Had you told people many years ago that the earth was round, they’d have thought you were lying. As far as our forefathers were concerned, they lived on a flat surface and could fall off at any moment. It wasn’t until experts could prove and explain how we’re all on one giant, spinning ball that people truly believed it.
It’s the same with many facts. Some sound like utter rubbish. Others seem too wild to be true. Someone asked, “What scientific fact sounds like complete nonsense until someone explains the maths or physics behind it?” and a bunch of nerds came out to play.
From lesser-known details about the solar system, to explanations on why cumulus clouds float despite weighing around 1.1 million pounds each, here are some of the most interesting responses.
#1
Sun takes 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. All the other planets basically look like a rounding error.
“The nation’s pool of scientific talent hasn’t been this shallow in decades… America’s scientific, economic, and social well-being is at stake.” That’s the view of Jerome H. Grossman, a member of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable of the National Academies.
The expert firmly believes that there’s a “dangerously scarce” number of U.S. scientists and engineers. And he’s not the only one. But others argue that there are too many scientists and not enough jobs available.
#2
Learnt recently: a grain of sand is halfway in size between the earth and an atom.
Image source: sownplagorsh, NEOM
#3
Trying to “catch up” to something in orbit if you are also in orbit. Apparently, you have to accelerate in the opposite direction from the object you trying to catch. That will drop you into a lower orbit closer to the center, which will move you faster relative to the object you are pursuing and also the object you are orbiting. Once you have aligned with the object you want to meet up with you then accelerate again after that well fling you out to meet the object. Simultaneously it will slow you down again, relatively to everything else because you are now in a further orbit.
Image source: OkayishMrFox, NASA
While some may think of scientists as men and women hard at work in laboratories, the experts at Culturico, a non-profit project aimed at sharing scientific knowledge, say there’s so much more to the profession.
The U.K.-based Science Council defines a scientist as “someone who systematically gathers and uses research and evidence, to make hypotheses and test them, to gain and share understanding and knowledge.”
The last part is important, notes Culturico, adding that scientists should also be skilled communicators so that they can inform and educate the general public.
#4
If you are dieting and losing weight, most of the weight you lost is excreted by the air you breathe.
Image source: AnonymousFairy, Polina Kuzovkova
#5
Eyes see upside down, brain flips it.
Image source: SumonaFlorence, Amir Benlakhlef
#6
A teaspoon of neutron star stuff would weigh around a billion tons. My brain still hates that.
Image source: Reasonable_Banana10, Alexander Grey
“As the world evolves, scientists must evolve accordingly. Young researchers should reconsider their responsibility toward both the scientific community and society,” the Culturico team writes. “They must approach the scientific world with an awareness that communication is the most significant component of their work as it will undoubtedly advance their scientific career.”
#7
A average cumulus cloud weighs around 1.1 million pounds (500,000 kg), yet it floats because the moist air inside it is less dense than the dry air around it.
Image source: ateiii, PiccoloNamek
#8
That it would be harder to build a rocket to impact the Sun than it is leave the Solar System entirely.
#9
Wet air is less dense than dry air at the same temperature and pressure.
Image source: Cold_Philosophy, Getty Images
#10
2 identical cars colliding at 100kmh head to head is the same as 1 car colliding 100kmh into strong wall.
You would think 100 + 100 = 200, but not true because each car gets to complete stop in same time as if it would be when hitting the wall.
#11
In semiconductors, the absence of an electron has more mass than the electron itself.
Image source: Maximum_Nectarine_58, Yogesh Phuyal
#12
The fact that you’re technically falling constantly when in orbit, that’s literally what orbiting is — falling toward earth but moving sideways fast enough to keep missing it. blew my mind when I first got it.
Image source: Specialist-Budget796, NASA
#13
Sir David Attenborough is the best thing since BEFORE sliced bread.
Image source: EvilFin
#14
More than 99% of a tree’s solid mass is built from air and water.
A very small percentage, less than 1%, is trace nutrients from soil. All the cellulose structure and other parts of a tree are products of photosynthesis using CO2 from the air combined with water.
That’s why there are no holes in the ground around trees, since they are extracting virtually nothing from the soil besides water. And the forest ground level raises year by year as trees fall and contribute their materials, extracted from the air, to the humus layer on the ground.
Image source: GuyMott
#15
A bullet shot perfectly horizontally, and bullet dropped from the same height will hit the ground at the same time (in a vacuum).
Image source: StrumGently
#16
I got in a huge fight with my ex once because I tried to tell him a fun fact I read about how your body isn’t good at telling the sensations of damp and cold apart, like how cold laundry that’s sat in the dryer sometimes feels damp when it is just cold. It is a thing!! We struggle to determine dampness!
He was so mean and just tore me apart for being stupid and obviously he can tell when something is wet. It’s stuck in my head for years because we were on a hike and he was so obnoxiously cocky about it for the whole rest of the experience. Like, “I still can’t believe you thought that!”
But guess what, I looked it up again post break-up, and he was WRONG. It feels nice to shout that into the void.
Image source: That_Shrub
#17
Rainbows aren’t bows or arches. They are perfectly round, full circles.
Image source: Particular_Pass_5304
#18
Light having no mass yet getting trapped in black holes sounds wrong. Gravity bends spacetime so paths curve in and nothing escapes.
Image source: Ok_Nose345
#19
You are being squeezed right now by the air pressure. We live at the bottom of an ocean of air at a comfortable 1atmoshere of pressure, which is 100,000 N/m2 which is 10,000kg per square meter.
You have approximately 2 square meters of skin, so are being squeezed by the air with a force equal to about 20 tons!!
Image source: Egg1Salad, Brooke Cagle
#20
The insane amount of unique arrangements of a standard 52 card deck. There are 52! or written out in full
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
unique arrangements.
Even a deck of just 10 cards already has 3,628,800 unique ways to arrange them.
Image source: TheBassMeister
#21
A piece of paper folded 52 times reaches as tall as the moon.
Image source: GingaNinja1427, Mariela Ferbo
#22
Trickle down economics.
There have been 17 economic papers done on it and they all prove it has never worked; yet Donald Dump did it anyway.
Image source: Captain_Coco_Koala
#23
Every organism emits an faint light.
Image source: danknhihooyaar, Maxence Pira
#24
Quantum mechanics, even explained, they require some effort.
The fact of the observable universe changes their behaviour because its being observed.
Image source: XAJM
#25
For several million years trees didn’t decompose so they just became old, fell over and new trees grew on top of the pile.
Those trees turned into coal.
Image source: Some-Relative4150
#26
GPS satellites need two relativity corrections pulling in opposite directions, and without both, the whole system falls apart within a day. Their clocks run slightly slow because of their speed (special relativity), but slightly fast because they’re sitting in weaker gravity up there (general relativity). The gravity effect wins out, netting about 38 microseconds a day of drift. That sounds tiny until you multiply it by the speed of light, at which point it turns into roughly 10 kilometers of position error per day if nobody corrects for it. The actual fix is almost anticlimactic, the satellite clocks are built to tick slightly slow before they’re even launched, so once they’re up there running fast relative to us, it cancels out to correct time.
Image source: Ok-Amphibian-5665
#27
Infinity can be bigger than infinity.
I’m pretty sure VSauce did a video on it
Edit: Quick explanation for those who don’t want to watch the video.
Imagine the natural numbers betwen 0 and infinity (aka: 1,2,3…). This is infinity A.
Infinity A can also be aplied to the interval negative infinity to 0. So, if you make the interval negative infinity to positive infinity you get 2A or as we will call it infinity B.
So, B=2A
But betwen 1 and 2 there is 1.1; 1,2; 1,3; 1,293729792 etc. You get the idea. So, you have another infinity A. And A×A=A^A or we can also write it as B×B=B^B=C
So, C>B>A.
Image source: ConfectionTotal8660
#28
The side of the moon which is facing the earth right now is the same side that always faces the earth and always will be (assuming no outside influence, and that the maths is correct).
Basically the moon is Tidally Locked to the Earth, meaning it’s rate of rotation matches it’s orbital rate around the earth. It’s like if you walked in a circle around your friend but rotated your body to always be facing them square-on.
The moon USED TO spin way faster on its axis, but remember that the moon has an effect on our oceans and causes tides. Mass attracts mass and vice versa, so this acted as friction on the moon’s rotation and caused the moon to rotate more slowly.
Our moon and earth have been at this for so long that the rates are matched and thus tidal locked, HOWEVER the mutual gravitational forces is still slowing both bodies down! The Earth is still spinning faster than the moon is, the moon is just matched to its own orbit around the earth now. So what’s happening is the moon is now slowing down the earth’s rotation too, meaning days on earth are getting longer!
Each century the length of an Earth day gets longer by 1.4-2.4 milliseconds. When the dinosaurs existed a day was only about 23-23.5 hours long depending on the exact year. In about 200 million years our days will be 25 hours long instead, kind of crazy!
Oh- and one last piece of trivia. People often talk about the “light side” of the moon and the “dark side” of the moon, this does NOT mean the same thing as the “near side” of the moon and the “far side” of the moon. The dark and light sides switch as the moon orbits the earth and rotates on its axis, but the near side (which faces earth) and far side (which faces away) are what always stay the same.
Image source: FlynnXa
#29
Fractals can have an infinite perimeter length but a finite shape area.
Image source: GardeningGrenadier
#30
I still can’t fully wrap my head around it, but Hank Green says it’s true and I trust him:
So, I’m a long way away from something, and I want to activate it instantly. INSTANTLY, the speed of light is too slow, and I’m like down on earth and the button or lever or whatever is all the way on the moon.
So I get the bright idea to make a massive pole that can reach from the earth to the moon, thinking obviously the two ends of the solid pole will move simultaneously, so the moment I whack my end, the other end hits the button/switch.
But science tells us nothing can go faster than the speed of light, so obviously it can’t be instant across distances. So how fast does the start signal travel from my end of the pole to the moon? Hank says the speed of sound.
Image source: Perfect-Still-8971
#31
Astronomers can watch the same event happen multiple times across years.
They’ve watched Supernova Refsdal, a single explosion, five times now. Four times in 2014, once in 2015. They also speculate they could have watched it explode sometime in the 1980s as well.
This is because light takes different paths as it travels around large celestial bodies, so arrives here at different times.
Might have misrepresented some stuff here, so if anyone more qualified would like to fact check me feel free.
Image source: ImBehindYou6755
#32
Not super flashy but if you put a rope around the globe and wanted to make the rope 1m higher you would need just over 6 meters of rope.
Image source: No_Interest9209
#33
That sleep is when so much of the body is actively working, not “shutting off.” It sounds backwards at first because we think of sleep as rest, but the body is doing a lot behind the scenes: hormone signaling, immune activity, memory processing, tissue repair, metabolism, and nervous system regulation. It’s one of those things that sounds simple until you realize how many systems depend on it.
Image source: AlignedModernHealth
#34
Every element heavier than hydrogen was created by a star.
Every element heavier than iron was created by a star dying violently.
Nearly every bit of your body and the world you live in is made of d**d stars.
Image source: VibrantPianoNetwork
#35
Schizophrenia has regional variations usually (seemingly?) based on significant culture norm shifts.
Image source: WinterWontStopComing
#36
Here’s a nightmare fuel one for you: We don’t know how general anesthesia works. Like, we know it works, but we don’t know the mechanism that makes it work, if that makes sense.
It’s theorized that it may actually just give you temporary anterograde amnesia. You are unable to form new memories while “under”. You can actually feel everything and are concious, but unable to move. You just don’t remember any of it.
Image source: cablife
#37
The physiological reflex for hiccupping has been theorized to evolutionarily trace back to the body’s respiratory response way back when we were still breathing with gills.
Image source: MiserableFungi
#38
There is no such thing as an absolute present because the notion of “now” is different in every reference frame. For instance an observer watching the solar system from 100 light years away would observe that the current year is 1923. In the same vein there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. Two events which appear simultaneous in one star system will not appear simultaneous just a few light years over.
Image source: Enneaphen
#39
There are more strains of virus on Earth than stars in the observable universe.
Image source: FriendlyPipesUp
#40
Mushrooms are closer to animals than they are to plants.
Image source: anon
#41
The rainbow mantis shrimp is roughly a foot long , but it’s punch moves so fast that it heats the surrounding water to the same temperature as the surface of the sun.
Image source: odeacon
#42
Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards.
Image source: Ridley_Himself
#43
The outer horse on merry go round is moving faster than the inner one.
Image source: snuzet
#44
Dinosaur fossils were around and already millions of years old even when other dinosaurs were still alive.
Image source: mjohnsimon
#45
Reducing speed limits actually decreases journey times.
PurahsHero:
For those of you not understanding this, journey times are significantly affected by congestion in most instances, especially stop-start traffic.
If you lower the speed, you decrease the gap between vehicles, thus allowing more people onto the highway in the same space, which helps to create free flowing conditions. That in turn speeds up your journey time overall.
Clearly if we made every road 10mph right now journey times would be longer. And we should do all we can to make public transport more attractive so we don’t have this problem. But this is fundamentally how it works.
Source: Am a transport planner.
Image source: PopularBroccoli
#46
Long story short, you need to pick between three doors, only one of which has a prize behind it (33% of winning). You choose a door, then one of the doors is opened and shown to not contain the prize. Now only two doors are left, the one you chose, and the one you didn’t.
Should you stick with your original choice or should you switch?
The answer is that you should switch, because the new choice has a 50% chance of winning, while your original choice only had 33%.
It’s counterintuitive, but that’s the math!
Image source: Phoogg
#47
I’m even reticent to post it because of the argument that can ensue: A plane can take off on a conveyor that’s going just as fast in the opposite direction… just like normal. It doesn’t propel itself using the ground/wheels like a car does. It’s propeller though, hence the name, only cares about the speed of the air. The wheels will simply spin twice as fast because they’re being dragged along. Imagine a car on solid ground towing a plane that’s on a treadmill, that car is the propeller. I’m sure YouTube has the mythbusters clip somewhere… even the pilot of the plane they found to test it didn’t think it’d work. Adam has said it’s one of their most controversial myths and people still refuse to believe it.
Image source: OfFiveNine
#48
Time becomes slower for someone going faster.
As they approach to the speed of light it bocomes significantly slower. At 99% of C it becomes 7x slower and at 99.9% 22x slow. At 99.9999% of C it becomes 707 times slower.
So if you can go to a round trip of 1 year to and from Earth you will return 707 years later!
If you can go exactly at lightspeed C the time stops moving for you.
If you can go faster than light time will move backwards for you and you will go into the past.
It is a scientific fact that will sound like total nonsense.
Image source: bikbar1
#49
The colour purple does not exist – as in, there is no single wavelength of light that is purple.
Image source: ShortingBull
#50
Birds are dinosaurs, but they’re not bird-hipped dinosaurs.
Image source: loki130
#51
The universe is only about 14 billion years old, but the radius of the observable universe is about 47 billion lightyears.
Hot water really can freeze faster than cold water.
e^pi*i + 1 = 0
Energy isn’t actually conserved in modern cosmology, and that’s okay because dark energy breaks time translation symmetry.
You can make sail-powered vehicles that travel against the wind faster than the wind.
Image source: CosineDanger
#52
It’s physically impossible to get a hamster drunk unless you mainline alcohol into their bloodstream. Their metabolism is lightning fast.
Image source: anon
#53
There are microscopic blueprints inside each cell for tens of thousands of machines and scaffolding that are literally made exactly as written in atomic detail in blinding speed billions of times a minute.
The blueprints can be read many different ways for each creation, allowing for modularization that turns the tens of thousands of blueprints to probably millions of unique power- using machines and structural elements that can be rigid, flexible, or even fluid, and connected with each other and special items to be even further altered.
The protein machines themselves orchestrate continual making more of themselves and their own DNA blueprints without any intelligence, but simply by doing what they do naturally in response to the environment around them.
Image source: forever_erratic
#54
Not a mathematician, just an oldGMAT (and LSAT) guy.
The number of atoms in the universe is approximately 10^80
The largest prime number yet to be found is approximately 10^23,000,000
Prime numbers, which follow no real pattern in math, lie at the heart of computer encryption. Oversimplified, a “key” is created by multiplying two crazy-large prime numbers. One of these prime numbers is known only to one side (the user) and the other prime number is known only to the other side (the program).
Because prime numbers have no pattern and can get so large, even today’s most powerful computers are unable to “discover” these two private prime numbers.
Quantum computers will be different. Allegedly, what a current supercomputer can perform in billions of years could take a quantum computer only a few days.
Except that prime numbers are infinite. So who cares? No matter how powerful a computer might be, we can always just generate larger prime numbers, right? Nope!
We have to store those prime numbers somewhere. But the universe only has a finite amount of space and infinity is infinity is infinity. Numbers can become so large that even if they were written in the smallest possible Plank constant form, the universe wouldn’t have enough room to store them.
The Graham number is the best example of this. Something about the number of points necessary on a hypercube in order to guarantee one uniform slice. The number so big the universe doesn’t have enough room to store it.
This is why SNDE is a horrifying acronym: Steal Now Decrypt Later.
Image source: StressCanBeHealthy
#55
The largest known black hole, Phoenix A, can fit 100 solar systems laid side by side, within itself.
Image source: rishav_sharan
#56
Heavy Water. So, it’s water… but heavier?
Also, ice isn’t just ice. There are currently 19 different types of ice known, all formed under different temperature and pressure conditions.
Image source: stereoroid
#57
Adding more lanes to a highway can lead to more congestion, since more people will choose that road over smaller ones. Also, adding a road in a city can also increase congestion, since you increase the number of ways traffic can end up on a specific road.
Image source: anon
#58
If you take all the planets in our solar system and line them up side by side, they can fit between earth and the moon when its at its farthest from earth. still find that hard to accept.. so much space.
Image source: ChickenEmbarrassed77
#59
In certain cases, scientists are able to predict what you will think about 5 seconds before you “think” it.
Image source: Gribbett
#60
A mathematical one: in theory, it is possible to cut a ball up and reassemble the pieces into two balls of the same size as the original.
Image source: paolog
#61
No one quite understands why elemental lithium has psychoactive properties, but the effects are are significant enough there are observable differences in crime and mental illness rates in populations with high amounts of lithium in their drinking water.
Image source: DeusExSpockina
#62
When a single uranium-235 (U-235) atom undergoes fission, it releases approximately 3.2 x 10^-11 joules of energy, enough to power a small LED for a fleeting half-millionth of a second.
Image source: anon
#63
Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus existed further apart in time than Tyrannosaurus rex and us in the current day.
Image source: anon
#64
The number of possible legal moves in the game of go (baduk) is larger than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.
Image source: MyBackHurtsFromPeein
#65
Every human cell in your body contains about 6 feet (2m) of DNA.
Also human cells are in the minority of cells in your body. You’re outnumbered by microbes by about 2:1.
Image source: THElaytox
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