Sometimes, instead of blowing your mind, advanced scientific concepts can just feel like they’ve left your brain twisted in knots. That’s right, in this edition of Mind Blown we’re tying up all our loose ends with a cursory examination of string theory. In eleven entries so far you’ve seen me mention or allude to string theory on more than one occasion, well the time for telling you just what you needed to know to get by is over. We’re going down the rabbit hole people. Hold on tight. To begin with, forget everything you learned about those pesky little sub-atomic…
Category: Mind Blown
Mind Blown- We are a computer simulation
Despite my overwhelming nerdiness, I’ve never really been much of a gamer. Video games just never held that much interest to me. With the sole exception being Sid Meier’s Civilization series. It’s possible for me to lose entire weeks to those games and not even notice. And sometimes during those sleep-deprived binges, I wonder if it’s possible that I’m just an NPC in some galactic alien simulation. Turns out I’m not the only one who is kept up at night by this idea, more than a few theoretical physicists have put for the theory that everything we know may just…
Mind Blown- Time Part 2
In the first part of this post I blew your mind with the nature of time itself, well I hope you were able to piece it back together because in our dramatic conclusion I’m going to wrinkle your brain all over again with a breakdown of the real question you want answered: Is it possible to travel through time? So hop in your DeLoreans and buckle your seat-belts because it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for since next week: Mind Blown-Time Part 2 (Back to the Blog Post). Time Travel has been the subject of speculative fiction for generations, but…
Mind Blown- Eternal Return
Ever feel like you’ve been through all this before? Well, you’re not the only one. For millennium thinkers, philosophers, and spiritualists have put forward the notion that existence is just one big eternal loop. That was is exactly the same as what will be. While always a popular theme among eastern philosophies this belief gained notoriety in the western world when it was put forth by Fredrick Nietzsche. But we here at Mind Blown are not overly concerned with philosophical gobbledygook. You can wax poetic on your own time, we say. Show us the Science! (Or at least some pseudoscience…
Mind Blown- Hubble’s Theory of Universal Expansion
Greetings and welcome back to Mind Blown. I’m going to go out on a limb today and assume that if you are reading an obscure blog about mind-blowing scientific concepts, that you have at least a passing familiarity with The Big Bang Theory (not the television show, the actual Big Bang Theory). What you may not know is that following the creation and the rapid expansion of the universe as we know it, things kept expanding! To explain that a little bit more clearly we need to go back to Einstein and his Theory of General Relativity (I mean don’t…
Mind Blown- Universal Hologram
The Cake is a lie. Or at least your preconceived notion that the cakes exists in three-dimensional space could possibly be a lie. What in the world am I talking about you ask, equal parts intrigued and befuddled. Well, its complicated, and more than a little difficult to wrap your brain around. Which makes it perfect for another edition of Mind Blown. Right now you think you have a pretty firm handle on what your world looks like. It’s three-dimensional. You can reach out and touch your computer or your desk, or your coffee mug and prove that. But there…
Mind Blown-The Origins of Life
Science is all about answering the big questions, and they don’t make questions any bigger than “Where does life come from?”. In this edition of Mind Blown will discuss some of the more far out Scientific theories concerning the origins of life on Earth. Let’s start by getting the more mundane theories out of the way first. Lightning zapping some primordial goo and creating amino acids. I mean its cool but its hardly brain bending. Organic compounds muddled around in hydro-thermal vents? Boring. Panspermia? The theory that life came to Earth via a piece of space rock? Bingo. That’s what…
Mind Blown- Quantum Entanglement
We’re officially nine days from Halloween and that means here at the Eclectic Eccentric it’s time to get Spoooky!!! Well at least spooky if you’re a fan of Albert Einstein, personal physics hero of yours truly. What am I rambling about? Why the topic of today’s Mind Blown of course: Quantum Entanglement. Or as Einstein once contemptuously called it “spooky action at a distance”. We’ll get to the reasons for Einstein’s disdain in a bit but first a little bit of background. Quantum Entanglement in a phenomenon in which particles that have previously interacted become intertwined to such an extent…
Mind Blown- The Copenhagen Interpretation
Have you ever been invited to multiple cool events on the same night? Wished you could go to all of them but knew you had to pick one and live with the choice? Well if you were an electron you might just be able to attend them all at once or maybe none of them at all. Who knows! Unless you were observed. Then we would know. WE WOULD KNOW. Sound like I’m talking gibberish? You’re right I am because in this edition of Mind Blown I tackle THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION. (Cue trippy orchestral sci-fi theme) What is the Copenhagen…
Mind Blown- Time (Part 1)
Try to focus on this moment right now. Fix it in your mind. You can’t, can you? Because even as you think about a moment that moment has passed. What we consider to be the present is actually the recent past. Our mind makes sense of the data it’s being sent and paints us a picture of the world around us but it takes time to process that data and in that time the world moves on. We live milliseconds in the past never quite catching up to the present. Trippy to think about right? And we haven’t even gotten…