@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online The first science fiction story is commonly held to be Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley in the 19th century, but one could argue that the first science fiction story is actually A True Story, written by Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian Greek satirist who lived in the second century AD. It involves a trip to the moon, complete with depictions of alien moon-creatures, and how life on the moon differs from on earth.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird truth #2: many, if not most, of the transistors and wires on a modern processor or DRAM chip are literally smaller than light; visible light has a wavelength between 400 and 750 nanometers, and feature sizes on semiconductor processes have been smaller than this ever since 1993, when typical feature sizes were on the order of 350 nanometers. Modern devices get as low as 7 nanometers.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird/uncomfortable truth #3: The largest known structure in the universe is called the Great GRB Wall, discovered in 2013. It's a massive cluster of billions of galaxies about ten billion light-years in length, and it's about eight times larger than our understanding of physics and cosmology implies should be possible. No one knows why it's so big or how it got there.
weird truth #4, slightly long
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online Weird truth #4: There's reason to doubt whether two of the most famous ancient Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and Socrates, ever even existed at all. None of Socrates' writings have survived, and are primarily known through citations in other works, who may have been using the name as a generic "wise philosopher" name, since philosophical works were often written in the form of a dialogue between two characters. Pythagoras, on the other hand, is thought to have been a pseudonym used by members of the Pythagorean school of philosophy, and it's entirely possible that no one by that name ever actually existed.
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@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online Weird truth #6: If you know anything at all about chemistry, you would probably be able to guess that mixing liquid fluorine, liquid hydrogen, and liquid lithium together would be a Very Bad Idea. Nonetheless, researchers at Rocketdyne experimented with the idea in the 60s, and successfully tested a rocket engine based on this mixture and found it to have a higher specific impulse (the rocketry version of fuel efficiency) than any other chemical rocket tested before or since. It was never put into use, for reasons of "what the actual fuck were they thinking" and "*NO*".
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online Weird truth #7: Several very common fruits and vegetables, including the chili pepper, bell pepper, tomato, potato, and peanut, are all native to the Americas, meaning they were completely unknown to the people of Europe, Asia, and Africa until the 15th century.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird truth #8: The Czochralski process, one of the earliest and still very commonly used methods of producing very pure, large, single crystals (primarily of silicon for producing semiconductor devices), was invented accidentally in 1915 when Polish chemist Jan Czochralski dipped his pen into a pot of molten tin (which for some reason he had on his desk) instead of his inkwell, and noticed that a very fine tin crystal came up attached to the pen when he removed it.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird truth #9: The avocado evolved to have its seeds spread by giant sloths--and only them. No other animal that would have any interest in eating them in the area was large enough to ingest the avocado's seed, and the seed is protected by a casing that *has* to be damaged (originally, by a giant sloth's digestive system) in order for the seed to germinate. Giant sloths went extinct around 10 000 years ago, and ever since, the avocado has only survived by human cultivation.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird truth #10: The last vacuum tube that remains in common use is one that almost everyone reading this probably owns one of: the magnetron, which is responsible for generating the intense high-frequency radio waves (more specifically, microwaves) used in a microwave oven. Prior to their replacement by flat-panel displays, the CRT was another vacuum tube that was very commonly used, though they are no longer manufactured and are increasingly rare to see.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online okay, that's the last one, at least for now. i wanted to do ten and then had a hard time thinking of the last few!
weird truth #4, slightly long
@Felthry @Sapphicgiraffic and here i thought pythagoras was someone who recruited geniuses into his cult, and then killed them off and claimed their work as his…
re: weird truth #4, slightly long
@meena @Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online I suppose that's also possible! but iwrc we do have reason to believe that multiple people used the name Pythagoras as a pseudonym.
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@Felthry @Sapphicgiraffic anyway, it's good to know that i just need to hate on Plato and that Socrates is just his fictional teacher.
re: weird truth #4, slightly long
@meena @Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online well, just as there's no conclusive evidence Socrates did exist, there's also no conclusive evidence he didn't. The case against pythagoras's existence is stronger than that against socrates's.
@Sapphicgiraffic@snouts.online weird truth #5: Theoretically, all isotopes of all elements heavier than nickel should be very slightly radioactive, though with half-lives far longer than any time span imaginable. This has been observed in the case of bismuth-209, which has a measured half-life of somewhere around a billion times the current age of the universe.