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

[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.

 

[Timewalker6]

For me it's consciousness. I don't know where it comes from (well obviously our brains but why is it there? How did it get there?) and where it goes once we die. I mean it's hard to think that consciousness simply disappears when we die.

 

[Drakkith]

For me it's consciousness. I don't know where it comes from (well obviously our brains but why is it there? How did it get there?) and where it goes once we die. I mean it's hard to think that consciousness simply disappears when we die.

Hmmm...perhaps it's not anything at all really?

 

[The Jericho]

I know it's an old thread, but it's a timeless question that I ask myself several times each Earth day, and I'm sure many other individuals on PF do too.

From my perspective, given the premise that nothing that 'exists' is discrete, in its most definitive sense, then consciousness (the unquantifiable entity which depicts whether the bearer is 'alive') must be continuously embedded throughout the continuum of space-time.

So when you die, you are intrinsically a shared portion of a continuous universe, and NOT a discrete packet of existence or to put it another way, a finite number of constituent parts.

Are DEAD and ALIVE two separate states, or are they just the most extreme states of an infinite range between 0 and Infiniti?

This issue arises every time I drink "cups" of coffee.

 

[Julio R]

Obviously women. The universe is an open book compared to them.

 

[Kholdstare]

Nah. I understand pretty much everything.