What kind of things literally, just blow your minds?

[MrBlah]

What kind of things literally, just blow your minds? Things that are just amazingly amazing...

[Zork Nemesis]

While it wasn't exactly mind-blowing given the circumstances, I've gotten a chance to disembark a Navy Amphibious Assault ship via landing craft. That was pretty cool. A lot of stuff was pretty cool when I was at sea in the Navy, despite the labor that often came with it. Get past the heavy lifting, the number of helicopters involved in an underway replenishment is pretty impressive for someone who doesn't normally see them.

Pulling into port in Split, Croatoa and Souda Bay (spelling?), Crete was a very impressive sight, not used to such high and rolling landscapes where I come from. Hell, just going to Europe and the Middle East as part of my job was amazing, even if I hated every bit of it. Suez Canal, The Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Kuwait, and I got a chance to visit Germany as well during my transit off the ship, even if it was just a medical center.

I don't get out enough, so little things like this are what impress me.

[Cpt._Keyes]

The stupidity of people. On a happier note while it doesn't blow my mind...I love theoretical physics and astronomy

[Plinko]

I hope nothing, literally, blows your mind.

[Cpt._Keyes]

I hope nothing, literally, blows your mind.

I was proud of myself...I forced myself to ignore the "literally" and delete my paragraph of ridicule, plink's got my back!

[Boss Llama]

I was gonna jump on the "literally" as well - it's badly overused. I wasn't planning to respond with ridicule, just something like "High velocity bullets, close proximity explosives, and perhaps the vacuum of outer space." That said, I think Plinko's reply is better - hopefully nothing!

Now then, figuratively speaking, there is some pretty cool stuff out there. I enjoy reflecting on the sudden rapidity of technological progress in the last 200 years, and considering its historical effect on humanity. Some examples:

The ease of long-distance communication, followed by long distance transportation, has shrunk the world in ways our forefathers couldn't comprehend. A message that would have taken weeks or even months to get to its destination in 1812 now will get there as fast as you can dial a number or click "send." People aren't far behind, with that same multi-month voyage now taking less than a day. For example - a few years back I decided on the spur of the moment to go to France. I bought a ticket, flew to Paris from Seattle on a Friday night, spent the weekend in Paris, and was home again on Monday. There are people alive today who were born at a time you would have trouble doing that even from elsewhere in France itself. Refridgeration is also an incredible technological force. The development of home refridgeration that wasn't just an ice box rebuilt the entire structure of a day for much of society. You no longer needed to go to the market every day to buy the day's food, and cooking/preparation styles developed to cover up the taste of spoiling food gave way to fancier dishes and alternate preparations. Also, refridgeration technology is directly linked to the development of HVAC for homes and buildings (A/C is just a modified refridgerator for your entire home), which significantly altered how we view our environment. It made the switch from us being subject to the environment, to being masters of it. This in turn is linked to everything from ideas of hygeine (shouldn't sweaty and smelly - an old and successfuly marketing blitz) to philosophy about the human place in the world.

All of that stuff is made possible by the battery, and studies of batteries. I'm not talking your standard AA (though those are pretty cool), rather I'm talking about the oldschool Voltaic Piles and stuff like that. It was batteries, and the study of electricity they allowed, that paved the way for nearly all modern communication, transportation, refridgeration, and other technologies developed since.

Also, the vastness of space is pretty awesome. Looking up in the sky and knowing that some of the light I'm seeing in the form of stars left its star a billion or more years ago. Some of the light being seen originated much more recently, but started heading our way during the Norman conquest, or while Shakespeare was writing, or when Washington was president, etc.

Also, old books - really old books, fill me with wonder. Original copies of centuries-old books are direct conversations with people and societies long gone. If I ever become independently wealthy, I will study paleographic writing and read ancient texts all day. I secretly hero-worship Michael Ventris.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

The cosmic size of the universe.

Quantum entanglement and the double slit experiment.

the simulation argument

Hawking radiation

A slightly more precise, but still much simplified view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle-antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole whilst the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). By this process the black hole loses mass, and to an outside observer it would appear that the black hole has just emitted a particle. In reality, the process is a quantum tunneling effect, whereby particle-antiparticle pairs will form from the vacuum, and one will tunnel outside the event horizon

[M's]

Electricity, and all the uses it has.

[Earthworm James]

This article - Every black hole contains a new Universe

http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content ... erse%2F566

Also, human perception & relationship to eachother, ourselves and nature blows my mind because of how removed most people are from their personal developement. My opinion is that all of the aforementioned things are essential to our individual and societal developement; relationship to ourselves, eachother & nature. In short my "mind is blown" by our current situation in the world, how we got here, and how every individual is shifting to live more vitaly, or less.

[Checkm8]

Dynamite.

[jim beam]

I would say teenagers and the fact that I lived through those years

[Zork Nemesis]

I stand corrected, Jim's new banner....

[Will T.]

Literally blow my mind? I'd say this guy:



Figuratively, the following things that are usually taken for granted, especially when you consider that it was less than a hundred years ago that most of them didn't exist:

-Electricity
-Lightbulbs
-Indoor plumbing
-Household appliances that either make previously-arduous tasks require little to literally no effort, or which do things that used to be impossible (dishwasher, refrigerator, oven, etc.)
-Air conditioning
-The internet (a worldwide system by which anyone anywhere on the planet can instantly interact with someone else anywhere else on the planet? Preposterous!)
-Video games, especially the inner workings of such - they're extremely complex systems, yet when you look at them most of them are just a mass of "If this happens, then do this" scenarios

There is one person who really blows my mind more than just about anyone or anything else: Walt Disney. He made so many amazing things and is now arguably the most famous person who ever lived. Yet the work he did to get there and the massive failures he persevered through are even more astounding than the end result. Mickey Mouse? His second super-star character, after the rights to his first (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit) were stolen away by a crooked publisher; he was on the verge of giving up for good when he happened to draw a picture of a mouse while riding a train one day. The Walt Disney Studios? His third or fourth attempt to actually start a studio; his first several efforts throughout the 1920s all fell apart for various reasons, usually through no fault of his own (investors and distributors not holding up their end of the deal mostly). Even after he had a successful studio, he faced a massive strike in the early 1940s that shut down just about everything and had most of his entire staff turned against him. Disneyland? A massive disaster on opening day, with wet cement on Main Street (people's shoes became stuck in it), half the plumbing not even working yet (no drinking fountains - and it was 115 degrees that day!), and over 3 times as many guests showing up as expected, many of whom snuck over the park berm on ladders. As an example of just how poorly the park held up under that many people, there were three cars left in a functional state on the Autopia at the end of the day. None of the other rides fared much better.

And yet, Mickey is now a worldwide icon; Walt's studio is now the largest corporation on earth; and Disneyland is one of a string of theme parks around the world, and the second most-visited tourist destination on the planet (the #1 spot belongs to Walt Disney World in FL). What he accomplished is amazing, but the fact that he went through so much and never once gave up is jaw-dropping.

[l3eeron]

My favorite subject to ponder is the natural world and the cosmos, everything from the Planck scale up to gravitational lensing. We're all just star dust, that blows my mind!

[Dog]

Astrophysics.