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The fact that planes are kept in the air by the shape of their wings, which forces air to go over at a pace when it can’t push down on the wing as hard as it can push up from underneath. It’s like discovering an exploitable glitch in a videogame and every time I fly I worry that the universe will get patched while I’m at 10,000 feet.
Tbf, you can make anything fly if you give it enough thrust. Wings just make it easier.
In a sense, everything can fly. Just sometimes not for very long.
BEHOLD THE CUBE PLANE
I remember reading a couple years ago that’s not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is “close enough” and “seems right”, and it really doesn’t matter unless you’re a plane wing designer.
The basic way an airplane works actually is simple and intuitive: it meets the air at an angle and deflects it downward. The equal and opposite reaction to accelerating that mass of air is an upward force on the wing.
There is, of course a whole lot of finesse on top of that with differences in wing design having huge impacts on the performance and handling of aircraft due to various aerodynamic phenomena which are anything but simple or intuitive. A thin, flat wing will fly though, and balsa wood toy airplanes usually use exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#Simplified_physical_explanations_of_lift_on_an_airfoil
“With a big enough engine you can make a barn door fly.”
Retinal photosynthesis, also known as the Purple Earth Theory. Colours are weird. Earth plants absorb red and blue light, they look green to us because that’s the wavelength of light that cannot be used by the chloroplasts. It’s hypothesized that this was advantageous on Earth because blue light goes further into water than the other wavelengths, facilitating the development of photosynthetic algae
Retinal photosynthesis is another viable chemical chain reaction that could be used to create ATP (usable biological energy) from light. It’s another molecule similar to chlorophyll, but it absorbs green light instead of red/blue - alien planets might be purple! There’s an viable parallel evolutionary pathway that leads to plants with magenta leaves
So humans vision is much more sensitive to green than other colors. it’s why camera sensors are 50% green 25% red 25% blue. Which makes sense as being able to detect small differences in plant cover is useful in both detecting predators and prey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
If humans had more flat color detection range we woulda actually be able to see that the sky is purple and not blue.
alien planets could be purple
So the prophecies are true…
For me, it’s the sheer scale of celestial bodies.
Our Sun is humongous. UY Scuti’s radius is 1700 times larger - 185300 times larger than the Earth’s. And then there’s TON 618, which has a mass 66 billion times larger than our Sun’s.
And even those are barely grains of sand when compared to solar and galactic structures… It is humbling, to say the least.
Edit 2: I deleted the previous edit, because my first observation is correct (scale is maintained when going from comparing radii to comparing diameters…), which is why I have an Arts degree.
You can observe the chirality of some molecules from the crystals they form, sometimes they twist clockwise, other times they twist counter clockwise. Which way they twist is dependent on their molecular structure.
If math is actually uncovering fundamental laws of the universe, rather than just describing it at various scales, then there’s a chance we can rewrite reality with our own set of rules that would render the current ones incompatible (by Gödel’s-IT).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
Tegmark’s MUH is the hypothesis that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.[3] That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics — specifically, a mathematical structure.
Look, I only heard about this concept, so maybe there’s more to it, but branches of mathematics are just a set of rules that we create.
Sometimes these rules can be applied to real systems, in our reality, and that helps to describe and understand the universe.
But it’s totally possible to come up with infinite nonsensical, useless mathematical systems that have nothing to do with the universe. The existence of these doesn’t mean that we have or could rewrite reality.
If our universe is bound by the laws of mathematics (big IF), then any theorem discovered within it has to be consistent or incomplete w.r.t it.
If a theorem is discovered that upends math as we know it, then the repercussions could be cosmic.Again, big if about the universe being bound by the laws of maths
That time passes differently in galaxies with different gravities. One of these galaxies is Mormon heaven.
…wtf?? How do you have negative one downvote?
This fact blows my mind the most.
Lemmy Easter egg. Gives access to Bizzaro Lemmy. They get a mustache. That’s it.
Wait what
Gravitational time dilation is an effect of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Places with stronger gravity would then have time pass more slowly compared to earth. The opposite is also true.
The fact that there is no discernable difference between an alive body or a dead body when it comes to chemical makeup.
All the pieces are there. All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places. Yet despite this the body is still dead.
When you say “All the atoms and molecules are still in the same places”, I can’t say I agree. It is the change of chemical composition that renders our body dead. Or should I say, death is defined to be such a chemical composition.
To be fair, a perfectly fine but dead body is impossible to observe since the process of dying is usually the result or accumulation of injuries or disfunctions. For this experiment you either have to kill somebody without altering their body in the slightest or instantly conjure a perfectly intact body without any life in it.
There are more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
Biological evolution
For the sake of discussion, let’s say on the one hand a magic man intelligently designed life and all that. And on the other hand we have it arise and evolve over the course of billions of years of random atomic interactions and genetic mutations. I honestly find the second one far more amazing, wondrous, amazing, and mind blowing.
Exactly! If it was just magic, things seem underwhelming all of a sudden - like why couldn’t you give zebras wings or laser vision? Why not have a grizzly bear with chainsaw arms on wheels? No ant computers or space octopuses? Makes nature seem arbitrarily limited and uncreative (and cruel) in comparison to what unlimited magic could accomplish.
(Just to be clear, this is not an argument against God since you could always just say “god set nature up to allow for natural evolution and has reasons for not going all out with creativity” - it’s unfalsifiable but you could believe that)
The label ‘homo sapiens’ for our species.
More like homo ignorare, yes?
OK, it’s really a mathematics equivalence, rather than a scientific fact, but Euler’s Identity:
eiπ + 1 = 0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity
it shows a profound connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics.
A shotgun
…? … Oooooohhh. Haha that’s some fine gallows humor.
Dynamite works as well
Infinity and Black Hole
In chemistry I was taught one carbon atom can exist in at least 12 separate living bodies before it’s no longer stable.
As you established that is not true, however you can add some of that carbon from some body and add it to the iron from the blood of 400 other human bodies so you can forge one nice sword.
Holy shit lol. This is amazing!!!
