| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/10/2009 5:55:19 PM |
I feel honoured to be in this part of the universe, at this time, when essentially stardust has evolved an ability to question it's own existence
 Very well put OP! .. Me Too!! :)
Nature 'herself' Amazes me. Every season blows me away - most especially Spring. I watch the ice melt - sometimes an inch thick on the branches of the trees outside my window .. and I watch as the tiny buds form .. and grow and "suddenly" Burst into life!
Spiders absolutely Fascinate me! As do Bees and many other critters..
Rainbows .. stunning .. I get how they appear - light refraction etc.. still They Always amaze me .. as does Lightening .. Fascinates .. Awes and Captivates me completely Every time..
I know I know ... probly not what you were looking for - still .. Very interesting thread OP .. I will stop in now and then to discover More 'stuff' that will surely captivate ..
btw - the Perseids (Meteor Showers) are on this week!! woohooo .. they are supposed to peak on Wednesday night in the Eastern sky .. spose it depends on where you are ..
Fascinating 'light show'!
Thanks for the thread! | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/10/2009 6:14:53 PM | A.S.is..//Spiders absolutely fascinate me! As do bees and many other critters..//
Spiders terrify me and I'm allegic to bee stings :)
A.S.is..//I know I know ... Probably not what you were looking for - still .. Very interesting thread//
Your type of positive reply was exactly what I was hoping for.
A.S.is..//Thanks for the thread//
Thank you for contributing in such a human way :) | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/10/2009 6:28:32 PM |
Krebby2001.. //OP... In science class...//
Wowza :).. What a nice story :D
I feel compelled to add that it was also felony stupid as well. Hopefully he was never permitted into a chem lab again.
commenced to adding up some chemicals that wound up, "exploding" when you dropped them
He could have just as well unknowingly mixed up something that was even more powerful and took out the whole lab.
As for the OP I guess I would add animal mating rituals as one of the most amazing properties I have seen. After watching human mating rituals, I would guess we're not that different. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/10/2009 8:18:36 PM | To later posters to me and Arno's "bomb" experiment gone awry:
Sweet Linda and I later dated, and the "bomb" incident was the major cause. As they say, "all's fair in love and war." Yep, me and Arno could have blown the whole lab with our mixing of chemicals, but that inquisitive nature as to how things are put together later propelled me to get my Ph.D. degree.
<div class="quote"> Hopefully he was never permitted into a chem lab again.
I gained top secret clearance later, as a scientist. I can say that I have walked through some of the most secret of laboratories since that time. Of course, I was a whole lot more careful later, as Sweet Linda made me see the errors of my ways, and, later, the American credo of "Serve and Protect" became a motto. Be glad who's on your side, having learned the errors of our ways, from tears shed from a pretty young girl.
Ain't America and the quest for knowledge great??? | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 8:42:55 AM | I figured a rainbow was pretty good.
Saw a guy on you-tube start a huge BBQ with a bit of liquid oxygen poured onto 10+ bags of charcoal that has a small piece of lit tinder on it....the can with the liquid oxygen was upended from a tripod affair and a string attached....everyone standing WAY back! Instant BBQ was ready for a full sid eof beef to be placed over it. Of course the fire dept had somethng to say about scaring the heck out of the whole town with a huge fireball....but hey....
Also, the jet powered beer cooler was kind of neat. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 1:50:23 PM | The focusing of light is one of the most amazing properties of science and nature I have seen.
I was 12, capping with the family; my dad had his telescope out and from time to time would call me over to look at some point of light, sometimes they where red sometimes blue ever so often there would be one that change through all the colors of the rainbow. All and all I wasn’t so impressed but, my dad was thrilled so I would go along with the excitement.
It was my dad’s thing to point out the star before I looked through the scope. He calls me over and this time he points at what looks like a wispy cloud in the sky; I’m thinking this is dumb but, I looked in the scope and my heart sank I got dizzy and my knees buckled. I had see photographs of the Andromeda galaxy before but seeing it with my own eye as a spiral galaxy hanging up there in the sky was too much for my head to take at the time.
The wispy cloud is no longer there every time I look at that spot in the sky with my eyes or a scope all that is there is the Andromeda galaxy. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 2:15:55 PM | The most amazing properties of science and nature I have seen were when I was a child.
Seeing and realising that a snow flake can make such patterns and each one is unique.
That nature can follows such a simple rule like the Fibonacci sequence. Running out into the garden and counting petals. The Golden ratio. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 2:50:41 PM | - The speed of light is constant for all observers. This really is an amazing fact and it has crazy ramifications in special relativity (time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity, time is another dimension in our (non-Euclidean) 4-d world). The further development of general relativity has another deep revolutionary idea - that gravity is not a "force," but rather the geometry of space-time.
- Quantum mechanics. The theory can make correct predictions, but what does it really say about the nature of our existence? Just what IS an electron? Does it even make sense to talk about nature having some sort of existence independent of measurement? Someone mentioned the double slit experiment for particles earlier.
- Banach–Tarski paradox... look it up
- Consider the natural numbers (1,2,3,4,...). There are infinitely many of them. Then consider the rational numbers (all fractions). There are infinitely many of these, but there are the same number of them as there are natural numbers. The rationals are not all of the numbers of the line though; for example, sqrt(2), pi, and e are not rational numbers. The real numbers are all of the numbers on the line (fill in the holes of the rationals. There are of course infinitely many of them, but in this case, there are MORE (uncountably many) real numbers than there are rationals. Here's the neat fact: if A is the number of rational numbers and B is the number of real numbers, then 2^A = B.
- A simple but strange mathmematical fact: suppose you have a collection of sets {Ar} indexed (index r) by the real numbers with the property that if r<s, Ar is a strict subset of As. Let A be the union of all the Ar. Does it then follow that A is uncountable? We have an uncountable collection of sets with an uncountable number of strict inclusions, but amazingly, the answer is no. I have a very simple counterexample if anyone wants. The basic idea is that you can't apply the idea of induction to uncountable sets. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 7:05:55 PM | Ever been out to a dark sky sight on a moonless summer night and seen the Milky Way? I don't mean just outside of town, a few streetlights shining in the distance, I mean a truly dark, can't-make-out-the-constellations-for-all-the-stars site, no streetlights or dome of town light, darker-than-pitch dark!
And then, if you're lucky to have good night vision, you notice that you are actually seeing by starlight! Nothing more. And the Milky Way is almost casting shadows, and you can make out stunning detail in it including the Lagoon, Eagle and Omega Nebulas, dark bands and shapes like The Dark Horse and bright knots like the Scutum Star Cloud!
The thing almost...just almost...becomes 3D and you realize that you're standing on a tiny mote circling a tiny star in an unremarkable outer arm of this great big thing called a galaxy containing billions of stars. Then you turn a telescope upwards and try to spy another galaxy, maybe one close like Andromeda or Triangulum, or maybe one further away.
Then you realize you're looking at another place with billions of stars....and someone or something might look back toward our galaxy when the light from our galaxy of that very moment reaches that galaxy and see the moment of time when you looked up...but you'll be long gone.
Is it any wonder why astronomers are always looking up? | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/11/2009 8:27:23 PM | 
It's not only astronomers. I appreciate the very candidness of your marvelous observation. A full moon, casting light on the armadillo digging for whatever it seeks; the bunny mommy leading her little hoppers to seek for forage; the possums, at night, lit by a starlight cast by the moon, providing vision. "Things," thousands of miles away, enabling what some would consider "miniscule" life to continue, as it has for thousands of years. The intricacy, the balance. the, yes, miracle, of life in its different manifestations, if that's not enough to make you stand there, in awe, you're not alive.
Life is a balance, a delicate balance, a wolf howling at night, lit, again, by the moon, as it has been for so many eons. A brook, babbling its course, casting reflections of life, and in its babbling and in its reflections, telling us who we are and how much we don't truly "see," should cause moments of reflection, and make us wonder what our cast is in life. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/12/2009 5:27:05 PM | brightspark-- on 8/9/2009 10 14 AM
I would have loved to have been in that field in PORTUGAL
which was covered knee deep in mud in 1917 when the sun
trembled,danced in the sky,rotated like a firewheel,made
sudden incredible movements in the sky,appeared to be
loosened from the sky and surrounded with scarlet flame
at one moment,then changed to yellow and deep purple!
It appeared to whirl and turn in a circle of broken clouds......
and the light turned a beautiful Blue to the amazement of
approximately 70,000 people and the knee deep mud they
were standing in suddenly dried up in a matter of seconds.
Apparently the behaviour of the sun,inexplicable to SCIENCE
was observed over a range of 40 km from that field.
Beats anything else I have seen or heard of (like the total eclipse
of the Sun) in recent history but the birth pains of a mother
and the joy experienced by their loving parents take some beating!
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/12/2009 5:33:52 PM | The implications of special relativity, variant time is very counter intuitive when regarding perceptions of space, it is such a significant shift that gravity went from a force to geometric.
What amazes me is he didn't get the Nobel for this, whilst half a century of space travel would have been impossible without it, we wouldn't even have GPS without it. And hell, he even drew a map and slide rule of what it meant by publishing GR as a sequel. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/18/2009 10:24:09 AM | quietjohn2
The house does not vibrate
The rug does not feel cold nor hot
I have checked it does not have a parking brake
It has moved again since i last put this on site.
Does anyone have a workshop manual for a red shag carpet which may or may not be a flying carpet model.
Does anyone have a starting handle for one as it still doesnt hover despite my Iraqi and Iranian commands. | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/18/2009 1:30:40 PM | LOL Enrique - sorry I can't help more. Did you wear the right clothes? - Did you try rotating it to see if it moved in a different direction?
Aha - another thought! Does the wall-to-wall carpet have a pile which orients towards your bed? - especially if it is compressed? As you step on the rug and the underlying pile bends, it may carry an area of the rug with it, allowing it to remain there when you step off it. Alternatively, the pile could act like a 'ratchet mechanism' restricting movement of the rug to one direction as you exert the small horizontal forces that accompany stepping.
@rockondon..
.....giant tube worms, which live in boiling hot temperatures on the sea floor....
How do you cook those guys????? | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/18/2009 4:06:26 PM | | I love it all. I love a squirel storing his food. The deer in the bush a salamander scorring about. I love how a turbine engine uses the force of air to propell an object forward. The smell of the chemical Pine Sol. Post it notes. How flour salt and water make paste for my sons projects. How pepper opens the pours of my meat, so it can marinade better. My pumkins and tomatos on the vine. Seeing the spectrum of light in a rainbow, knowing the science behind them makes them no less beautiful. I could go on, I want to know more, for knowing makes it that much more wonderous and beautiful to me. Soap. LOL | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/18/2009 5:08:58 PM | Life.... Life is deep...
How in the world (and given ample time... on the order of BILLIONS of years) complex molecular chemistry gives rise to the huge array of Life on this single planet alone is mind boggling...
I'm primarily a Physicist, interested in the greater cosmos (and the quantum level) at large... But I have a love for ALL the sciences really... And fundamentally, Life really blows my mind when I think about it.
We live in a truly amazing Universe... And this journey of enlightenment has really only just begun. There's still sooo much to learn... Still so much we don't understand... And that is a great and worthwhile Challenge.
But yeah... Life... It's really deep when you seriously think about it  | |
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| What are the most amazing 'properties' you have ever seen in science and nature?
Posted: 8/19/2009 3:05:30 AM | | Micro organisms. I think they are amazing to watch and understand. They are every where and are living thier own lives (secretly).......? And skin, in particular and the effect of aging on it and damage. I have keratosispilaris which is the growth of excess keratin within the pores of skin. You can only see the actual keratin build up around pores by looking at microscopic images. There does not seem to be a reason or benifit to the keratin growing in pores. The abundance of the keratin produces the feel and look of permanent goose bumps. I think maybe bacteria, fungus, or some other micro organism is the cause but, there is no cure. I only have very small patches but still I don't like them. There are so many different schools of science but I like microbiology best. Even like the ATP cycle, it is amazing that these micro things actually have specific chain reactions that can be understood and possibly replicated. | |
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