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30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
CuriositiesMAR 4, 2024

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up

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Some science facts can be pretty wild. Like this fun fact about grasshoppers. Did you know that their ears are actually on their bellies? And not just one pair of ears. They apparently have six along the sides of their abdomens! This is the kind of fact that I find quite hard to wrap my head around.
So I totally get why one Redditor went to r/AskReddit and posed a similar question to other netizens. The user u/shirofromgame wrote: "What is a scientifically proven fact you refuse to believe?" And the 'refuse to believe' part in this case is not that they actually don't believe it. It's more that the fact is so outlandish or ridiculous that it just blows their mind.

#1

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
As a child I could not grasp that groves in a record could make complicated music when a needle ran over them. Now that I'm older and it's all light on metal disks or just math (somehow) I have given up even pretending I believe. It's magic, pure and simple.
232points

Bored Panda reached out to the curious person who asked the Redditor about the things they couldn't believe. The Redditor u/shirofromgame agreed to have a short chat with us and told us the reason behind this post. The idea for the question came to the Redditor as almost all intrusive thoughts do – just before falling asleep.

"I came up with the Reddit post after trying to go to sleep (and failing), and I was thinking about such facts," u/shirofromgame told Bored Panda. "You see, I was so sleepy that I wrote the question on Reddit and immediately fell asleep after. I actually remembered I wrote it after two days and was surprised to see it had so many replies," the Redditor adds to her whimsical story.

Out of so many interesting replies, u/shirofromgame says that the very top one messed with them the most. It was the one about how our eyes work. "I really can't get my mind wrapped around [that]," the Redditor says, "About how our brains flip the image that we see from our eyes."

#2

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
Q-tips do belong in my ears and I refuse to believe any doctor saying otherwise.
213points

#3

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
I refuse to believe a leopard-moose-camel with a 40ft neck is a real animal and a horse with a horn isn’t.
168points

Admittedly, it is quite fascinating – our eyes actually do work like a Camera Obscura. As the specialist in neuro-ophthalmology, Dr. Andrew G. Lee, explains, the image we see is inverted on the retina. It's the retina that sees the world upside down. "Your cortex just turns it upside down," Lee says.

There's also an interesting experiment related to the whole phenomenon. If a person were to wear prism glasses (which do the opposite), they would see the world upside down. But what's interesting is that after they take the glasses off, the whole world would be upside down for them for a few days. How does it go back to normal? "[Your] cortex puts it back in the right orientation," Dr. Lee explains.

#4

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
The fact that our eyes see everything upside down and back into our brain we have to flip the image. Just crazy.
156points

#5

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
The fact that t.rex and stegosaurus were separated by millions of years and never existed together. I will always have Stegosaurus battle T Rex when given dinosaurs to play with!.
152points

#6

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
The idea that time can bend and stretch depending on gravity and velocity.
147points

#7

The solution to the Monty Hall paradox. I can even do the math myself. But it still "feels" intuitively wrong.
The scenario: you're on a game show and the host offers you a choice between three doors. Behind one door is a million dollars. Behind the other two doors, you get nothing.
You make your choice. But before the host opens the door to reveal what's inside, he opens one of the *other two* doors to reveal nothing behind *that* one. He then offers you a second choice: do you keep the door that you already chose? Or do you switch to the other unopened door? Does it matter?
Intuitively, it feels like it shouldn't matter, that you have a 50-50 chance of winning whether you switch to the other door, or keep the one you chose originally.
Mathematical reality: you should switch. You have double the chance of winning the money if you switch to the other door, compared with staying put.
Close second: in any random group of just 23 people you will have more than 50% chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday. Again, I can do the math to prove this but it still doesn't feel right.
124points

#8

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That babies' adult teeth are under their eyes (skeletal).
121points

#9

I refuse to believe that ALL snowflakes in the entirety of history are unique.
You mean to tell me, that ALL snowflakes EVER, across the ENTIRE GLOBE, are COMPLETELY UNIQUE?
That can’t be mathematically possible. Like, a single storm that drops 3 inches on my house must be a million flakes. Multiply that by the area of that storm, and the depth of the snow, and that number becomes huge. THEN, add that to every storm in the history of the whole globe.
I just can’t believe that we have seen every snowflake and have come to the definite conclusion that they’re all unique. Scientists aren’t at my house cataloging the snowflakes. How do they know?.
120points

#10

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That I'm not one living entity; billions of lifeforms all combine to make one of me.
114points

#11

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
Skyscrapers sway a lot. I refuse to believe a building like the burj khalifa moves 6-7 feet in the wind without issue.
114points

#12

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That the average time to sleep is 7 minutes. WHO???.
113points

#13

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That the speed of light can’t be broken. They said flight was physically impossible with a machine, then they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible. I just don’t believe that we’re right this time either.
105points

#14

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
I know it's true but I still find it hard to believe that viruses are not considered living organisms.
There are a lot of factors but the two biggest ones I think are the fact that they are inert and do not use energy when not in a host. And that they cannot self replicate without said host.
Hard to believe something capable of so much death and destruction is probably not even conscious.
102points

#15

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That computers work by using combinations of 0 and 1!.
102points

#16

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
That fruits and vegetables do not decay faster when I’m the one paying for them.
98points

#17

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
Women are born with all the eggs already in them and don't produce those through the lifetime.
It is so ridiculous that I still can't believe it, even though I tell it to the others. Hope for a paper suggesting an alternative to "The egg from which you were born was actually created by your grandma".
90points

#18

The double-slit experiments and all their variations still weird me out. As someone who hasn't studied the necessary fundamentals, it just seems like the Light particles know whether or not you're watching and will change their behavior depending on what you're expecting them to do.
88points

#19

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
Narwhals. Ain't no way.
86points

#20

30 People Share Facts That Are True Despite Sounding Completely Made Up
In a lottery, having a string of consecutive numbers (say 1,2,3,4,5,6) being drawn is equally likely as a string of random numbers being drawn.
82points
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