As I sit here, listening to awesome music and browsing the internets, my mind is busy putting itself back together like a puzzle of shrapnel. Why? Cause it has been blown once more. I just found out that an universal constant is not, in fact, a constant at all. Recent research (try saying that 10 times really fast) seems to show that the strength of electromagnetic interaction (the energy that holds atoms together) varies in different parts of the universe. This also means that the laws of physics are not universal. In short, my reaction to this discovery was something like this:
And that got me thinking of some other things that have blown my mind in the past. The incomplete list:
- everything that moves drags a pocket of vacuum behind it
- roughly two hundred thousand years of evolution (the length of time the human race has existed) is barely a second compared to the age of the planet itself, not to mention the Sun
- this image…
… encompasses an area barely 1/13 000 000th of the sky and shows ten thousand galaxies, each and every one of them containing between ten million and one trillion stars
- two entangled quantum particles can transmit information between themselves literally instantly (as in no delay whatsoever)
- there are more nerves going from your brain to your eyes and ears than the other way
- your muscles are perfectly capable of punching through concrete, but doing so would rip them off your bones
- 90% of what you see at any given time is made up by your mind, because if it would try to process everything your eyes are feeding it, you’d go insane
So yeah. My mind gets blown rather often. Over and over again. Because stuff like that just interests me. I’m always up for finding out something cool about the world, human physiology and the universe. I know that no one will care if I happen to drop some of those things into a conversation, but it’s there in my brain and I know it and it’s awesome.
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Have you noticed that explosions make everything cooler? It’s true. For example, look at your lamp. There it is, right there on the ceiling or on your desk, giving you light and some comfort, even a little bit of warmth. Now imagine that while it did all that, it would also be exploding constantly. You know what you get? A star. And tell me true that a star is not cooler than a simple lamp.
Here’s another thing that is easily improved by explosions. Say that there’s a meteorite coming down. It’s already burning its way through the atmosphere, there’s a long trail of fire behind it. Now, if it doesn’t explode, it crashes into the ground, creates a crater and a shockwave capable of granting you Superman’s flying power for a grand total of 15 seconds. However, if it does explode, it will light up the entire sky brighter than sunshine at high noon. In a brilliant flash of light, whatever remains of it is completely vaporised as the former spacerock gets turned into pure energy in a single instant. That’s way cooler than crashing down and killing 200 people.
That, my friends, is a supernova. It’s the second biggest explosion known to man. That is what happens when a really big star dies. It fucking EXPLODES with enough force to vaporize an entire solar system. Its death leaves behind a cloud of starstuff that reaches reach several lightyears in diameter. From that destruction, new stars and solar systems are born. For a single brilliant moment, one star can easily outshine the entire galaxy it’s in. In the year 1006, a star exploded 7200 lightyears away, bright enough to be visible during the day and cast shadows during the night. The power released in a single one of these explosions is far greater than all the energy generated by our Sun during its entire life.
The universe is awesome.
