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.)
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.
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.
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.
Damn. I watched a short film very similar to this where a mathematician woman made a super computer in her home to do the same thing. It pissed off her husband who finally takes off and she's left with her obsession. Can't remember the name.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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"
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jd|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] curiousepic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magnusdeus123|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xuzz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chegra|15 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] WillyF|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
(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|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkuchar|15 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] sage_joch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Eliezer|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mquander|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e1ven|15 years ago|reply
Now it appears to be a [self] post.
[+] [-] AndrewO|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] podperson|15 years ago|reply
OK how about the Axiom of Choice?
[+] [-] sunkencity|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fletchowns|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aik|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
[+] [-] rsaarelm|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Instead, it can be said that human genome can be represented by a digital code, which has finite number of bits.
[+] [-] listic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] podperson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x5a177|15 years ago|reply
e^iπ + 1 = 0
[+] [-] kaokun|15 years ago|reply
Mind. Blown. The universe is one crazy place.
[+] [-] texel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z92|15 years ago|reply