Five Mind Blowing Scientific Facts YOU DIDN’T KNOW
Look around. How familiar do you think you are with your surroundings? You must think: very. The fact of the matter is this universe layered with surprises, and despite living for years on this planet, we don’t realize the mind-boggling things that are right in front of us. To make us fall in awe. To make us wonder. To make us shake our head in disbelief. Just for the love of wonderment, a few are listed here:
1. YOU NEVER REALLY TOUCH ANYTHING
Touching is an illusion. A deceitful game played by your mind. You see, everything is made up of little particles we know as atoms. And those atoms are further divided into sub-atomic particles namely electrons, protons and neutrons where electrons are placed in the outer most shell. Electrons carry the negative charge and thus repel each other. When two surfaces come extraordinarily close to each other, there’s an electromagnetic force in action that creates repulsion which our mind perceives as touching when we aren’t.
Take two magnets and try to bring the repelling poles in contact with each other. There’ll be a strong repelling force that’ll keep you from succeeding. It’s the same phenomena with touching.
2. STARS MAY NOT BE THERE WHEN YOU SEE THEM
As fast as light is, it still has a finite speed. So it takes time for the light to reach your eyes. The stars you see in the night sky are so far away that it takes millions and sometimes billions of years for the light to reach us and it’s not at all unlikely that the star you’re looking at right now isn’t there anymore. Just a ghost of it.
In fact, if you think, everything you see is in the past. We just think we’re seeing what’s happening right at the moment simply because the delay of light reaching our eyes is negligible.
3. YOU’RE MADE OF STARS
Astrophysicists think that many atoms in our body have come from stars that exploded years ago. It’s entirely possible that two different atoms, one from your right hand and the other from your left, might have come from two different stars. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say we’re made of stars!
4. AVERAGE CLOUD WEIGHT IS EQUIVALENT TO 100 ELEPHANTS
See those innocent looking fluffy clouds above your head? How much do you think it weighs? A whopping 1.1 million pounds! Yes. An average cloud weighs that much. They’re floating mountains over our heads. Thankfully they only fall on us in the form of rain.
5. ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE
When you’re standing outside right beneath earth’s atmosphere, there’s a pressure of 1,000 kg or one whole tonne on your head! That’s a weight of a small car. So why don’t you get crushed? Because our bodies exert an equivalent reactionary force that cancels out the effect of the atmospheric pressure. The same thing happens with the sea in water but at a much more intense level.
