One thing that I have accepted in this lifetime is that there are infinite things I won’t ever understand. I can’t wrap my head around how humans created such ornate buildings hundreds of years ago, and I’ll never fully grasp how the internet works. I cannot fathom the fact that our galaxy contains billions of other planets, because honestly, even my smartphone blows my mind.
We are lucky to live in an age where we have so many more answers than we did a few centuries ago, but that doesn’t mean our brains can fully comprehend it all. Redditors have recently been discussing concepts that they’ll never quite grasp, despite how many times they’ve been explained, so we’ve gathered some of their thoughts below. Enjoy scrolling through these topics that might be beyond your realm of comprehension too, and be sure to upvote the ones you'd like to understand!
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Why America doesn’t provide healthcare & schooling to their citizens.
How Trump can still be allowed to run for President.
Any regular guy saying the things he constantly says in any post, podcast or YouTube video and the guy would be cancelled instantly. Old orange full of money says the same things "let's make him President again!" I guess? I am not sure I will ever understand.
Space, it's so big that it is unfathomable and I think it's expanding?! Into what? How did it start? It's all a mindf**k .
Why after thousands of years of history behind us, people still suck. You’d think we’d be improving but no, sometimes it feels like we’re actually getting worse.
Think of it this way: people haven't changed much, but culture has mostly improved. For example, many places in the world had little or no police (or equivalent) that protected regular citizens. Often, soldiers in wars were not supplied with food, so the soldiers would steal food from local citizens, sometimes injuring or killing those citizens as well. Nobody in power cared. As another example, at the end of many, MANY, wars in some parts of the world, the winners would either kill their opponents or sell them as slaves. It didn't matter which religion the victors claimed to follow, they all behaved this way. The conflicts between modern Israel, Palestinians and Lebanon would be fundamentally different today if the founding of Israel included selling the Palestinians into slavery or killing them. So, as bad as the situation there has been and is today, at least far more people survived than would have in previous centuries. Culture is improving, but it doesn't have a solution for everything.
I'll go, for me it's the whole transformation from caterpillars to butterflies. I understand what they DO but it's the most alien s**t ever that a worm just decides to rearrange itself into a winged creature that looks nothing like it did before.
It's even more bizarre than that - between caterpillar and butterfly stage is mush, it digests itself!
How some people can have no inner dialogue. And how can those people have thoughts or ideas? I don’t get it.
My health insurance
You mean I have to pay every time I use it even though I pay monthly? Unless I pay a big amount then I pay less? But if I don’t use it they just keep it all? But they don’t cover my teeth or my eyes?
Omg this...I just started paying for my own insurance when I got married. Was on state insurance for a long long time and they pay for most anything. Now I'm getting bills that are higher than my 600 dollar monthly cost ( that's for me and my husband) I don't fcking get it and I'm losing it
Quantum mechanics. No matter how many times it's explained, the idea that particles can exist in multiple states at once or influence each other instantaneously across vast distances just feels like nature's most elaborate inside joke that I'm not quite in on.
How a basic wax record and player works. I get it’s a grove that is tiny hills and valleys and the needle picks up on each little one but how the f**k does that equal a voice coming out of a large metal tube. It’s witchcraft as far as im concerned.
At the most basic, the wiggly grooves in the recording move past the needle fast enough that you can hear the vibrations of whatever is attached to the needle, as long as it is rigid. It's not loud if you just use the needle. Attach the metal cone to the needle and the vibrations are enough to make the cone vibrate, which is loud enough to hear. This video link below shows someone playing a record with just a plastic 5 pound note. The groove makes the corner of the plastic note vibrate, and the plastic note is stiff enough that you can hear it vibrate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUlu-XjCgtk
The electoral college. No matter how it’s explained to me, it will never make sense to me that we award arbitrary points to states over going what the majority of voters want.
How my pet seems to know when I’m sad and tries to comfort me.
You're assuming animals don't have emotions and can't feel empathy? Have you never seen a huge dog and a tiny kitten get along, the dog NOT ripping the kitten to pieces?
How a chicken can make a whole egg everyday! I’m always just blown away
Everyday. A whole new egg. And sometimes two a day! Why is this not talked about more?! Lol.
I ate a lot of organically breeder chickens in my village in childhood. After cutting, I noticed their stomach was full of eggs. They were of different sizes at different growth rates.
So many things & all these answers are just adding more to the list 😂.
Brains are insane to me...like every human is virtually made of the same things, we all have a brain etc, but everyone's brain is so ridiculously different from others & then when you bring in things like mental illness / dementia- why do some brains go through that and others don't? Why isn't there a better way to help/ reverse/ stop progression.
Environmental impact has a huge role I think, 8 billion brains in 8 billion different and unique to them environments across a whole planet, everything from what's in the food and water, atmospheric difference such as altitude, social interactions, relating to the world in their little corner all firing neurons and creating pathways as unique as a fingerprint.
How my cat always knows exactly when I’m about to sit down with a snack.
Or to settle on your lap exactly five minutes before you need to get up.
Healthcare bills - they are engineered to not be understood.
Universe is expanding. Expanding to where? .
I'm a classically trained singer and will never understand how I can think of a certain pitch and then recreate it accurately.
How NFTs work. Even Futurama couldn’t help me understand.
How when I'm playing an FPS game in Europe and aiming my gun at another players head who's in the US and pulling the trigger, electrical impulses are (roughly speaking) sent from my mouse to my computers motherboard to its CPU which makes the decision to forward it to my network card which sends it to my router to my 5G antenna, then through the air to a recieving cell phone tower a mile down the road, then down into the ground through cables again (I'm assuming) through the entire country to some major European backbone hub, then down into deep sea cables under the entire f*****g Atlantic ocean, through the same whole bunch of cables and switches and relay stations through HIS country as well and finally into his computer where he dies from the bullet a FRACTION OF A SECOND later.
And then we all complain about the lag and the high pings because the internet is just so f*****g slow today.
But anyway it's not so much that I don't understand how this all works technically, I do but I just can't wrap my head around how the information is able to travel as fast as it does for as far as it does. It's not just the distance itself but also just the sheer amount of devices and things the data packets have to enter and exit on the way, with computer chips running software making logical decisions on how to recieve it, analyse it and send it on its way again over and over and over again. And all of this doesn't even take a single second from start to end. Not even half of one.
I dunno it's just mindboggling to me.
Electricity travels at the speed of light, about 300,000km/second. From Europe to the US is about 10,000km. That means information (if there were no resistance) could travel there and back fifteen times in a second. Even with delays and laggy lines, that distance takes less than one tenth of a second. That's faster than you can blink.
Mattress and furniture stores. They gotta be fronts for money laundering, right?
Computer!! You take the rock!! You pound it into metal ore or something!! You put the metal together with some stringy bits of copper or idk whatever goes into circuits!! You run electricity through it!! It does math??? It's a rock!! How it does math?!?!?!??
Edit: if I had a 1 and a 0 for everyone who has explained computers to me based on this post I could build MULTIVAC.
To pick a much simpler example, a cake would seem magical to someone who just looked at the ingredients. The wrong ingredients or the wrong amounts would produce something that isn't cake. Edit: Regarding the comment in the original post "It does math??": The math part is actually a separate topic than the electrical part of computers. Computers are designed to use electricity to operate special circuits that enable the use of digital logic (Boolean logic). Logic circuits, when designed sufficiently (and rather complexly), enable math calculations. You could use something else besides computers and electricity to do Boolean logic and math calculations. For example, it's possible to design a complex network of pipes and valves powered by a waterfall to perform math calculations. It's just enormously easier, cheaper, and more flexible to use computers.
Quantum physics always feels like someone’s trying to explain magic with a lot of big words.
Sometimes I think I understand it, sometimes not at all. But most parts I'm just superpositioned about it.. 🤷♂️
That scene from Interstellar when they go to the planet for a bit, then get back to the ship and the dudes many years older. Why time passes quicker in different places in space.
It doesn't. Firstly it's not about different places, but different speeds, but for any individual time passes just the same as it does for any other. It's only in the theoretical case where someone's travelled close to the speed of light relative to another person and then returned to meet them that we notice a difference, but each person's time has passed no more quickly than the other's.
The internet. WHERE IS IT? How can things be stored on something that's not tangible?
The internet is just a huge network of connections between computers. Web pages and photos and all that stuff are stored in the computers, not the connections between the computers. If you unplug the internet from all of the computers, the stored information doesn't disappear, you just can't access the information anymore. Edit: By the way, the "Cloud" is just a marketing term for companies that set up a bunch of computers to perform the same things, using additional software that coordinates the computers to work together better, like storing photos and playing back videos. If 1000 people are watching the same video, they are likely receiving the video data from multiple computers, not just one computer, because it's easier and cheaper to design the service that way, and the service responds to commands faster. The software coordinating the computers decides which computer feeds the video data to each viewer, depending on how busy each cloud computer is. It's a lot like when people want to buy movie or sports tickets: One ticket booth is too slow for handling a lot of customers.
Peoples behaviour.
It's totally random after birth! Some get influenced by their surroundings, but I don't think you can teach everyone. It's just random choice that you would be good or bad.
Black holes. Space in general, but black holes really get to me. So strong that light and other stars/planets can’t escape it? Where does it all go?!!
The diametre of a hydrogen atom 1.06 × 10^(−10)m, and the distance between the proton and the electron is 5.3x10^(-11)m. The diametre of a proton is 1.7×10^(−15)m, and the diametre of an electron is 1.0x10^(-14). That means an electron is 1/10,000 the size of a hydrogen atom, the rest of it is empty space. In one cubic metre of air, there are 2.70×10^25 atoms of hydrogen, so if you compressed all that one cubic metre of air via gravity, it would be smaller than one cubic millimetre. Even a cubic metre of iron would compress to less than a cubic millimetre if all the space were removed. It's the electromagnetic resistance that keeps atoms apart - remember, gravity is a WEAK force, not a strong one (e.g. magnets can defeat gravity), so black holes are incredibly dense gravity wells. A black hole weighing the same as the Sun would a ball only three kilometres across.
I don't understand color. I think it's something about how the color we see is the color that wasn't absorbed and therefore the one reflected into our eyeballs, but I just don't really get it.
I don’t get how cell phones work. I get it. I don’t. How can I speak to my family in the Middle East on FaceTime without any sort of cords. My mind cannot fathom
Update: wow I thought waking up this morning I’d just put on my scrubs and it would be another day on the psych ward.
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you for providing so many amazing explanations. For not being rude, or trolls or making me feel dumb about this. I had an old account I had to get rid of, I have been on Reddit for nearly 10 years. This is the most positive experience I’ve ever had. Thank you!
The biggest failure of "education" is that it kills curiosity. Kids who ask questions and want to know things get punished. [ ............ ] Have you ever heard of the "quiverfull" cults? They do "blanket training" where they put a kid on a blanket, and anytime the kid tries to go off the blanket and explore, they abuse and hit the kid. The kid stops being curious, stops learning, stop thinking. That's what most "public education" does, killing curiosity instead of encouraging it.
It's so sad because it's true! All through grade school (in the U.S.) I was too nervous to ask questions not necessarily because of bad teachers but other factors too, but when I got into college and stuff I realized, if I had a question it was a good chance others did too so I learned to start asking. Some teachers loved me for it, some absolutely hated me for it. I didn't care either way. It's the teachers job to explain things in a way that makes sense, or provide me a resource to figure things out, if I needed extra help I learned to ask whether it made the teacher happy or not. The younger students I went to college with were appalled I did this sometimes, but they appreciated it.
Load More Replies...Imaginary numbers in math. They literally had to make up numbers to make some equations work. I HATED that part of my math class and it always made me angry. Still makes me angry.
Imaginary numbers aren't made up, they're just poorly named :) There is no law against taking the square root of a negative number (like there is about dividing by zero) so it's totally okay to do, but there is no "real" number that you can multiply by itself to make -1. Hence, "imaginary" one.
Load More Replies...Time. How did it come about? Was it a glitch in the big bang? What was there before time? Is it an illusion? Yeah I read Hawkins book. About 5 minutes later I had the same questions.
Time is probably the consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, if you consider the Universe creation as a thermodynamic phenomenon.
Load More Replies...The biggest failure of "education" is that it kills curiosity. Kids who ask questions and want to know things get punished. [ ............ ] Have you ever heard of the "quiverfull" cults? They do "blanket training" where they put a kid on a blanket, and anytime the kid tries to go off the blanket and explore, they abuse and hit the kid. The kid stops being curious, stops learning, stop thinking. That's what most "public education" does, killing curiosity instead of encouraging it.
It's so sad because it's true! All through grade school (in the U.S.) I was too nervous to ask questions not necessarily because of bad teachers but other factors too, but when I got into college and stuff I realized, if I had a question it was a good chance others did too so I learned to start asking. Some teachers loved me for it, some absolutely hated me for it. I didn't care either way. It's the teachers job to explain things in a way that makes sense, or provide me a resource to figure things out, if I needed extra help I learned to ask whether it made the teacher happy or not. The younger students I went to college with were appalled I did this sometimes, but they appreciated it.
Load More Replies...Imaginary numbers in math. They literally had to make up numbers to make some equations work. I HATED that part of my math class and it always made me angry. Still makes me angry.
Imaginary numbers aren't made up, they're just poorly named :) There is no law against taking the square root of a negative number (like there is about dividing by zero) so it's totally okay to do, but there is no "real" number that you can multiply by itself to make -1. Hence, "imaginary" one.
Load More Replies...Time. How did it come about? Was it a glitch in the big bang? What was there before time? Is it an illusion? Yeah I read Hawkins book. About 5 minutes later I had the same questions.
Time is probably the consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, if you consider the Universe creation as a thermodynamic phenomenon.
Load More Replies...