Scratch beneath the surface of most subjects and you find worlds of almost infinite complexity and the Internet, has given us the ability to dive deep into practically any subject we can think of. Compared to when I was a boy, this is like having super-powers that we could only have dreamt of back then where mostly just a handful of long out-of-date books is all that we had. These days, we have so much information that you almost feel omnipotent as your fingers dash across the keyboard in search of new knowledge - it's a beautiful thing. Here, I make all-too infrequent attempts to compound that knowledge in some small way, and offer up some of the more unusual things in life.
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Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, but it is stranger than we *can* imagine. I like to follow cosmology and quantum physics where I can, two subjects that both confuse and excite. Over the years they have provoked a lot of curiosity about the universe in which we live, simply because it's just so much more complex than we'll ever have a snow flake's chance in hell of understanding. They turn the everyday stuff of life into what can only be described as science fiction, even though much of it is indeed fact. Fairy tales, with supporting evidence. M theory though, just makes my mind melt.
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We like to think of time and space as continuous, that you can divide time and space into infinitely small quanta. This is fundamental to everything we know about the universe, and something that should be rock solid science. Think again. Most of us already know that matter isn't continuous at all but instead constructed from atoms and they in turn from sub-atomic particles. Our perceptions of the nature of matter have been adjusted to accept that it isn't the continuous stuff that we once thought it was. But what about time and space? If we look at the theory of loop quantum gravity, it is not only matter that is made up of discrete components, but also time and space as well.
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Okay, so we all know that plants are the one of the lowest intelligent life forms on the planet. After all, they don't have a brain, no ability to think, no ability to intelligently manipulate their shape or form and no control over their existence. All of this is true of course, but if we think a little harder about what we know about plants, we have to question how true this is. How would we, for instance, explain the following behaviours? Plants exhibit the ability to face their leaves and / or flowers towards the Sun in order to aid photosynthesis.
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