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28 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
Some science facts can be pretty wild. Like this fun fact about grasshoppers. Did you know that their ears are actually on their bellies? And not just one pair of ears. They apparently have six along the sides of their abdomens! This is the kind of fact that I find quite hard to wrap my head around.
So I totally get why one Redditor went to r/AskReddit and posed a similar question to other netizens. The user u/shirofromgame wrote: "What is a scientifically proven fact you refuse to believe?" And the 'refuse to believe' part in this case is not that they actually don't believe it. It's more that the fact is so outlandish or ridiculous that it just blows their mind.
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#1
As a child I could not grasp that groves in a record could make complicated music when a needle ran over them. Now that I'm older and it's all light on metal disks or just math (somehow) I have given up even pretending I believe. It's magic, pure and simple.
Bored Panda reached out to the curious person who asked the Redditor about the things they couldn't believe. The Redditor u/shirofromgame agreed to have a short chat with us and told us the reason behind this post. The idea for the question came to the Redditor as almost all intrusive thoughts do – just before falling asleep.
"I came up with the Reddit post after trying to go to sleep (and failing), and I was thinking about such facts," u/shirofromgame told Bored Panda. "You see, I was so sleepy that I wrote the question on Reddit and immediately fell asleep after. I actually remembered I wrote it after two days and was surprised to see it had so many replies," the Redditor adds to her whimsical story.
Out of so many interesting replies, u/shirofromgame says that the very top one messed with them the most. It was the one about how our eyes work. "I really can't get my mind wrapped around [that]," the Redditor says, "About how our brains flip the image that we see from our eyes."
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#3
I refuse to believe a leopard-moose-camel with a 40ft neck is a real animal and a horse with a horn isn’t.
Admittedly, it is quite fascinating – our eyes actually do work like a Camera Obscura. As the specialist in neuro-ophthalmology, Dr. Andrew G. Lee, explains, the image we see is inverted on the retina. It's the retina that sees the world upside down. "Your cortex just turns it upside down," Lee says.
There's also an interesting experiment related to the whole phenomenon. If a person were to wear prism glasses (which do the opposite), they would see the world upside down. But what's interesting is that after they take the glasses off, the whole world would be upside down for them for a few days. How does it go back to normal? "[Your] cortex puts it back in the right orientation," Dr. Lee explains.
#4
The fact that our eyes see everything upside down and back into our brain we have to flip the image. Just crazy.
#5
The fact that t.rex and stegosaurus were separated by millions of years and never existed together. I will always have Stegosaurus battle T Rex when given dinosaurs to play with!.
#7
The solution to the Monty Hall paradox. I can even do the math myself. But it still "feels" intuitively wrong. The scenario: you're on a game show and the host offers you a choice between three doors. Behind one door is a million dollars. Behind the other two doors, you get nothing. You make your choice. But before the host opens the door to reveal what's inside, he opens one of the *other two* doors to reveal nothing behind *that* one. He then offers you a second choice: do you keep the door that you already chose? Or do you switch to the other unopened door? Does it matter? Intuitively, it feels like it shouldn't matter, that you have a 50-50 chance of winning whether you switch to the other door, or keep the one you chose originally. Mathematical reality: you should switch. You have double the chance of winning the money if you switch to the other door, compared with staying put. Close second: in any random group of just 23 people you will have more than 50% chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday. Again, I can do the math to prove this but it still doesn't feel right.
#9
I refuse to believe that ALL snowflakes in the entirety of history are unique. You mean to tell me, that ALL snowflakes EVER, across the ENTIRE GLOBE, are COMPLETELY UNIQUE? That can’t be mathematically possible. Like, a single storm that drops 3 inches on my house must be a million flakes. Multiply that by the area of that storm, and the depth of the snow, and that number becomes huge. THEN, add that to every storm in the history of the whole globe. I just can’t believe that we have seen every snowflake and have come to the definite conclusion that they’re all unique. Scientists aren’t at my house cataloging the snowflakes. How do they know?.
#11
Skyscrapers sway a lot. I refuse to believe a building like the burj khalifa moves 6-7 feet in the wind without issue.
#13
That the speed of light can’t be broken. They said flight was physically impossible with a machine, then they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible. I just don’t believe that we’re right this time either.
#15
Women are born with all the eggs already in them and don't produce those through the lifetime. It is so ridiculous that I still can't believe it, even though I tell it to the others. Hope for a paper suggesting an alternative to "The egg from which you were born was actually created by your grandma".
#16
The double-slit experiments and all their variations still weird me out. As someone who hasn't studied the necessary fundamentals, it just seems like the Light particles know whether or not you're watching and will change their behavior depending on what you're expecting them to do.
#18
In a lottery, having a string of consecutive numbers (say 1,2,3,4,5,6) being drawn is equally likely as a string of random numbers being drawn.
#21
That cold plunges are good for your health. Can’t do it. Not going to submerse myself if freezing water.
#22
That many living people have Neanderthal DNA. Mostly in non-African ethnicities. My DNA is apparently more 'Neanderthal' than 93% of the population tested to date by 23andme. [why?]? THat many living people have the DNA of another non-modern species (is that the right word?), the Denisovans (mostly certain Asian ethnicities). How many more non-modern species of DNA do humans carry that we just have not identified? How many others did we interbreed with? WHAT ARE WE?
#25
Humans are made up of 70% water, just doesn’t make sense. Too many bones and muscle for such a high number.
#26
That dark matter / energy exists. We've yet to directly observe any of it, only the indirect effects via gravity, and even Einstein himself acknowledged that his model of physics was incomplete. We understand gravity now better than Newton did, but there are still gaps. While the body of evidence supporting dark matter theory is extensive, we're one step away from demolishing and reinventing all of modern physics. One day a new Einstein will come along and invent an even more robust model of gravity, and it could reveal that our supposed "dark matter" was really the result of a huge flaw.
#28
The levels of crazy my kids can reach after having a marshmallow, or any junk food for that matter, makes me not believe that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity.
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