What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life? - icey
======
btilly
My favorite isn't there.

Back in the 1920s Hubble did photographic surveys of the sky with long
exposures. Here is what he found. Pick a random spot in the sky. Take a long
exposure. Count the stars you can see. Take a magnifying glass. Count the
galaxies you can find. With a few obvious exceptions, there will be more
galaxies than stars. A lot more. (Obvious exceptions would include things like
nebulae that you can't see through to see galaxies behind them.)

~~~
Avshalom
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field_hi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field_high_rez_edit1.jpg)

Every light there is a galaxy (okay Like and 7 stars).

I remember seeing that photo when it came out and sort of brushing it off
because it wasn't some sweeping nebula. Four years of an astrophysics degree
later it nearly brought me to tears just thinking about looking at 10000
galaxies and the full weight of that sight. It's one of those things thats
more powerful the more you understand it.

Yeah... it kind of blows my mind.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Is that photo, by any chance, the background of the COSMOS intro?
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Cosmos_a_speci...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Cosmos_a_special_edition3.jpg)

~~~
nobody_nowhere
Cosmos predates the deep field image by about 20 years... but it really
captures the essence of the show pretty well.

------
jd
When I was nine I was playing with BASIC and wrote a simple program that would
enumerate all colors of all pixels on the screen. I wanted to see all possible
images "fly by" so to speak. First I got frustrated because it was running so
slowly, only then I started to think...

If I can display a picture of a car on this monitor, then that picture would
eventually also show up 'by chance' with my program! Mind blown. Then I
realized it would have to show every picture in the world eventually, because
every picture in the world could be displayed on my monitor. Mind blown again.
Then I realized it would display every book in the world also, because a
picture of a page of text is just another picture. Whoa. Then I realized the
monitor would also eventually display all things that happened in the past
that we had no records of and everything that was going to happen in the
future!

Of course I couldn't grasp exactly how long the program was going to take, but
I realized that if it had to go through infinitely many pictures it would have
to take infinitely long to run.

But now I can do the real math. Should be fun:

Display 60 frames per second. 3600 seconds in an hour, 85000 in a day, 31
million seconds in a year. So 1860 million images per year.

How many possible pictures are there?

640 x 480 x 16 bits = 0.5 MB frame buffer. Kilobyte is 10 bits, megabyte is 20
bits. So there are 2 ^ 20 bits and each bit we have to toggle so there are 2 ^
(2 ^ 20) combinations.

1860 million combinations ~ 30 bits. Since we have 2 ^ 20 bits worth of
statespace those 30 bits are completely insignificant. So let's assume there
are a billion people with a billion computers each who work on the problem in
parallel. Then there are 2 ^ (30 * 3) = 2 ^ 100 images processed each year.
This still doesn't make any difference! 2 ^ 30 - 100 bits = 2 ^ 30 bits.

It would take over 10 ^ 300000 years for a billion people with a billion
computers each that process 60 frames per second to enumerate the different
values of a 640 x 480 monitor.

And that's just for a single megabyte. Mind blown.

~~~
chegra
Wow, you too, I came across this while meditating at 22. But I was thinking
about how there can't be a new color of light.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_algorithm>

Other implications:

1\. Knowledge is finite(a big number but finite, only 10^100 atoms in the
universe so even if your screen was big as the universe there is only so much
it could show)

2\. Solving a problem can be interpreted as a search through linear space of
all possible permutation. So, lets say that the drug to cure cancer could be
in the form of an equation, it would show up on the screen eventually.

3\. Oh, if there is a God, his pic will eventually come up on your computer.

------
chegra
The top for me would be boltzmann brains -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain> Better to read the wiki
article, since I might not do it justice. A self conscious being might pop
into existence based on random fluctuation.

Other Top contenders for me are: 1\. Zeno's Paradox -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes>

2\. Birthday Paradox - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_Paradox>

3\. Twin's Paradox- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox>

4\. Monty Hall Problem - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem>

5\. Stanford Prison Experiment -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison>

6\. Asch Conformity Experiment -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments>

7\. Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority figures -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment>

8\. Placebo and Nocebo - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo>

9\. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

------
WillyF
"Michigan’s forests yielded more money and created more millionaires than did
all the gold mined during California’s Gold Rush."

It may not be the most mind-blowing fact I've heard in my life, but it's one
of my favorites. It shows how much a good story can change perceptions.

~~~
mkramlich
And those trees can grow back. The gold underground won't.

(Yes it takes much longer for a new tree to grow to replace a chopped down
one, but still. It's much more renewable than gold.)

------
istari
My boss was doing an internship at Intel, and didn't have time to verify the
floating point unit because he had to go back to school.

------
dkuchar
besides "you and everyone you know are going to die" at age 3, or "there is no
santa claus" which logically led to "God is an imaginary friend for grown ups"
at age 10.

The fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our
genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling.

[http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----
Introducti...](http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----
Introduction/dp/0199291152/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1286843250&sr=8-1)

~~~
sage_joch
I considered the stories of Santa Clause and God to be pretty mind-blowing
when they were presented as fact. So the realization that both were made up
was kind of a return to sanity.

~~~
Yzupnick
You might have been the smartest kid I have ever heard of.

~~~
dkuchar
the santa claus/god realization could have been like 12 or 13, I don't
remember exactly when I was told there was no santa, I'm estimating. I know I
was three with the death thing, my parents remember me crying myself to sleep
repeatedly moaning about it. of course they could be mistaken.

anyway, the ages were only there because I hadn't seen anyone referencing
anything other than facts they heard recently. in reality nothing you've heard
recently could be as earth shattering as the facts you learn when you're a kid
that pull the veneer off your rosy fantasy world.

------
Eliezer
I am made of parts.

Close runner-up: There are zillions of slightly different versions of me.
<http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0302/0302131v1.pdf>

Third place: There are only around one and a half thousand people signed up
for cryonics worldwide.

~~~
Alex3917
"Third place: There are only around one and a half thousand people signed up
for cryonics worldwide."

This is a lot more surprising once you learn that because you can pay for
cryonics with your life insurance, it literally costs only a few bucks a
month.

------
vyrotek
That the Minecraft creator was at one point making $250k a day.

------
mquander
I remember clearly in elementary school when I suddenly understood that
gravity is just a constant acceleration; if I were in a box in space
accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, it would feel exactly the same. For some reason, I
found that absolutely mindblowing at the time. I spent all day trying to
explain it to everyone else, and I don't think I've ever been so excited about
knowing something again.

~~~
Alex3917
Do you also find it weird to think about how without gravity we couldn't walk?
That one gets me especially hard because it's a such a tangible example of how
we've evolved to take advantage of laws of the laws of physics, and how if
these laws were even slightly different then we wouldn't be here, or at least
not the same as we're here now.

~~~
TGJ
The first day of a robotics class, my teacher explained that we don't really
walk. Each step is graceful falling. Place one foot forward, tilt and fall
till the foot hits and repeat.

~~~
SHOwnsYou
I hate to be the one to break to this to you, but your robotics teacher was
off his or her rocker or was trying to make a much larger point with a bad
example.

If walking was simply graceful falling, it would imply that once we begin the
process of "falling" onto the next foot, we couldn't significantly affect the
outcome. However, because I can start walking and then stop with a single leg
half way between it's highest point and the ground, this explanation of
walking as falling becomes very problematic.

------
e1ven
Strange- This used to be linked to a Reddit story at
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_most_mindblowing_fact_you_heardread_in/)

Now it appears to be a [self] post.

------
AndrewO
I'm not sure if this is the most, but Cantor's Diagonal Argument[1] is the
first that comes to mind, probably even more as an example of a creative
approach than for its implications (although those are pretty huge too).

Charles Petzold's "Annotated Turing" has a great run down of this and a bunch
of the other mind-blowing things that came out of math in the late 19th/early
20th centuries.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument>

~~~
Zecc
Your URL is missing the apostrophe:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument>

------
sunkencity
Erazing faith in the verb "to be" by reading up on Alfred Korzybski and the
philosophy of when abstractions fail.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski>

------
fletchowns
Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist,
in some form or another. Whoa!

Another one: Assuming peak efficiency, the turbines in the Grand Coulee Dam
generates 1 gram of heat and light every 3.7 hours. All that water for one
measly gram of something! Source:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence>

~~~
derrida
"Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist,
in some form or another." The physicist richard feynman in the first lecture
of "the feynman lectures on physics" says that the most important fact, that
would convey the most information would be the atom hypothesis or fact. Which
is essentially what you said except with the additional bit of information
that "... all matter is made of indivisible particles that both repel and
attract each other depending on the distance between them"

------
aik
The point when I realized that most things I hear are probably bs and I need
to think for myself, regardless of the source.

What naturally followed was the realization that there are an infinite amount
of things not yet solved or understood and I have the power to try to discover
any bit of it.

------
mfalcon
"It is from the mind that all happiness comes, just as it is the mind that
causes the experience of suffering."

It seems a pretty obvious statement, but it took me 24 years to really became
aware. Now I know how important is to meditate on a daily basis.

------
adbge
Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space even
when the space is devoid of matter (free space).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy>

------
rsaarelm
You can represent any book, any image or any sound with a large number.

You can set up a cipher where anyone can write you messages using publicly
available information, but only you can read them.

Human DNA is essentially a digital code, has a finite number of bits, and is
smaller than data sets which we routinely manipulate today.

Every known way of making meaningful computations can be represented in a
formal system which you can write down on the palm of your hand.

You can also write a recipe for producing the entirety of an infinitely
detailed image, that keeps being visually interesting as you zoom in, on the
palm of your hand.

~~~
listic
One can also represent any book, any image or any sound with a small number.

~~~
mthoms
I think he meant lossless-ly.

------
podperson
Cantor's diagonal argument -- proof that the Real numbers are more infinite
than the Integers (or Naturals). Slightly more mind-blowing than the
algebraics are no bigger than the naturals.

------
0x5a177
Euler's identity blew me away when I first learned it a year ago:

e^iπ + 1 = 0

~~~
kaokun
This is mine too. How is it possible that

    
    
       * the ratio between the a circle's circumference and diameter
       * the number such that the derivative of e^x = e^x
       * the square root of negative 1
    

Have anything to relate them to one another?? That last one isn't even a
number!

Mind. Blown. The universe is one crazy place.

~~~
lnnegativeone
which also means that ln(-1) = i*pi

o, and another cool one is (1/2)! = sqrt(pi)

~~~
nl
appropriate username!

------
texel
For me, it was the EPR/double slit experiment.

~~~
z92
For me it was the delayed choice quantum eraser. Simply mind blowing!

~~~
ent
I just read about it yesterday and can't help thinking that the universe is
just messing with our heads

------
anthonyb
The second time I read Cryptonomicon, the implications of evolution finally
dawned on me -- I have an unbroken line of ancestry stretching back _4 billion
years_. Most of my ancestors weren't even human...

([http://www.sffworld.com/authors/s/stephenson_neal/excerpts/c...](http://www.sffworld.com/authors/s/stephenson_neal/excerpts/cryptonomicon1.html),
bottom of page)

------
freshlog
I was brought up thinking that everyone flosses their teeth, until only
recently when I asked my peers, finding out that it isn't the case.

------
frobozz
It's not the facts themselves, but the way they are expressed:

1) Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landings, than the building of
the pyramids.

2) The Comparison of Moores Law to A Series paper at the start of this talk:
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/11-steven-ac-declarative/>

------
o_nate
Some more contenders:

1\. Benford's Law - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law>

2\. Two envelopes problem -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_envelopes_problem>

------
icey
A word of caution - many of the items in the reddit story come without sources
and there will certainly be a number of factually incorrect comments.

------
russellallen
The most mind-blowing things in my life have mostly not been facts.

~~~
etherael
Ok, I'll bite. What have they been?

------
davidedicillo
I'm Italian, born and raise there. I moved here in Florida 5 years ago. My ex-
girlfriend is American, born and raise here. One day I met her best friend
from college (he lives here in Florida as well), and he told me that his
father was Italian. When he told me his lastname, I told him that I know
people with the same last name from my grandfather's hometown, so I asked him
to ask his father where he is from. We ended up finding out that he was from
the same place and that he was friend with the only family member (a very far
one, my grandfather's cousin) I have here in the States, in Connecticut.

~~~
davidw
Along those lines:

* I bumped into a girl that I went to South Eugene High School with at the train station here in Padova, Italy. We were even on the same train. I was quite literally speechless for a moment or two.

* I worked with a person in San Francisco whose dad had known my dad and uncle in the same small town in Montana.

~~~
etherael
I accidentally alt tabbed to a tail of a kernel log where a packet hit the
wire at the exact moment that I accidentally alt tabbed. The IP address looked
weird to me for some reason so I reverse resolved it and traced it, it
belonged to the first ISP I'd ever used, I ran an nmblookup on the machine
name and it was my first girlfriend's computer name.

Utterly freaked out I contacted her via IM, not having actually known how to
do that and not having spoken to her for a very long time and verified that it
was indeed her ip address and she was indeed at that computer, but she had
absolutely no idea how I had managed to ascertain that fact and was about as
freaked out as I was by the episode.

We talked for many hours before it finally dawned on me exactly what had
happened.

On the exact day that I had been checking firewall rules on my laptop with
kernel packet logging enabled, at the exact second that I had accidentally alt
tabbed to a terminal window that was tailing said packet log, she had done a
search on napster for a song that I happened to have.

This is very much the weirdest coincidence I've ever experienced in my life
thus far.

~~~
rationalbeaver
That is also, quite possibly, the nerdiest coincidence in the history of
mankind. My hat is off to you, sir.

------
TGJ
Using the length of a basketball court as the radius of the Earth, a pencil
mark on one end represents the Earths crust.

~~~
davidj
that is amazing. Also, consider most of all rocks on the planet are in a
liquid state.

------
turbojerry
The first time I saw Quantum Corrals-

<http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/images/stm15.jpg>

Watching an Open University TV programme about James Lovelock and the Gaia
Hypothesis-

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yvQVD7sgn0>

Stumbling upon cybernetics and Metasystem Transition theory-

<http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/mstt.html>

The first time watching each of The Matrix films and picking it apart in
realtime, and yes, the ending of Revolutions is a Metasystem transition.

Lots of synchronicity in my life, a few examples, when I first heard about
tuple spaces and Linda, and pulling out Mirror Worlds by Gelernter from my
bookshelf as I had bought it a couple of years before and not read it yet,
then again that has happened a few times since, the last time was when I was
getting interested in classification and found I had Sorting Things Out by
Bowker and Star, I keep buying books I don't know I'll need, until that time
in the future that I do. Someone else mentioned the Asch conformity
experiments, which I came across on YouTube and then within the week I was
reading the book Poker Without Cards and the experiments were mentioned in the
book, even though I hade no idea before hand, there were other instances of
synchronicity with that book, but I don't want this post to end up as tr;dr.

------
lanstein
The one that I just read ten minutes ago, that my childhood hero Wade Boggs
once drank 64 Miller Lites on a cross-country flight (without dying) has to be
up there.

~~~
jackowayed
Related: Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while on LSD
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_Ellis#June_12.2C_1970_no-h...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_Ellis#June_12.2C_1970_no-
hitter)

------
pjscott
I am powered by nuclear fusion. Indirectly, of course. I eat food, which gets
its energy from either eating other food or from sunlight.

This really blew my mind when I was six.

------
RealGeek
Parallel Universes, I literally fell of my chair when I heard a scientist
telling, "There are infinite versions of our universe, all slightly
different".

Many-worlds interpretation:

 _Many-worlds is a postulate of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective
reality of the universal wavefunction, but denies the reality of wavefunction
collapse, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures
are real —each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). It is also
referred to as MWI, the relative state formulation, the Everett
interpretation, the theory of the universal wavefunction, many-universes
interpretation, or just many worlds.

Many-worlds claims to reconcile how we can perceive non-deterministic events,
such as the random decay of a radioactive atom, with the deterministic
equations of quantum physics. Prior to many-worlds, reality had been viewed as
a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, rather, views reality as a many-
branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation>

~~~
cletus
If you're interested in this theory there is a novel worth reading that covers
this ground, almost from first principles.

It is Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Great book. Like most Stephenson books it gets a little weird at the end but
is nonetheless well worth reading.

~~~
absolut_todd
so THATS what it was all about!!!!

------
bear
My uncle was smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen
table near the cookie jar at Grandma's house during Thanksgiving.

He showed me how small our sun is by showing me the tip of his cigarette and
comparing it to the top of his coffee cup i.e. the size of larger stars in the
universe.

I was about six years old and the universe suddenly became a drastically
larger place.

------
davethewave
Not so much I heard, but I told my Mum that all the stars in the sky were suns
a long long way away - she never new

------
dmfdmf
For me it is the fact that all life appears to have originated from one common
ancestor and that life appeared fairly quickly after the earth formed and that
there is an unbroken chain of life between me and that first molecule that
replicated and transformed itself using energy from its environment.

------
Corvinex
That half the worlds population lives on less than $2 a day...

~~~
wisty
From wikipedia: Since 1980, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has
increased 67%, while median household income has only increased by 15%.

------
netmau5
A computer and an innovative mind were the only tools necessary to sustain
myself economically and make the world a better place. I'm still working on
the mind, but the MBP was a good investment towards that end :)

------
alexophile
It was pointed out [1] that this thread was the source of a controversy that
lead to a Florida law student and political candidate losing his position
writing for the student paper:

[http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-
lo...](http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2010/10/candidate-loses-
alligator-column-over-plagiarism/)

[1][http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_most_mindblowing_fact_you_heardread_in/c120lzk)

------
brettmjohnson
Hmmm, "heard/read" limits it a bit, as "self realization" is more memorable.

However, in the 7th grade (age 13-14), my math teacher explained to me that
education was a "privilege, not a punishment". I don't remember how it changed
my thought processes, but I remember the moment. Previously, I was what you
might call a "slacker". After that, I was "nerd slacker" - at least I paid
attention, even if I was still lazy.

A decade late, I graduated university with a degree in Mathematics and went
into software engineering. Smart + lazy = good software.

------
derrida
2nd Law of Thermodynamics... Things flow from hot to cold, from simplicity to
complexity. It is the only asymmetrical physical law! Does it have anything to
do with time? We don't know!

~~~
derrida
Oh, I must say, someone mentioned Godels Incompleteness Theorem, and this
comes pretty close. But I think the 2nd law if you think about it, can explain
so much.

------
alinhan
Not the most mind-blowing facts, just recent ones that come to mind:

1\. The volume of water and air on Earth, compared to the Earth:

[http://www.sciencephoto.com/images/download_lo_res.html?id=6...](http://www.sciencephoto.com/images/download_lo_res.html?id=690550330)

2\. The relative sizes of Earth, Sun and the biggest known stars, and the fact
that a passenger airplane would take 11,000 years to circle the biggest known
star:

<http://www.vplay.ro/watch/qtg8z7kg/>

------
Evgeny
That we have all evolved from some very simple single-cellular ancestor that
lived billions years ago and everything that happens to us on a biological
level is encoded in the DNA.

~~~
adrianwaj
Have you heard of epigenetics? This blew my mind recently.

"study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression
caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence"

------
bambax
That the universe, apparently, is nonlocal.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_Theorem>

(This article is quite complex; there was a superb article in Scientific
American that described Bell's experiments and conclusions simply and clearly;
it's here:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=was-
einstei...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=was-einstein-
wrong-about-relativity)

but unfortunately it's behind a paywall).

------
ekanes
Take a moment, and look around you. All the elements that are combined to make
you and everything you see was once inside a star. A star!

*Hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium aside.

------
etherael
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Bostrom.27s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_argument#Bostrom.27s_hypothesis)

------
Jupe
Logic paradoxes always did (and still do) blow my mind:

1: The farther out in space you look, the farther back in time you are seeing.
If you could look back all the way to the big bang, you would be looking
(billions of miles away) at the _inside_ of a universe about the size of a
grape fruit (or whenever super-inflation was supposed to start).

2\. You cannot move. In order to move between A and B, you must first move
half way between the two. etc.

3\. Some people "invest" in the lotto.

~~~
gaoshan
Forgive me but how is moving half way between two points not moving? Did you
mean "You cannot arrive"?

~~~
sesqu
I believe the idea is that the problem of moving is atomic. To move, you must
know how to move (assuming the world is not discrete).

It is the same as "you cannot arrive", except in reverse. Or that "you cannot
rotate one of two parallel lines", because the jump from parallel to
intersecting is elusive.

------
danielrm26
Over half of people in the U.S. don't believe in evolution.

~~~
Alex3917
It depends how you define "don't believe". They might say they don't believe
in evolution, but that doesn't mean they act in ways that are logically
congruent with evolution being false.

~~~
philwelch
Most people don't act in ways that are logically congruent with all their
beliefs. You're lucky if their beliefs are consistent with each other.

~~~
Alex3917
"Most people don't act in ways that are logically congruent with all their
beliefs."

Do they really believe them then? Is there any reason not to say that a
belief, by definition, is something (among other things) that you act
logically consistently with.

~~~
philwelch
I'm sure there's a word you _can_ define as something that you act logically
consistent with, but I think it's closer to the word "motivation" than the
word "belief".

------
TamDenholm
I've no idea if this is true or not (probably not due to where i heard it) but
a poll was taken in the US about foreign aid.

68% said that too much was spent on foreign aid, 59% said they thought it
should be cut.

Thus 9% think foreign aid is too high but shouldn't be cut. It isnt so much
this specific example, but i bet pollsters get this kind of thing all the
time, which i find fascinating.

Bonus points if you know where its from.

~~~
resdirector
I think it's from The West Wing episode "Guns Not Butter":

[http://www.tvloop.com/the-west-wing/show/quotes/joshua-
lyman...](http://www.tvloop.com/the-west-wing/show/quotes/joshua-lyman-
josh-68-percent-think-were-giving-too-322784)

------
bayareaguy
1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set>

2\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem>

3\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

------
aufreak3
That knowing things with the mind is as limiting as it is empowering. In other
words, your mind can be blown and you'd still be alright.

------
substack
I couldn't see how anything could possibly stay in orbit when gravity pulled
everything together until I wrote a computer program to simulate orbits in 2d:
<http://ln-s.net/7oFZ>

It was really enlightening to fiddle with the constants and to create events
that show how kinetic and potential energy interact in space.

------
DrStalker
When a primary school teacher told me that planes fly because the faster
moving air on top of the wing creates a low pressure zone and sucks up the
wing.

It was obviously wrong, because some planes can fly upside down, and that was
when I realized that just because an adult speaks with authority about
something they believe to be true doesn't mean it is true.

------
sshah
Listing few that stayed 'on my mind' for multiple days

\- E=mc2

\- Genocide in Darfur <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Darfur> and

\- Wealth controlled by top 1 percent of population in US
<http://www.slate.com/id/2268872/>

------
serverdude
1\. That humans kill each other because of differing opinions. 2\. That I see
only my own point of view till I live - at every moment, there are billions of
folks who are living a different life and experience. 3\. When we gaze at a
star, we are gazing into the past.

------
javert42
RSA algorithm for asymmetrical encryption/decryption and the Diffie-Hellman
key exchange protocol.

------
uptown
Probably not the MOST mind-blowing, but dual-photography rocked my world.
Here's the video demo:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8237361566146405294>

------
icefox
Most recently I found out that the Russian Salyut 3 space station (whos
missions were to take 3" resolution pictures of the US) had a cannon mounted
on the bottom of it. Not only was there a machine gun in space, but it was
fired too.

~~~
philwelch
How did the space station keep its position?

~~~
ebrenes
This article I found while pondering the same question states that it was de-
orbited a day after the test firing
([http://maikelnai.elcomerciodigital.com/2009/12/30/salyut-3-d...](http://maikelnai.elcomerciodigital.com/2009/12/30/salyut-3-disparando-
desde-el-espacio/)), granted it doesn't provide sources for that specific
claim.

------
marknutter
For me, when I finally grasped Einstein's theory of special relativity, that
was a pretty mind blowing experience. It's not as easy to fully _get_ as you
might think but when you do it's an almost zen-like experience.

------
phbob
The almost casual mention in Umberto Eco's 'Foucault's Pendulum' that ancient
civilisations had electric lights and batteries. Not sure how well this theory
holds up nowadays, but I was pretty amazed...

------
astrofinch
This doesn't answer you're question, but I'm really impressed that someone was
clever enough to invent hash tables. Lagrange interpolation is also something
I'm not sure I could have invented.

------
esponapule
that fast food hamburgers are only 2.1% to 14.8% Meat (B. Prayson et al. Fast
food hamburgers: what are we really eating?, Annals of Diagnostic Pathology 12
(2008) 406–409

------
marze
This comes to mind:

[http://www.tvkim.com/watch/357/kims-picks-mute-autistic-
girl...](http://www.tvkim.com/watch/357/kims-picks-mute-autistic-girl-finds-a-
voice)

------
cmykgrayscale
entangled particles and quantum mechanics in general.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lOWZ0Wv218>

------
jsz0
Carl Sagan's reflections on _star stuff_ still blows my mind.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UR2L_4ic6Y>

------
thesnark
That we are star dust.

~~~
Alex3917
We are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2hL6iCSFxk>

------
dean
Not so much mind-blowing as shocking -- when I first heard that the Europeans
brought horses to America. There were none here before Columbus.

------
points
That "Manic Monday" by the Bangles was written by Prince.

Oh also that "Monopoly" is an American invention (I assumed it was as British
as the Queen).

~~~
lowglow
+1 for Manic Monday

------
known
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin> in Japan

------
alexhanh
The atoms I consisted of a few months ago have been replaced by different
ones. It's the pattern that makes me.

------
rationalbeaver
Fairly mind blowing to me at the time I heard it: Reno, NV is farther West
than Los Angeles, CA.

------
holychiz
about 90% of my misery, unhappiness, frustration in life are due to one word:
expectation. Once I understood that my sufferings are caused by unmet
expectation of myself and/or others, my sufferings ease.

ps. still have high expectations, just not suffering.

------
__Rahul
That I can boil water in an origami paper cup kept directly over flame.

------
jacquesm
That we differ only 2.5 percent in our DNA from mice.

It _still_ blows my mind.

~~~
dfhfghfg
Along the same lines... we share 50% of our DNA with bananas :)

------
riffraff
that most people in the world do not use bidets
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet>

------
gregg_
We landed on the moon!

~~~
prawn
That we haven't landed man on Mars yet!

------
allengoodman
f\left ( x \right )=e^{x} \to {f}'\left ( x \right )=e^{x}

~~~
jackowayed
For those that prefer not to read TeX, that's saying that

d/dx (e^x) = e^x

------
chimingin
this place is so becoming reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_m...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dlrjs/whats_the_most_mindblowing_fact_you_heardread_in/)

lame.

~~~
pg
It was originally a link to the reddit thread.

~~~
blasdel
I assume you're the one that edited it?

With the link we're ostensibly talking about them, without it we're reduced to
their level, and just having the same adolescent discussion again. Editing out
the link makes HN _more like reddit_.

~~~
pg
I really don't think it's that big a deal.

------
pge
e^(i*pi) = -1

------
bhiggins
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY> really demonstrates the elegance
of bolo ties.

------
HilbertSpace
(1) All life on Earth is based on DNA. There is no alternative, no second
choice, no runner up.

(2) While there are millions of species on Earth that have long been stable
and successful and still are, humans have by some astronomically wide margin
the most powerful capabilities with, again, no alternative, no second choice,
no runner up.

(3) For all we have done with working with information, computing, human
physiology and psychology, we still have hardly a weak little hollow hint of a
tiny clue how to program a computer to be as _smart_ as a human, dog, kitty
cat, dolphin, or ... many more.

(4) On the one hand, humans, both individually and collectively, commonly make
serious, disastrous mistakes for even just silly reasons. On the other hand,
humans have made shockingly good progress even at understanding the universe.
How could the same species have both such big disasters and bit successes?

(5) As we try to understand the universe in greater detail, we get in effect
'throttled': We can't go faster than the speed of light; we can't look in
detail at a scale much smaller than an atom; we can't have energy enough to
explore all the possible particles. In each case, we are throttled, and
essentially blocked, not by hard barriers but just by increasing costs.

(6) As mentioned by others, the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR) _spooky action
at a distance_ paradox.

(7) There is a naughty boy in his room with his relatively large computer. He
types in candidate laws of physics and then clicks on the button Big Bang.
Mostly all he gets is a fast poof but occasionally he gets something
interesting. How do we tell our universe from something in this boy's
computer? More generally, how are the laws of physics _enforced_?

(7) Suppose n is a positive integer, R is the set of real numbers, R^n is
Euclidean n-dimensional space, and C is a closed subset of R^n. Then there
exists a function f: R^n --> R so that f is zero on C, positive otherwise, and
infinitely differentiable.

It is fair to say that the Mandelbrot set is _bizarre_ , but it is a closed
subset of R^2. So, the Mandelbrot set is the level set of an infinitely
differentiable function. So, a very smooth function can have a bizarre level
set.

Also, the graph in the plane of one dimensional Brownian motion is closed and
almost surely differentiable nowhere. So, a curve differentiable nowhere can
be the level set of an infinitely differentiable function.

So, could have a landscape given by an infinitely differentiable function, in
a valley pour in water, form a lake, and, as in Mandelbrot, have the boundary
of the lake be as irregular as the Mandelbrot set or Brownian motion. So, a
very smooth landscape can have lakes with very irregular boundaries.

~~~
bendmorris
While it's debatable whether viruses count as a form of life, RNA viruses do
exist. It's also generally believed that there were RNA-based forms of life
before the advent of DNA.

You are spot on about #4. The more we learn about our world, the more creative
ways we come up with to destroy it.

------
icosahedron
That 50% of step daughters will have some sort of unwanted sexual relationship
with their step fathers. I don't know if this means actual sex or just
unwanted advances. Either way is just mind boggling.

It's so gross on so many levels. I don't recall where I read it, and I hope
it's false.

~~~
mkramlich
Sounds like one of those "college feminist club" kinds of statistics that get
tossed around. Sounds way too high.

------
davidj
That in 1933 the United States declared bankruptcy and has been so ever since.
Also, the original 13th amendment of the Constitution was simply deleted and
replaced. And the 16th amendment was never ratified.

~~~
davidj
sad :( i don't understand why people are downvoting my post... Is this just to
sad for people to believe?

~~~
esponapule
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from
whatever source derived, without apportionment

The several state legislatures ratified the Sixteenth Amendment on the
following dates: Alabama, August 10, 1909; Kentucky, February 8, 1910; South
Carolina, February 19, 1910; Illinois, March 1, 1910; Mississippi, March 7,
1910; Oklahoma, March 10, 1910; Maryland, April 8, 1910; Georgia, August 3,
1910; Texas, August 16, 1910; Ohio, January 19, 1911; Idaho, January 20, 1911;
Oregon, January 23, 1911; Washington, January 26, 1911; Montana, January 27,
1911; Indiana, January 30, 1911; California, January 31, 1911; Nevada, January
31, 1911; South Dakota, February 1, 1911; Nebraska, February 9, 1911; North
Carolina, February 11, 1911; Colorado, February 15, 1911; North Dakota,
February 17, 1911; Michigan, February 23, 1911; Iowa, February 24, 1911;
Kansas, March 2, 1911; Missouri, March 16, 1911; Maine, March 31, 1911;
Tennessee, April 7, 1911; Arkansas, April 22, 1911 (after having rejected the
amendment at the session begun January 9, 1911); Wisconsin, May 16, 1911; New
York, July 12, 1911; Arizona, April 3, 1912; Minnesota, June 11, 1912;
Louisiana, June 28, 1912; West Virginia, January 31, 1913; Delaware, February
3, 1913; Wyoming, February 3, 1913; New Mexico, February 3, 1913; New Jersey,
February 4, 1913; Vermont, February 19, 1913; Massachusetts, March 4, 1913;
New Hampshire, March 7, 1913 (after having rejected the amendment on March 2,
1911). The amendment was rejected (and not subsequently ratified) by
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Utah.

<http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/html/conamt.html>

