Weirdest/things that blew your mind when you learned them

[s00mb]

Oh well I disagree.

 

[Wes Tausend]

Time.

Many things have blown my mind. The first was probably a wind-up alarm clock my father gave me when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It began a fascination with time. I knew that wind-up toys go fast at first, then slow. So how could a wind-up clock possibly keep good time? My father gave it to me because it ran slower and slower and finally quit.

My father replaced it with a synchronous electric clock, something I never figured out until my teens. I immediately took the wind-up clock apart, I mean ALL apart, and cleaned it and oiled it. After I put the gears and springs back together, it worked perfectly... for a while. Meanwhile, I'd learned how the latch made it keep time by regulating the mainspring. And after finally looking at the back case, I discovered a slot with an F and S. I realized it provided access to adjust clock rate via the hair-spring. My father hadn't noticed it before and put up with inaccurate time for years. I was pretty proud of that discovery.

The latch mechanism on the wind-up allowed me to figure out how a pendulum clock regulated time in the school mimeograph room. The smell of the ink comes back to me when I remember.

The reason my free wind-up alarm clock quit was I had way over- oiled it and the open mechanism got full of dust- bunnies. I so loved the beautiful brass machinery that I'd left it open on my window sill by the bed. I took it back apart, put the parts in a small box, then went out to play. Some of the parts got lost before I got back to it. But by then I could afford a one dollar pocket watch from Ben Franklin. I could hear it tick under my pillow.

My next watch was a small water-proof Timex I got for Christmas when I was 10. I left it on while swimming just so I could tell concerned people it was water-proof and it never failed me. I had it until I accidently left it on the roof of my first car. Several reliable Timex's followed, barring misplacement.

I still have a cheap Casio left over from work. It has two time zones that I worked in and keeps military-style time to within a few seconds a month. For 20 some years I replaced various Casio's as the straps and/or batteries died. One kept time to less than a second lost per month. These cheap watches worked better than better looking quality watches I received as performance awards from work. I worked the last 20+ year's for a railroad that required accurate time.

Wes

 

[DennisN]

What really blew your mind when you learned it or what continues to blow your mind when you think about it?

Also, whenever I try to think of the stupendously large size of the Universe it blows my mind.

I'd also like to add a couple of more things about the Universe that blows my mind:

1. Some electromagnetic radiation that reaches Earth has taken billions of years to reach us, with the extreme being the CMBR. That is a loooong time. And the further out we look, the longer back in time we see, which is pretty cool.
2. The Universe is not only expanding. The expansion is accelerating!
3. Scientists have located the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy and also tracked stars orbiting it.
4. We have recently seen images of (the surroundings of) black holes.
5. Scientists can now detect gravitational waves due to cosmic events that have taken place very far away from us.
6. And last, but certainly not least: The Universe could be infinite in spatial extent. That is not easy to wrap my head around!

There are more mindblowing things about the Universe (e.g. various things regarding black holes and open questions about them). The six points above were just some things I came to think about a while ago.

 

[BillTre]

Some mind blowing (to me) biological things:

• That some of the most complex of biological nanomachines (ribosomes, electron transport chain and ATP synthase) were evolved before the two first evolutionary lines of life (bacteria and archaea) diverged, by DNA synthetic enzymes probably evolved later (they differ between bacteria and archaea). These are all very large proteins or complexes of proteins or proteins and RNA. The electron transport chain and ATP synthase generate energy for cells by pumping protons (H⁺) out of the cell while the APT synthase let's them flow back in through a turbine-like structure which spins and uses the mechanical energy to catalyze ATP formation. ATP is the major energy carrier of the cell. Ribosomes translate nucleic acid sequence into protein sequence in cells, central to the informational control of cells and life.
• The colinearity of Hox gene expression with their embryonic expression patterns and the body part identities they control in embryonic development, which is shared by most animals. The cluster and order of the genes seems to be the primitive condition which can be scrambled through evolution, although also expanded upon (such as in vertebrates).
• Not so recent (1979, >40 years ago) a surprise to me, but at the time it was figured out, a very large impact killed off the dinosaurs (except the birds).

 

[hutchphd]

The panoply of molecular machines associated with life processes that have been discovered over my lifetime. Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth.
I remember sitting in high school biology (in 1967) and hearing about "active transport" of stuff in the cell body and thinking "what are the hell are they talking about, divine intervention?...elves? " .
As it turns out the microtubule motor proteins mechanisms are wonderful and mechanical and non-theological (by my reckoning). That is but one of many such wonders.
The Hubble deep space image works for me, too.

 

[BillTre]

Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth

Hey, me too.
Born into The Age of Biology!

 

[hutchphd]

It still seemed unkempt to me ...hence my physics education!

 

[BillTre]

It still seemed unkempt to me ...hence my physics education!

The challenge is to make order of it.

 

[hutchphd]

Yes.. I never would have believed the the progress that has been made. And how fascinating it really is. Hope we can keep the slope positive for a while longer.

 

[phinds]

The challenge is to make order of it.

But it's all squishy !

 

[BillTre]

But it's all squishy !

Except for the shells, bones, spines, and hard plant things like wood.
(Squishies is a term often used for soft invertebrates like worms and slugs, as opposed to crunchies, like insects and crustaceans with hard exoskeletons.)

Anyway stars have no hard surfaces, and nebulae are nebulous.

 

[phinds]

Except for the shells, bones, spines, and hard plant things like wood.

I'll bet if you add up the weight of all the biomass on the planet, you'll find that easily 90%+ of it is squishy. Probably more like 99%.

Hm ... OK, maybe the forests will keep it down to only 90%+

 

[BillTre]

Well the essence of life is mushy cytoplasm for sure.

 

[DaveC426913]

Watson and Crick did their DNA work about the time of my birth.

First thing I thought of too.

It gives me great hope, reminding myself that we are still in our infancy of understanding the world. So much to discover still!

 

[DennisN]

The challenge is to make order of it.

But I've heard it can be dangerous!

 

[BillTre]

My alter-ego.

 

[DennisN]

Not so recent (1979, >40 years ago) a surprise to me, but at the time it was figured out, a very large impact killed off the dinosaurs (except the birds).

There is a very funny comic which I laugh at every time I think of it. I won't post the image here because it contains some foul words, but here's a link to it in a spoiler below:

Spoiler

http://explosm.net/comics/818/

 

[phinds]

Anyway stars have no hard surfaces, and nebulae are nebulous.

Yeah, but have you ever had to dissect one of those? Every stepped on one and gone YUCK !

 

[Ibix]

Every stepped on one and gone YUCK !

Yeah. I got slimy Betelgeuse all over my toes.

 

[BillTre]

Yeah, but have you ever had to dissect one of those?

Sounds like a lot of people wold like to dissect Betelgeuse to figure out what going on in there and how it works.
Poor astronomy, prevented from understanding the star's innards by queasiness about getting yucky.

 

[gmax137]

2. The Universe is not only expanding. The expansion is accelerating!

Or, is it?
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discovery-dark.html
"New evidence shows that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error"

 

[Filip Larsen]

My mind was blown towards positive infinity discovering how very simple (non-linear) physical systems are capable of showing surprisingly complicated forms of self-organization.

My mind was blown towards minus infinity discovering the yet unresolved Fermi paradox, especially considering the selection of possible solutions that are not so nice.

 

[DEvens]

Quantum Mechanics.

QM is pretty cool. But the "turn your head at an angle and squint" part about QM is Bell's inequality.

 

[nuuskur]

Green's theorem is the weirdest most mind¤#%& theorem I have learned about (yet). It doesn't matter how one picks $M$ or $L$, as long as they satisfy certain conditions the result holds. I don't even have the vocabulary to explain why it's so strange.

 

[jackwhirl]

I don't know the formal name, if any, but the idea that nations (or other large organizations) are 'living' things composed of humans as we are composed of cells.

 

[BillTre]

That's like ants in an ant colony (or bees or termites).
A larger emergent group composed of smaller more numerous units.

Some have said aliens might consider cities to be Earth's organisms with humans as their equivalent of our microbiome (bacteria/archaea living on or in larger creatures).

 

[Klystron]

After living and working in south Asia for years, I was astonished to learn that hot peppers (Capsicum) are indigenous to Central America and spread to Asia with the Columbian Exchange.

Hot peppers seem so essential to local cuisines and grow in such great variety in Asian agricultural regions such as the central basin in Thailand; one assumes chile peppers to be indigenous to the region or to have arrived with traders thousands, not hundreds, of years past. Live and learn, and enjoy those peppers.

 

[chemisttree]

Balut is food!
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-worlds-worst-foods.87657/post-737299

 

[hodgeman]

From Undergrad, most memorable would be:
- That magnetism can be understood as charges + length contraction
- The principle of "least" action
- Dirac quantisation (before knowing some representation theory, it does look like magic..)
- The gauge principle

 

[skeptic2]

Time.

Many things have blown my mind. The first was probably a wind-up alarm clock my father gave me when I was about 6 or 7 years old. It began a fascination with time. I knew that wind-up toys go fast at first, then slow. So how could a wind-up clock possibly keep good time? My father gave it to me because it ran slower and slower and finally quit.

My father replaced it with a synchronous electric clock, something I never figured out until my teens. I immediately took the wind-up clock apart, I mean ALL apart, and cleaned it and oiled it. After I put the gears and springs back together, it worked perfectly... for a while. Meanwhile, I'd learned how the latch made it keep time by regulating the mainspring. And after finally looking at the back case, I discovered a slot with an F and S. I realized it provided access to adjust clock rate via the hair-spring. My father hadn't noticed it before and put up with inaccurate time for years. I was pretty proud of that discovery.

The latch mechanism on the wind-up allowed me to figure out how a pendulum clock regulated time in the school mimeograph room. The smell of the ink comes back to me when I remember.

The reason my free wind-up alarm clock quit was I had way over- oiled it and the open mechanism got full of dust- bunnies. I so loved the beautiful brass machinery that I'd left it open on my window sill by the bed. I took it back apart, put the parts in a small box, then went out to play. Some of the parts got lost before I got back to it. But by then I could afford a one dollar pocket watch from Ben Franklin. I could hear it tick under my pillow.

My next watch was a small water-proof Timex I got for Christmas when I was 10. I left it on while swimming just so I could tell concerned people it was water-proof and it never failed me. I had it until I accidently left it on the roof of my first car. Several reliable Timex's followed, barring misplacement.

I still have a cheap Casio left over from work. It has two time zones that I worked in and keeps military-style time to within a few seconds a month. For 20 some years I replaced various Casio's as the straps and/or batteries died. One kept time to less than a second lost per month. These cheap watches worked better than better looking quality watches I received as performance awards from work. I worked the last 20+ year's for a railroad that required accurate time.

Wes

You may be interested in this story about Eli Whitney, from https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/eli-whitney

The young Whitney was a natural tinkerer. Supposedly he once stayed home on Sunday, while the rest of his family went to Church, so that he could take apart his father's watch. He had it together again and working by the time they returned. He also made a violin at the age of 12. Soon after, he had started his own business forging nails and had even employed help to do so.

The version I read said that Eli had such a curiosity about how things worked, including the watch, that his family warned him time and again not to touch the watch. The watch apparently came from England and if he ruined it, it would be many months before a replacement could be gotten.