mind. I know there were things that I never even thought about when I was younger that I now believe I possess all the knowledge necessary to form an opinion around. But it?s funny to think that in about five years? time, I?ll suddenly (apparently) have more access to thought processes that simply didn?t exist before. Or were dormant and ready to be ?unlocked?, so to speak.

ONE MORE THING?every one of us have the potential to become a murderer, rapist, thief, or whatever, based on the circumstances, which side the dice wants to roll for us in terms of how and where we were born, who were born to, what mental state (which can be altered, fairly easily actually) we have, etc. Like, the guy that shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School. He?s not a demon or anything like that. He?s human, just like that. We could?ve done that same shit, if we had a similar brain pattern and access to that weaponry like him. Heck, right now, I could, if I were so predisposed, grab a knife and stab my mother in the head with it for no good reason. I could probably do that just as easily as that criminal. But I wouldn?t.

Also, other questions that I think about when I read stuff or just observe things are:
-?Before we can question the existence of God, should we question what the fuck God actually is??
-?Where will I go when I die??
-?If ?one is all and all is one? (read Fullmetal Alchemist and you?ll get it?), where did the all come from?
-Does there have to be a beginning? A watch without a watchmaker?
-Why does even the scientific explanations for things like how viruses work?still make me think, ?But why and how does that happen? Like?WHAT?!?
-How the fuck have we, as a human race, survived for so long, with all our inadequacies, through simply?evolution? That?s it??

I dunno. I guess what I?m trying to say is that?humans and the world are simultaneously more fucked-up and more brilliant than I ever gave them credit for.

 

[Popadoo]

What OP described is pretty much quantum physics.
Basically, we can't know for sure those boxsets aren't changing, and while you are not looking at them, they are in a super-position of both being where they should be, and where you said they could be. When you look at them, they must take the form of one or the other. Being where they SHOULD be is close to infinitely more likely, so that's why you have yet to see them swap positions. Though nothing in quantum physics is stopping them from leaping to somewhere else.
It's magic, pretty much.

What always blows my mind is time dilation, and the reason being is unlike a lot of crazy science stuff that is mostly theoretical, this is proven to happen.
It's a fact of life.
The fast you travel through space, you slower you travel through time.
The higher the gravity effecting you, the slower you travel through time.
AND THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
Satellites have to have their clocks reset every single day because the lower gravity in orbit makes their clocks run FASTER.
HOLY CRAP.

 

[Lt._nefarious]

Anne Hathaway usually blows my mind when I think about her!

Ok, sorry. The internet, I just don't get it! It's magic, okay, fucking magic. The internet is in the air, it's everywhere. The internet is Jesus and taking hallucinogenics is just your mind tapping into the internet all around you.

 

[Skaven252]

Roughly one third of the world's entire population is fed by the Haber-Bosch process which uses oil and natural gas to bind nitrogen to hydrogen, to create ammonia that can be used to make fertilizer. This fertilizer launched the Green Revolution which boomed Earth's population.

The Haber-Bosch process was originally developed by the Germans to make explosives and munitions for their World War 1 efforts, after the Brits denied Germans access to saltpeter from Chilean mines.

In other words, 1 out of 3 of you are alive now, because Brits screwed with Germans.

Also, this means that when oil and natural gas starts running out, we will be very, very hungry.

 

[Ledan]

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.

Sounds like an extension of quantum physics. If some particles act differently when observed / unobserved, why not all particles?

 

[Doclector]

The fact that every person you've ever met, no, ever seen, and billions of other people besides on the planet have dreams, ideas, lives and wants needs and fears besides yours. Every single person.

Oh god, that one fucks with your head. You are the main character in your own life, whether you feel important or not. To think that everyone else has their own stories, and their own thoughts, their own struggles, in their mind, just as epic as yours, is mindboggling.

Hell, ever tried to speak another language? Difficult at first, isn't it? Even if you master it, it can rarely feel as natural speaking that as the language you grew up with. Yet, there are thousands of people for whom that language is entirely normal. "Yes" was always "ja", and "yes" is an alien concept, a silly word, your entire language that you see as natural may seem incomprehensible to someone who didn't speak it from youth.

 

[thesilentman]

Think about all of universe's span and equate to the 12 months of the year, okay? The earth formed in the first months, and life started coming in around November.

And us humans? THE LAST FIVE SECONDS OF DECEMBER. Yep, if we were to equate the entire history of the universe to twelve months, human history comes down to the last five seconds of December.

Just something to think about... ;-)

 

[Senare]

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.

I thought about this when I was a kid and decided to remember how I thought and felt then, while at the same time considering my future self. So as my future self I can think back and understand that while I was off about some things I in turn knew that I would be and thus my mind is not blown. It also helps against that special brand of nostalgia some people get: "life is just better at age X"

 

[Lionsfan]

The ultimate truth.

Under all of our clothes we are all naked.

...........you're a goddamned liars you ares

The fact that every person you've ever met, no, ever seen, and billions of other people besides on the planet have dreams, ideas, lives and wants needs and fears besides yours. Every single person.

Oh god, that one fucks with your head. You are the main character in your own life, whether you feel important or not. To think that everyone else has their own stories, and their own thoughts, their own struggles, in their mind, just as epic as yours, is mindboggling.

Hell, ever tried to speak another language? Difficult at first, isn't it? Even if you master it, it can rarely feel as natural speaking that as the language you grew up with. Yet, there are thousands of people for whom that language is entirely normal. "Yes" was always "ja", and "yes" is an alien concept, a silly word, your entire language that you see as natural may seem incomprehensible to someone who didn't speak it from youth.

I dunno, saying yes yes in French has always felt fine for me.

Sidenote, I think if you were fluent in two languages, it would be interesting to "learn" English from the other pespective.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The fact that every person you've ever met, no, ever seen, and billions of other people besides on the planet have dreams, ideas, lives and wants needs and fears besides yours. Every single person.

That's a good one, yeah. More than that, you'll never know about most of them.

 

[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.
snip

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

Yeah, there's a lot of good shit in those Dr. Quantum videos.

A tiny bit on entanglement:

 

[Redingold]

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.

This end of this video is no longer in agreement with scientific study. Last year, a team of physicists doing a double slit experiment managed to observe the path of a particle, noted precisely which slit it went through, and still were able to produce an interference pattern. The point is that observation is not a passive process on the quantum level. In order to observer the location of, say, an electron, you need to actually do something to it - bounce a photon off it, for instance. Doing this changes the behaviour of a particle, but the reason is not so mysterious - a particle being struck by photons will obviously behave differently than one not being struck. If you're very clever with your measuring, then you can reduce the effects on the particle while still knowing where it is (to within the tolerances permitted by Heisenberg).

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/disentangling-the-wave-particle-duality-in-the-double-slit-experiment/

People tend not to get wave-particle duality. It isn't that things are sometimes particles, and sometimes waves. Quantum objects are particles, and they propagate in wave-like ways. A particle has a thing called a wavefunction associated with it. The wavefunction behaves like a wave, and the position of the particle is related to the strength of the wave - more precisely, the modulus squared of the wavefunction gives the probability density function of the position of the particle. Interactions with other particles are...a whole lot more complicated, and not something on which I have much technical knowledge. Still, there's nothing mysterious going on, except for entanglement, which is freaking crazy.

 

[Keoul]

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.

The "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it. Does it make a sound?" question has 2 answers, yes and no.

If you are referring to sound as to the human perception of it then no it does not make a sound however if you're referring to sound as the manipulation of airwaves and molecules bouncing off each other then no human needs to be there for sound to exist.

I understand what you're saying but I still have a hard time believing the "whole world is just a simulation" theory. I don't know... It just seems to outlandish for me, it just raises more questions. Sure it's fun to debate about it but I don't think it'll ever be true.