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[atomicwinter]

Has anyone stopped and thought that reality itself is just so weird and insane. Essentially we are talking monkeys on a flying rock spinning around a nuclear explosion in an endless sea of nothing but apparently there's dark matter and stuff in it and all kinds of crazy crap going on we don't even know. There are particles that exist that don't follow the laws of anything we understand, they appear and then disappear and then reappear and then they are in two places at once.. some of that Quantum Physics and other related fields are just so out there. What the hell is this really, its insanity.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It's not insanity. It's organized chaos.

[Ogdibus]

.

[Max White]

It's not organized chaos, it is a seamlessly logical and predictable system that follows rules too complex for any current model to predict, thus appears chaotic.
If you knew everything about the universe, there would be nothing chaotic about it. Although to store and calculate all data and processors in the universe, you would need a computer with all the processing power of the universe, thus would likely be the same size as the universe. Unless these things are scalable, in such a case you could do it with a crystal ball.
Although I would not recommend bringing such a ball into this universe, or having something from this universe observe it, or you will start an eternally recursive function that would pretty much crash all existence.
Or the universe is more complex than we know (and we know it is) and it has ways to deal with such an abnormality.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It's not organized chaos, it is a seamlessly logical and predictable system that follows rules too complex for any current model to predict, thus appears chaotic.

So, like I said, organized chaos. A perfectly intentional and orderly setup which appears to be a total mess.
(it was also an MLP reference, s2e5, specifically)

[Criptfeind]

Or the universe is more complex than we know (and we know it is) and it has ways to deal with such an abnormality.

Eh. Unless it was another universe size computer or crystal ball that was reading all the inflammation the actual change would be miniscule.

[Armok]

You guys are just getting started. You think this stuff is bad? Just wait until you see what happens if you poke it a bit harder.

[Leafsnail]

Well it's only strange because it's not like what we're used to.  It would be (to somewhat contradict myself) strange if every aspect of the universe was so similar to our everyday experiences that we could find it normal.

[Itnetlolor]

Reality isn't weird. It seems perfectly normal to me. Then again, I've been through my own weird experiences.

But yeah, take a glance through the real life examples of the Reality is Unrealistic trope.

[eerr]

Define real?

[Virex]

We're the weird ones out if you ask me. Unlike the rest of reality we keep making these strange expectations about how the world should behave only to be baffled when we find out it works differently...

[Powder Miner]

Saying it's organized chaos might be a bit inaccurate- Chaos itself is defined in the set of rules that we know of...

[Telgin]

Yes, I've thought about this at length before.

As a graduate student in computer science who knows how to build a functional computer out of transistors (not that I realistically do so for a remotely complicated one), I see this in just the computer you're sitting in front of.

It's pretty ridiculous how complicated that thing is, just by itself.  So many billions of parts working together and based on such complex physics (stuff starts to behave very strangely at the scales that modern transistors are built at)... it's a marvel that it works at all, much less is capable of what it is.

Then I start to think about the meatware component attached to it (me / you), and it gets even more ridiculous.  Then add in the human population, planet, solar system, etc.

I can only wonder if it's even possible for humans to comprehend the most fundamental laws of how the universe works.  We may never do better than approximation and imperfect modeling.

[Armok]

Telgin is on the right track. Now read http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646 and keep thinking about it for a few weeks.

[SalmonGod]

Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Somewhat tangential, but I couldn't help myself.

This one is probably more appropriate, but less fun.

Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.