Cool & Crazy Science Facts

I just finished reading the book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. Here is a link to some information on the book –

en.wikipedia.org...

This book was a really interesting read, it is a book about science and tries to cram a ton of info into about 500 pages. I was interested if anyone else on ATS has read it, and what there thoughts are on the book. The information in this book seems like it should be common information taught in high school, but I was amazed by how much I would have never heard of if I didn't seek it out on my own.

I thought some of the same things that interested me would interest fellow ATSers. So below is some scientific info from the book that I thought was cool. Please post any other cool science facts that you know!

Let's make this a thread full of cool/interesting/odd science facts!!

“Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years.”

“The current best estimate for Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion metric tons...'

“Particles have a quality known as spin and, according to quantum theory, the moment you determine the spin of one particle, its sister particle, no matter how distant away, will immediately begin spinning in the opposite direction at the same rate. It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph, you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji, and the instant you sent one spinning the other would immediately spin in a contrary direction at precisely the same speed.”

An interesting quote in the book, “The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.” -British Geologist Derek V. Ager.

“As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified – half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to identify, the count obviously has barely begun.”

“An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. It this instant of it's arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path – people, houses, factories, cars – would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.”

“We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core. And of course the idea that the continents move around on the surface like lily pads has been common wisdom for much less than a generation.”

“The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is 3,959 miles, which isn't so very far... Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle have been modest indeed. One or two South African gold mines reach to a depth of 2 miles, but most mines on Earth go no more than about a quarter of a mile beneath the surface. If the planet were an apple, we wouldn't yet have broken through the skin. Indeed, we haven't even come close.”

“The largest earthquake since the scale's invention was (depending on which source you credit) either one centered on Prince William Sound in Alaska 1964, which measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, or one in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile in 1960, which was initially logged at a magnitude of 8.6 magnitude but was later revised upward by some authorities...to a truly grand-scale 9.5”


more to come.......

reply to post by Ace High

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Here is a few I pulled from This Site





I'm looking for more info on # 1 - 'cause that's crazy...

Edit to add This

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[edit on 6/14/2009 by chapter29]

[edit on Sun Jun 14 2009 by Jbird]

I love this topic already.
I have a few really cool books I will flip thru and give you some quirky facts.(the handy science answer book as well as the handy oceans book and handy bug book)
However I have to go out for a bit and will be back later to contribute to this thread.

Heres food for thought.
Sunday was named after the sun
Monday was named after the moon
Tuesday was named after tui the anglo saxon god of war
Wednesday was named after Woden the anglo saxon equivilent of Odin the cheif norse god.
Thursday was named after thor the norse god of thunder
Friday was named afterFrigg the norse god of love and fertility
Saturday was named after saturn the roman god of agriculture.

Err, there must be a mistake here I think...

60 x 60 = 3,600 seconds in one hour.
3600 x 24 = 86,400 seconds in one day.
86,400 x 365 = 31,536,000 seconds in one year (one year of 365 days each exactly 24 hours)
31,536,000 x 500,000 = 15,768,000,000,000 seconds in half a million years...

You said 500 Billion is rather more than 15 trillion, 786 billion - you see the problem?

reply to post by chapter29

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Crazy stuff man....yeh #1 is crazy!!

Yeh man get the info together, I love stuff like this.

I figured as much about Sunday, the rest is new to me, thanks for the info.

reply to post by Now_Then

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Thanks for the math man!!!

I took it straight from the book so I am glad you caught it.

Please post any other cool facts you might have.

The biggest plant is the Banana tree, also, the banana is not a fruit but it is a herb.

I love me bananas,lol, oh and heres a link to a site with many fact about bananas....

www.funfacts.com.au...

a few more facts from the book -



If you have any cool science facts please post!

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[edit on Sun Jun 14 2009 by Jbird]

oh man this book sounds epic

i have got to land a copy of this, i LOVE random science facts

thank you so much for bringing this great work to my attention

reply to post by muzzleflash

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I enjoyed it immensely! Keep an eye on this thread, I have quite a few more tidbits of info I will be posting. By the way I love to trade books with ATS members. Shoot me a U2U with your address and I will ship it to you, all I ask is that you return it when you are done reading it and ship me an interesting book while you have mine.

Thanks for these, I love these kind of facts, here's one I found odd a while back, about the 'speed of an electric current'



www.eskimo.com...

He goes into it a lot more on that page, giving the way he works it out. It really blew my mind when I read that. The guy who runs that page is a "Research Engineer on staff at the University of Washington in Seattle", so seems fairly qualified to talk about such things. His website covers a lot of common science misconceptions, and cool weird science.

www.eskimo.com...

It is an excellent book... and an excellent primer for the non science background reader.

I read it about a year or so ago and was impressed since Bryson is primarily a writer of humor... his "A Walk in the Woods" is a side splitter.

Very cool thanks for the info and link

Here are a couple more I thought were cool:






Come on, I know some of you have some cool science facts?

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[edit on Sun Jun 14 2009 by Jbird]

reply to post by Ace High

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Re: the earth's magnetic field. Did you know.... That pottery is an excellent sort of 'time capsule' or a recorder of the orientation of the magnetic field (north south) and also the strength.

At the point the pottery is fired that information is stored forever, boffins do actually use bits of pottery to gauge the changes given they can date them and pretty much locate the area they were fired.

reply to post by jimminycricket

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Thank you for the speed of electric current factoid. I learned this bit a whilel ago as well and was a bit surprised. Then it was explained to me that it's not the actual flow of electrons that causes electricity it is the potential energy transfered in a wave along the outside of the wire (the actual EM field) that causes electricity.

To put a realistic example.. when people are doing "the wave" in a stadium, the people don't actually move from seat to seat. Instead they exert energy upwards and the downwards. The "wave" doesn't exist as a standalone entity but rather as a composite entity that results from the action of the induviduals. Electrons generate an EM wave the same way by jumping to a higer energy state and then back down.

Here is another interesting factoid. While the human brain is obviously important for day to day function of the human machine, it in itself does not control all aspects of the human body.


www.answers.com...

Personally, I think the artifact of sentience is a composite entity that is caused by the total function of all nervous systems all the way down to the cellular level.. But that's an opinion, not a factoid.

reply to post by rogerstigers

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Thanks for the info, that was a new one to me!

On average 10 million stars die per day

In the universe 100 supernovas per second

Women use about 20,000 words per day and men use about 7,000

America has the largest railway system

We produce new skin at 0.25 m2 per day

Average human produces 300grams of pooh (number 2's) per day

Somalia has the most Camels

Saudi Arabia imports more than exports