Whether you want to seem smart at a dinner party or your ten year high school reunion, we’ve got you covered with these 6 science facts to make you sound clever. If you’re a bit anxious about conversations potentially turning philosophical, it’s always a good idea to have some aces up your sleeve. Quantum physics, the moon’s orbit and other mysterious facts can become your area of expertise as well. So if you don’t mind being remembered as “that guy”, read on for some perfect ice breakers that are bound to make you win over friends in no time. Just kidding, you’ll still stick out like a sore thumb by the end of the night. But at least you’ll know things others don’t know.
6. Mirrors don’t really “mirror” you
Or at least, mirrors don’t mirror you horizontally. Although it sounds complicated at first, once you get the gist of it, it’ll all fall into the right places. It is believed that mirrors flip our images along the Y axis, with the left side becoming the right. But that’s not all the story. When a written words appears flipped backwards in a mirror it’s because you flipped it relative to where you were standing. Our belief that mirrors reflect us two dimensional, with X and Y axes, is wrong. The Z axis is responsible for the reversed image which isn’t a simple flipped version of ourselves, but an inside out one.
5. It is the Earth that orbits the moon
This piece of information will make you feel very powerful at the next party you attend. So read carefully. Since the Moon has its own gravity, so we could say that we orbit it. Or even better yet, we could agree on stating that both the Moon and the Earth orbit a common point, the barycenter, or in layman’s terms, the center of mass between two orbiting objects. If the two objects have the same mass, the barycenter will be found in the middle, but when one of the objects is heavier, the barycenter will be found inside of it.
4. Your blood won’t boil in space
We used to believe this because the boiling point of liquids is lower in lower atmospheric pressures. So with the atmospheric pressure in outer space being 0, it would mean our blood would boil on the spot. Well, not really. If you don’t have a wound anywhere, it means your system in sealed and pressurized. So your blood pressure will do its job of keeping your blood in liquid state. Unlike your blood, the liquids in your mouth and eyes will boil if you suddenly find yourself in outer space.
3. Your head is older than your feet
In a nutshell, the stronger the gravity is, the slower the time passes. If you are closer to a massive object, the spacetime is bent more and the light has to travel further. This has been reported to happen in real life with the clock of the satellites that orbit the earth. These run faster than the ones on the ground, so they need to be adjusted to make up for their speed.
2. A black hole won’t suck you in
We’ve seen this so many times in movies that it’s now difficult to believe it actually won’t happen in real life. But no, these vacuum cleaners of the universe won’t suck you in. A black hole maintains the mass of the object that created it, with the only difference being that the mass is condensed in a minuscule point, also known as a singularity. This translates into objects being able to orbit a black hole without risking to get sucked in.
1. Blind people don’t see anything, not even blackness
It’s difficult to make a distinction between the two, but there actually is one. People that have always been blind are believed to be immersed in a world of darkness. But they couldn’t answer our questions about how being blind looks like because they’ve never seen the color black. Things are a bit different for people who lost their sight after being born. For example, a man who lost his sight after his optic nerve was severed, said he now sees swirling colors and shapes that change all the time and can even be distracting at times.