Asklemmy

43885 readers

876 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

380

What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by zirzedolta@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

450 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some 'organic element' since I couldn't accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did something change? Last time I checked we didn't know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn't deterministic.

That we know that the universe isn't (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn't change anything about that.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.

[–] dudinax@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don't know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don't know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.

The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.