Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
According to the new study, there’s a 50-50 chance we’re living in a simulation. And the probability will increase as we develop technology enabling the creation of a simulation containing conscious beings.
“The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations,” Kipping told Scientific American. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”
In 1937, a funnel was filled with hot pitch, a highly viscous material. In April 2014, the ninth drop from the funnel fell, almost thirteen and a half years after the eighth.
J.J. Thomson won the Nobel in Physics in 1906 when he showed electrons were particles. His son G. P. Thomson won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for showing that electrons are waves.
“Cheerios effect” is an interesting fluid dynamics phenomenon that happens in cereal bowls. When there are just a few bits of cereal left floating on top of the milk, they tend to cluster together in the middle or around the edges of the bowl, rather than dispersing across the surface.
At the subatomic level, space is never truly empty. It is filled with a writhing, active population of “Virtual Particles” that pop in and out of existence. Physicists call this “quantum foam”. Physicists theorize fluctuations from this field of energy may have given rise to the Universe.
Timeless physics is the controversial view that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than an illusion. Arguably we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it.
One evening in 1954, in a student hall at Princeton University, grad student Everett was drinking sherry with his friends when he came up with the idea that quantum effects cause the universe to constantly split.
Physicists at Washington State University created ‘negative mass’ where unlike every known physical object in the world, it doesn’t accelerate in the direction it was pushed. It accelerates backwards.
Sniper bullets can travel so far that the rotation of the Earth will move the target, and shooters have to adjust their aim accordingly.
Due to time dilation one could travel thousands of light years in a human lifespan without exceeding the speed of light. A full 40 year trip at 1 g will appear on Earth to last 58,000 years and cover a distance of 55,000 light years.
If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, it is speculated that a strangelet coming into contact with an ordinary lump of matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. In a disaster scenario, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.
J.J. Thomson won the Nobel in Physics (1906) when he showed electrons were particles. His son won it in 1937 for showing that electrons are waves. And they were both right.