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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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.
Just because we understand it doesn't make it any less impressive. We are dust that got exploded so hard it started thinking about itself. Miraculous
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."
Q-tips do belong in my ears and I refuse to believe any doctor saying otherwise.
I refuse to believe a leopard-moose-camel with a 40ft neck is a real animal and a horse with a horn isn’t.
Giraffe used to be called "camel-leopard". Rhino used to be called "big horse with a single horn".
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.
The fact that our eyes see everything upside down and back into our brain we have to flip the image. Just crazy.
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!.
Best point of that whole thing not mentioned - not only didn’t they live together. But its more time between the Stegosaurus and the Trex then between us humans and the Trex. 80 million years between them two, and 65 between us and the Trex.
The idea that time can bend and stretch depending on gravity and velocity.
They had to correct the GPS to take account of this, it wouldn't work otherwise. Space also bends and stretches — falling towards a black hole can produce an effect known as "spaghettification" :-)
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.
Ask Marilyn (vos Savant) did several columns on this. I agree with OP. It doesn't make sense that switching is better, but it really is. The situation makes me grumpy.
That babies' adult teeth are under their eyes (skeletal).
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?.
They found an identical snowflake. I can't remember who 'they' are, but that's actually now been disproven now, I belive, as it's now been discovered that there are identical snowflakes. Or, rather, identical patterns formed. And it's also been proven to do with the weather conditions. So basically the weather, the area, altitude, etc, dictates the various shapes of the snowflakes that will fall
That I'm not one living entity; billions of lifeforms all combine to make one of me.
And then think that you're actually mostly made up of space, and that not one cell of you is actually touching any other because of this "space". You're mostly 'made' of "space". But this "space" isn't just 'nothing'. It has influence, and may even have some control over whatever is around it. So... What is it?... ; ) THEN, realise that that is the same for appsoloutly everything 'solid', living and inanimate... I'm still learning about this, of course (same as the people studying it, of course), but that's a good one to me
Skyscrapers sway a lot. I refuse to believe a building like the burj khalifa moves 6-7 feet in the wind without issue.
Used to live on the 14th floor and I can confirm this 👍🏻 They sway!
That the average time to sleep is 7 minutes. WHO???.
It's me. I'm bringing the average down. If I'm not asleep within a couple of minutes of closing my eyes, then something is wrong. Sorry everyone. I'm the freak.
oh, my, I'm envious! chronic insomnia my entire life. I've often laid in bed for hours without falling asleep - usually now after 20-30 minutes I just get up and do something; read, watch tv or a movie, laundry, clean the house, anything... (and yeah, I know I'm not supposed to watch videos or play electonic games). In my 20s I'd read a science-fiction book cover-to-cover almost every night because of my insomnia. Fortunately, I can function on just a few hours of sleep a night - I've friends who are zombies on less than 8-10 hours... Btw, CBD gummies help; they don't make me *go* to sleep, they quiet my brain so I can *fall* asleep (just CBD; not THC, although I've friends who swear by those, too)
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The lump laying next to me snoring 4 minutes after climbing in next to me. Every night.
Haha and then once they start snoring it's hard to fall asleep from the noise.
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Had a bf once who'd fall asleep within seconds. Since he was a kid he'd simply done 3 deep breaths and fallen asleep by the third breath. So f***ing provoking! I have always had sleep problems and there he was, falling asleep so fast and staying asleep. No wonder that relationship didn't last long. Lol
My wife brings that number down! She can be fast asleep within a couple of minutes while I take anything up to an hour.
Once my bf is comfortable he is out in 30 secs and I'm like how?!? Me it takes around 30 mins to fall asleep ugh
If i had a good day, work or/and sport, no alcool, no tv no smartphone before going to bed. I take a book and i can't even read a full page. I'd say less than 5 minutes to fall asleep.
Please don't be offended, but I remember how so many health experts declared that Margaret Thatcher (Brit PM) descended into dementia due to sleeping only 5 hours a night. She used to say how proud she was about how little sleep she needed, at the time. Not that I'm saying that I know for definite that 5 hours or fewer have such issues on brain health is a fact, as I've never really looked into it - it was just that your comment reminded me. As an aside, she ruined the UK by selling all our National services (energy/water/steel/social housing/transport), and we have been suffering ever since.
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What the heck? I give myself an hour to fall asleep and it usually takes longer
I do my 'pre-sleep' adjustments before I lay down and turn off the lights. If My mind is calm, I can fall asleep in moments.
If you fall asleep sooner than the average 7minutes or your partner says you snore excessively, please consider seeing a pulmonologist for a sleep study.. My study saved my life. My sleep apnea is under control.
Try downloading a sleep tracking app; I never thought I fell asleep that quickly but I really do. Time seems to stretch out when you're trying to fall asleep and I think we just misjudge it.
Sorry to say but Bored Panda is contributing to bringing this average down.
You must mean: The average time to fall asleep is 70 minutes
My wife can go to bed, fall asleep, have a dream, and then wake up to tell me about it before I can make it through an entire BP article. It blows my mind.
I’m definitely an outlier since it usually takes me about 15 minutes to fall asleep!
Me - I put a podcast on - and set my timer on spotify to stop at an hour - I never make it past the first 3 minutes of the episode (Sleep Cove for great sleepy time podcast listening)
If I fall asleep within 3 hours, it's a good night. Meanwhile, I'm married to someone who could fall asleep hanging from a washing line erected on a train carriage. Freak.
I read that completely wrong, as “the length of time before you wake up”, not “how long it takes to fall asleep”. But neither are believable to me.
SEVEN MINUTES?!!!! I’m lucky if I’m asleep after an hour! Toss, turn, hot flash, pee break, clogged nose, rinse and repeat. My husband falls asleep within minutes. There are nights when I have considered homicide
Depends. Watching cartoons with my kid, 0,1 seconds. If I have an important meeting in the morning, 17 hours.
“average time to sleep is 7 minutes” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person requires 2 hours to sleep. Bedtimes Georg, who lives in cave & falls asleep in .000001 seconds, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
This is me. I feel so sorry for people, especially my wife, who have trouble falling asleep. According to her, in the 30 years we've been married she's observed that I fall asleep in about 5 minutes on average. If I'm still awake after 15 minutes, something is wrong and I will get out of bed and go read for a while. I can honestly say that in my 59 years of life, I've had legitimate "I can't get to sleep" insomnia no more than 10 times.
it takes me on the average 30 seconds to go into a deep sleep. I will wake up, most nights after an hour's sleep and it feels like I have slept 8hours. (feels like it) Then I look on the watch and see it has been only 1 hour and go to sleep again. Very seldom I will have a night that takes more than 5 minutes
It’s hard to measure when you actually fall asleep; something I learned since sleeping with another person every night is that I can be asleep and not realise it. Snoring and everything, but I could not have told you I dropped off.
Me- like 2 minutes. Trouble is I can't sleep much more than 3 hrs in a stretch. It's all give and take.
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.
I know it's true but I still find it hard to believe that viruses are not considered living organisms.
There are a lot of factors but the two biggest ones I think are the fact that they are inert and do not use energy when not in a host. And that they cannot self replicate without said host.
Hard to believe something capable of so much death and destruction is probably not even conscious.
That fruits and vegetables do not decay faster when I’m the one paying for them.
Lol 😂 Well I can guarantee that even if you buying them personally curses them, they’ll last way longer (& have more nutrients from being riper) if you buy from local growers than the big supermarkets.
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".
It wasn’t created by your grandma. It was created by your mother, which happened to be inside your grandma. Not the same thing.
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.
Narwhals. Ain't no way.
Yeah how can they exist but a unicorn can’t???? If we have the genetic material to grow feathers why can’t a horse have the genetic material to grow a horn?!
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.
Black is absolutely a colour, how else would there be a crayon for it?.
That cold plunges are good for your health. Can’t do it. Not going to submerse myself if freezing water.
I once had a ridiculously high temperature and I was hallucinating and raving so the hospital stuck me in a tub full of Ice water...................I was lucid instantly.
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. WTF? 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?
Neanderthals & Denisovans are both members of the human species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Neanderthal_and_Denisovan
That jet planes can fly. Come on.
I’ve flown on them many times before.
But come on.
I watched the airshow where the A380 was presented to the public. It did a very slow fly-by. How that plane just stayed airborne was insane (and a combo of no cargo/passengers, very little fuel, and a tremendous flight crew, but still insane).
Our stomach acid is strong enough to even dissolve metals over time.
Humans are made up of 70% water, just doesn’t make sense. Too many bones and muscle for such a high number.
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.
I love physics and anything to do with the universe but, when it comes to dark matter, my brain melts down. No, don't understand it, don't want to even start understanding it AARRGGHH!!!
Cold water is just as effective as warm water for washing hands.
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.
Expectation bias. The perception of hyperactivity is solely that of the parents & nothing to do with the children’s behaviors. Not to mention the environmental circumstances skewing perceptions.
Note: this post originally had 40 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
As usual there are many "scientifically proven facts" that are absolutely not true in this Bored Panda journalist's copy/paste exercise.
At least we're not the only ones doing it. I saw on reddit yesterday that someone posted a meme from bored panda
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I refuse to believe the Banach-Tarski theorem. That it is possible to cut a sphere of volume V into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two spheres each with volume V. In other words, the mathematical theorem that 3-D volume is not conserved. An extreme example is that it's possible to cut a sphere the size of a pea into a finite number of pieces that can be reassembled to make a solid sphere the size of the Sun. No friggin' way.
I refuse to believe that anything you ever posted here was worth reading.
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The most recent that blew my mind is: There is no truth. It is a concept we all agree upon due to similar perception. Laws of physics may seem "true", but they're a product of human perception, therefore an agreed upon concept.
So gravity is just an “agreed upon concept”? If we all decided tomorrow that gravity wasn’t “true,” it would cease to exist?
Load More Replies... For me, the whole fabric of spacetime is completely incomprehensible. So spacetime is a 3d plane that changes time depending on where you are? and this explains gravity somehow?
I always liked the explanation that it's like if some people were holding a bedsheet nice and tight, and someone else put a bowling ball in the middle, the flung a marble past the bowling ball. The marble would spiral in toward the ball, and if friction weren't a thing it would just keep going around and around (orbit). And that marble also puts a dent in the sheet (albeit much smaller), and a tiny little ball bearing might orbit that. How time plays into that, though, I have no god damned idea lol
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These posts should have an entirely different title."scientific theories that are hard to believe" or something.This one creates expectations about a list of interesting facts.Misleading.
Dragons don't exist, but dinosaurs do. Dinosaurs are just scientifically approved dragons.
I mean, there are a few key differences between dinosaurs and dragons, one being that dinosaurs didn't breathe fire (because, like, come on), and the other being that dinosaurs didn't fly. Depictions of dragons with wings all have WAY too small a wing span to be able to lift their bodies off the ground. Even bees, which are barely able to fly, have wings that are roughly the size of their bodies, but dragons are depicted with wings significantly smaller than their bodies.
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Its kind of sad the number of people who feel the need to correct any of these posts. So often it doesn't sound like a "hey I think they might have gotten this a bit wrong" but does sound much more like "I know more about this than the writer and by God I'm going to set that idiot straight". The tone of arrogance in some of those posts is gross. Definitely some people I would never want to meet.
With the advent of "Science" - it was made plain that "what I believe" is not necessarily the same as "The (hopefully) objective Truth." Alas; all of us, including "scientists" - have forgotten - all of this. Tra-la-la.
The fact that you put the word science in quotations tells me you know nothing of science.
Load More Replies... As usual there are many "scientifically proven facts" that are absolutely not true in this Bored Panda journalist's copy/paste exercise.
At least we're not the only ones doing it. I saw on reddit yesterday that someone posted a meme from bored panda
Load More Replies... I refuse to believe the Banach-Tarski theorem. That it is possible to cut a sphere of volume V into four pieces that can be reassembled to make two spheres each with volume V. In other words, the mathematical theorem that 3-D volume is not conserved. An extreme example is that it's possible to cut a sphere the size of a pea into a finite number of pieces that can be reassembled to make a solid sphere the size of the Sun. No friggin' way.
I refuse to believe that anything you ever posted here was worth reading.
Load More Replies... The most recent that blew my mind is: There is no truth. It is a concept we all agree upon due to similar perception. Laws of physics may seem "true", but they're a product of human perception, therefore an agreed upon concept.
So gravity is just an “agreed upon concept”? If we all decided tomorrow that gravity wasn’t “true,” it would cease to exist?
Load More Replies... For me, the whole fabric of spacetime is completely incomprehensible. So spacetime is a 3d plane that changes time depending on where you are? and this explains gravity somehow?
I always liked the explanation that it's like if some people were holding a bedsheet nice and tight, and someone else put a bowling ball in the middle, the flung a marble past the bowling ball. The marble would spiral in toward the ball, and if friction weren't a thing it would just keep going around and around (orbit). And that marble also puts a dent in the sheet (albeit much smaller), and a tiny little ball bearing might orbit that. How time plays into that, though, I have no god damned idea lol
Load More Replies... These posts should have an entirely different title."scientific theories that are hard to believe" or something.This one creates expectations about a list of interesting facts.Misleading.
Dragons don't exist, but dinosaurs do. Dinosaurs are just scientifically approved dragons.
I mean, there are a few key differences between dinosaurs and dragons, one being that dinosaurs didn't breathe fire (because, like, come on), and the other being that dinosaurs didn't fly. Depictions of dragons with wings all have WAY too small a wing span to be able to lift their bodies off the ground. Even bees, which are barely able to fly, have wings that are roughly the size of their bodies, but dragons are depicted with wings significantly smaller than their bodies.
Load More Replies... Its kind of sad the number of people who feel the need to correct any of these posts. So often it doesn't sound like a "hey I think they might have gotten this a bit wrong" but does sound much more like "I know more about this than the writer and by God I'm going to set that idiot straight". The tone of arrogance in some of those posts is gross. Definitely some people I would never want to meet.
With the advent of "Science" - it was made plain that "what I believe" is not necessarily the same as "The (hopefully) objective Truth." Alas; all of us, including "scientists" - have forgotten - all of this. Tra-la-la.
The fact that you put the word science in quotations tells me you know nothing of science.
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