What is the hardest thing for you to wrap your brain around

[OmCheeto]

I'm all set with entropy; it's enthalpy that I still don't quite get (beyond it's definition, and how to calculate the change thereof).

Enthalpy isn't taught in basic physics, so I haven't had the professional requirement of coming up with a dozen analogies to explain it.

I remember Enthalpy! It was a term they used when teaching us how nuclear reactor systems worked.

But being somewhat old, and mentally degenerating at a very rapid pace, anything I learned before yesterday is generally hard for me to wrap my brain around.

 

[Gomar]

Had the meteor not struck planet Earth when the dinos walked all over killing them all, then they would still be around. Ifcourse, had that same meteor struck just 500 years ago, I would not be writing this now.

 

[Yayfordoritos]

The hardest thing for me to wrap my head around is how people can still think the universe was created in 6 days, and that a virgin got pregnant by an immaculate conception.

 

[OmCheeto]

The hardest thing for me to wrap my head around is how people can still think the universe was created in 6 days, and that a virgin got pregnant by an immaculate conception.

A "day" can be defined other than a time period of 24 hours. Perhaps the biblical creation day is 2 billion years long.

And we impregnate people like that all the time where I work. Never asked them if they were virgins of course. It's a bit of a personal question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjz16xjeBAA​

Science explains everything.

Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the science of Santa Claus the other day on NPR. He is a freakin' genius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YAQh9O0rm8​

ps. Magnets! Someone explain magnets to me!

 

[Whovian]

Number Theory. Or Human stupidity. I'd say both are equally hard for me to wrap my head around.

 

[ahaanomegas]

The hardest thing for my to wrap my brain around is how people can confuse two different subjects like Philosophy and Quantum Mechanics or Astrology and Quantum Physics? Every subject is wonderful in its own way and should be dealt with differently. Yes, there is no border between subjects and they can be intermingled but not to the extent that you make a subject lose its integrity.

Understanding people is hard. Well, understanding the universe is hard.

 

[1MileCrash]

I think it's Graham's number for me.

 

[Drakkith]

I can't understand why my bank account is constantly empty...I think QCD may have something to do with it.

 

[PNGeng]

How humans survived in the wild.

 

[Jow]

Anything greater than or equal to Graham's number. (Alright, not technically a physics thing).
The most difficult, actual thing, for me to wrap my brain around: every single thing in Quantum Mechanics :)

 

[lisab]

Graham crackers.

 

[Drakkith]

Graham crackers.

I thought you put white/grey squishy things BETWEEN the crackers??

 

[nitsuj]

Memory.

How tiny chemical reactions and electrical signals can conjure up such vivid memories from 20+ years ago amazes me.

This is it for me too.

 

[NWH]

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It's an analogy that can be applied to almost any practical situation and asks the very question of existence.

 

[NemoReally]

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It's an analogy that can be applied to almost any practical situation and asks the very question of existence.

Egg? (chicken came from egg, but what laid egg wasn't necessarily chicken - probably tasted as good, though ... I find the distinction question interesting in cases like this; the thing in the farmyard is "clearly" a chicken and its wayback ancestor clearly isn't (it probably had teeth and a long bony tail) - where along the evolutionary trail does a chicken become a chicken and not a chickosaurus?)

 

[Drakkith]

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It's an analogy that can be applied to almost any practical situation and asks the very question of existence.

I've never found it to be all that applicable. Or deep.

 

[csnoob]

Why anyone gives a flying <expletive> about New Year's.

P = NP

Why anyone thought Notre Dame was #1

 

[NWH]

I've never found it to be all that applicable. Or deep.

Look at it a different way. What came first, energy or matter? What came first, the universe or the big bang? The chicken or the egg scenario asks the very question of existence, like where did everything come from and what was actually required for it to exist. That's the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around, how something can seemingly come out of no where without a chicken or an egg to give birth to it.

 

[Drakkith]

Look at it a different way. What came first, energy or matter? What came first, the universe or the big bang? The chicken or the egg scenario asks the very question of existence, like where did everything come from and what was actually required for it to exist. That's the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around, how something can seemingly come out of no where without a chicken or an egg to give birth to it.

Huh. I've never had an issue with that question. I guess I just don't care because I don't think we can even know.

 

[kevinferreira]

Women.
Everything tangible by our senses and thoughts seems to follow a pattern, a logic (even if hidden) that we can scratch, a equilibrium principle, something that we can recognise, [B]except[/B] women. From all familiar things, nothing is more unfamiliar than a woman's brain,...

 

[NWH]

Huh. I've never had an issue with that question. I guess I just don't care because I don't think we can even know.

That's a fair view point. There's a lot of things I feel I could wrap my head around, like relativity or the idea of extra dimensions, but the idea of absolute nothing completely baffles me.

 

[Synchronised]

The human brain.

 

[spark802]

What keeps us alive? We can have a biologist or physcian tell us about electrolytes and our heart beating etc...but what keeps us GOING?

 

[tomishere]

seriously one subject that i found completely confusing (and still do) is p-chem.. totally counterintuitive imo... as the course dragged on i had to stop myself from trying to understand it and just start using these crazy mnemonics , in order to pass.

 

[filipv]

why is there something instead of nothing? why this universe bothers to exist?

it drives me crazy, it drives me nuts.

 

[illusionist93]

Firstly genesis and secondly E=mc^2

 

[Allawonder]

The very fact that we never seem to dream in dreams, and yet many people believe 'life is just a dream': one of those things I never can wrap my brains about!

 

[tinmanrl]

The hardest thing for me to get my head around is the multiverse. If it is found to be true that there is a multiverse, and each individual universe is like a soap bubble with all the bubbles nearly but not quite touching each other, then how can they all be said to be expanding? Expanding to where? Wouldn't they be impinging on each other's territory by now? On the other hand, if each universe is in a different dimension, then it is pretty irrelevant to even talk about them. Kind of like imaginary numbers (another concept I have difficulty getting my head around). Something for mathematicians to play around with, but with no practical purpose. And by the way, if there is a multiverse, wouldn't we need to come up with a new name for the individual bubble that we live in because the word universe would imply all the bubbles taken as a whole, whereas ours would be a subset of it? Then there is that whole infinity thing...an infinity of universes...my mind may never sleep at night again just thinking about it.

 

[Shahil]

Justin Bieber fandom. And country music. I cannot understand why so many people like country music :P

One concept that did boggle my mind when I first came across it was communication theory used to broadcast signals for television and radio. I could not fathom firstly, how people came up with the idea of the transmission and secondly, how the rather exact equations that we learned could be translated onto circuitry with its inherent tolerance ranges and still work so well. I do somewhat understand this now but I've not really been in the communications field for the past five years so I've moved onto wondering about other things.

 

[Aero51]

Probability. At first I found its logic to be extremely counter-intuitive.

 

[SixNein]

Maybe the sheer size of the universe? The speed at which light travels? The size of a quark?

Out of all the things in the universe, what is hardest for you to possibly imagine, as long as it's generally accepted it doesn't have to be proven.

For me it's both the size of the universe and the size of a quark. I mean, sitting here trying to wrap my head around how something can be so unbelievably large, yet also thinking how something can be so unbelievably tiny.

Kind of ironic a little bit, how something like a solar system is similar to an atom even though their sizes vary beyond belief.

For me, it's how human thought occurs. I would love to have the algorithms for it.

It's the only thing standing in my way of taking over the world =P

 

[Mentalist]

I dunno. One day a person is jolly towards you, then the next, completely different.

Why people cling to objects so fervently, like a couch as if it was a living, breathing thing.

The universe being described mathematically...

 

[julcab12]

..Life

 

[uperkurk]

How about the concept of not existing? I thought about when a human dies, basically, if god does not exist, then that very instance you die, you won't even have known you've died, hell you won't even know that you used to exist.

You're lying in bed living, breathing, thinking and then that very moment when you go from thinking > death, you won't even know it lol.

So in a sense, you could say everyone lives forever, because they last thing you knew before nothingness, was life.

Also to think that all the millions of years the universe and Earth existed before you were born, you had no knowledge of whatsoever, to think when you die, everything that is to come in the future you'll have absolutely 0 knowledge of.

 

[Maui]

Looking at myself in the mirror.