The huge gap between two ends of measurement scales. Universe vs. atom, brilliant light vs darkness, density of air vs gold, second vs. millenium, picometer vs. light year.
The sky. It’s so far away, but looks so close. The fact that it’s just an optical illusion. Try to imagine how far away the blue stuff is that you’re looking at. Then imagine what’s halfway in between. Whoa. Then halfway between you and that spot. Then halfway again and again.
Plants. They live for centuries (some of them) in the same spot, totally indifferent to the course of human events. I mean, does a tree at Normandy know what happened around it? No, and it wouldn’t care anyhow…so long as it rains and shines, it’s happy.
I saw some TV special a while back that said that really, really old menus (or records of them) for restaurants on the Eastern seaboard were found from the early 1800’s. Apparently back then, the average lobster would be considered massive by todays standards. I don’t think they said anything about what class of person was more likely to be eating lobster then though.
Taking “raw” materials that we ingest, extracting all the good (and not-so-good) stuff out, and expelling the waste. Now if we could only figure out how to do that with our trash.
That the opposing spirals in composite flowers, pineapples, pinecones, and so on, are in adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, and that this same sequence is intimately related to the golden number…the number whose square is one more than itself.
Yeah. A few months back my friends and I went camping at the lake, and in the morning were sitting out on the shore, which was rocky and on a slope. Towards the top of the slope, the rocks were huge, and progressively got smaller as the slope went down. I picked up one of the little rocks near the water and I was like, “this rock is just a tiny version of that gigantic one over there!”
Gravity. We can predict the effects of gravity to an incredible degree (such as putting a probe in perfect orbit around Saturn), yet we have absolutely no idea how gravity actually works. There are lots of theories, but no one knows for sure how every object in the universe exerts some type of pull on everything else.
Fax machines. You put a piece of paper with writing on it on one place, put in a number, and a piece of paper with the same writing comes out at another place? That is magic!
My typewriter fascinates children. “You can see what you’re typing.” Not possible with computers and printers.
Horses. Here’s an animal that started out as food, then one day some caveman (or woman) thought “Hey, wonder what will happen if I sit on that instead of eating it?”
I can put a stamp with less than 50 cents on a card, mail it Monday, and it will be across the country in my friend’s hand by Wednesday or Thursday. I think that is a bargain.
Any of the machinery use to manufacture prepared foods, such as that seen on Food Network’s Unwrapped series. Pneumatic actuators, automated fillers, rollers, formers, packagers, bottlers, all that stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. Who thinks that all up?
Most likely the first nomads who set out on horse- (or camel-)back, with a skin pouch or four full of (probably goat- or sheep’s-)milk at their side. By the time they had bounced up and down for 12 hours on the beast’s back… well you get the idea.
I’m amazed by the resiliency of the Human body and soul – the amount of physical and emotional beating a person can take, and still, often, just walk away from the experience.
And, conversely, by their fragility in other cases.
"You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of 'em are even dumber than that!"
In light of the above truism (quoted from Ivan Stang, but I doubt he coined it), it amazes me that there are not a great many more traffic accidents than there are, considering how complicated and challenging it is to guide a motor vehicle through such a chaotic environment as traffic. And most people even manage to reach their intended destination!
In a similar way, the world wide phone system. You can call somebody on the other side of the world, yadda yadda yadda. But along with that is the fact that the individual units not only get the message content over the wires, but also the electricity they need to operate. Not only that, but it usually still works even if the power’s gone out.
Cooking at all. The simple fact that making stuff hot completely changes it. That sticky mass of dough turns into a delightful loaf of bread, that bloody piece of cow turns into a yummy steak and so on.
Airplanes.
Radio, tv, the internet. I’m constantly amazed that all that information is available to me at any time.
But one of the biggest is that we as a species managed to make it this long. Think about all those things we can’t do without and imagine that initial group of people who had to figure all of it out just to live long enough to produce the human race. Of all of things we now know can kill us, they had to sort it all out with a much smaller group. It truly is a wonder that we’re here at all.
