16 People Share Bizarre Science Facts That Prove Truth Is Always Stranger Than Fiction

There are perhaps many things in science that seem logical to the scientists, but defy common sense for most laymen. Quantum physics and its theories is one such field, and our very existence might be another. Here are some documented scientific and medical facts that may sound bizarre and something out of a horror movie script, but are completely true. It's going to take some time wrapping our heads around this, as it did for the people who shared them.

• What you see when you look into the mirror isn’t you. Not only are there multiple distortions, your real you isn’t even visible, technically speaking. So your brain corrects nerve impulses of the retina using the vestibular system to know if the image is upright. You also perceive yourself as more (or less) beautiful than how others perceive you. Benjamin Weiss / Quora
• Longevity of stars: Stars can burn for over a trillion years. Most fires burn briefly and then die out, as anyone who tries to light a camp fire can testify. Yet stars burn, stably, for billions (yellow stars, e.g., our Sun) or even, potentially, for trillions (red dwarfs) of years, harnessing one of the most explosive process ever — thermonuclear power. How weird is that? Michael Price / Quora
• My favorite is that a glass of water has more atoms in it than there are glasses of water in all the oceans of the world. Or how about, an atom has no shape or size until someone measures it? Or that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to light speed. Stephen Thomas Blume / Quora

• Caterpillars basically dissolve into liquid in the cocoon. The only thing left are the so called ‘imaginal discs’, groups of cells that contain all the information and the mechanism to turn that soup into the various body parts of a butterfly (the same applies for other insects).
  boostman / Reddit
• Quantum mechanics and relativity are both full of things that defy common sense, but that feels like low-hanging fruit. The rotation of a neutron star is something I’ve always found very striking. So you’ve got a 10 km large object, with a mass greater than our sun, and it rotates perhaps many hundred rotations per second. Imagine seeing that.
  I find it hard to imagine anything that would feel more threatening/powerful to experience. That something so massively huge could rotate with such speed seems to defy common sense, even though it simply conserved its angular momentum when it collapsed to become a neutron star. Justice Långvall / Quora
• All matter literally gives off light, but we can only see a sliver of that spectrum (although we do have tools to help us see other spectrums.) Our bodies give off infrared, and are basically glowing in that portion of the spectrum, similar to how iron glows to our normal vision when it’s heated. Something that sees a different spectrum than us might not see hot iron as glowing at the same temperatures we see iron glow at. MadgoonOfficial / Reddit

• When you dream, one portion of your brain creates the story, while another part witnesses the events and is really shocked by the plot twists. Longjumping_Owl9929 / Reddit
• I recently read about the Split-Brain experiments. There is a procedure for severe epilepsy that involves cutting the connecting nerves of the two brain hemispheres, resulting in the two hemispheres being unable to communicate with each other.
  The experiment shows that both halves can answer questions independently of each other, have separate opinions/preferences, form memories independently. Basically suggesting that there are two minds in the brain. That just blows my mind(s). Mlinch / Reddit
• On a related note, people with certain types of blindness will still mirror a smile. Because the part of our brain that handles emotional contagion makes use of visual information independently of the visual processing part of our brain. You don't need to actually see someone's emotional state in order to respond to it. headzoo / Reddit

• Ice doesn't cool your water, the water heats up your ice. Energy transfers one way. When I realized this, studying thermodynamics, I sat and just let it hit me. I love chemistry. Top_Distribution_693 / Reddit
• With the help of quantum tunneling, there is a 1 in 5.2⁶¹ chance that the molecules in your hand and table would miss each other when slamming it, making your hand go through the table. Macury / Reddit
• Exponential power: Fold a “big sheet” of paper — that is 0.1 mm thick — 50 times and the height of the stack is over 20 times the distance earth to moon. Thank you. laidmajority / Reddit
• The knowledge that the atoms of our bodies contain elements only forged in the center of stars, and that such stars upon death blow the elements via supernova across the universe and into our very existence. We are made of star dust. analyzeTimes / Reddit

• My test results came back positive for a rare and fatal condition. Sitting in the doctor’s office, I could barely hold back tears as I asked, “Is there any way to treat this?” My doctor took a deep breath and said, “I don’t think you actually have it.”
  I blinked in confusion. “What do you mean? The test said I do.” He explained, “This condition is notorious for false positives. Statistically, you’re more likely to not have it than to actually be sick.”
  He further explained that this was called the false positive paradox, and in tests of rare conditions, a positive result can mean you don't have the disease. I still cannot wrap my brain around this.
• My wife and I were in a car crash some time back. I escaped with minor injuries, but she had a serious head injury that put her in a coma for a month. Slowly, she began to regain consciousness, communicating through signs.
  One morning, she started to talk, and I was shocked because she spoke in a British accent, although we are not English. When I explained to the doctor what had happened, he explained it could be an extremely rare condition: the foreign accent syndrome. A speech impediment, it results from damage to the parts of the brain responsible for coordinating speech.
  It makes the person sound like they have suddenly acquired a foreign accent. After a few months, she began to revert to her normal speech and, thankfully, has made a full recovery since.
• Alice in Wonderland syndrome: I experienced this when I had a high fever as a kid, and was happily delirious, playing ball with Pink Panther at the foot of my bed. We tossed this invisible ball back and forth, and sometimes it was enormous and light, and then it would shrink and become impossibly small and heavy. It was fun. thundercrown25 / Reddit

Clearly, the world is a far more mysterious place than we can imagine, and science is perhaps the only language needed to understand it. On that note, here go some recent scientific discoveries that might spell happiness for many in the coming years.