Rare & Bizarre Phenomena

[Yuli Ban]

I love anomalies. Anything which falls outside the standard (often greatly) is like candy.

But what do I mean by rare & bizarre phenomena? I'm talking about those quirks at the edge of reality, the things that are about as close to the paranormal as it's possible to get without crossing over into pseudoscience.
It's those things that are pseudos/mimics of normal phenomena— things where the ends are the same or similar but the means by which it gets there are totally different from how we normally perceive them to develop.
Or perhaps entirely alternative versions of normal things.
Or things that require the perfect amount of things going right at the perfect possible time.
Or technologies that are so far beyond the normal human condition that it goes beyond science fiction into pseudo-fantasy.
Or things that are just so rare that getting a chance to see them in person is nearly impossible.

Or things that just look cool but don't happen often.

When we were a species of ape wandering the East African savannas, we had no way of knowing things like ball lightning, Bose-Einstein Condensates, vantablack, acoustic black holes, convergent evolution, red sprites, superfluids, tetraneutrons, the Placebo effect, the Meissner effect, and so on.



Artificial ball lightning in a vodka bottle
Description: "Spherical and toroidal plasmoids in rarefied xenon inside an empty vodka bottle, powered by 30 MHz 50W wireless generator."

[Yuli Ban]

Convergent evolution is so cool. Like how all animals ultimately evolve into crabs.

The fossa is probably the most interesting to me at this exact moment.



This is not a cat.


The Fossa, an unknown animal to most (unless you've watched Madagascar). The fossa is a cat-like, carnivorous mammal that is endemic to Madagascar. The fossa is the largest mammalian carnivore on the island of Madagascar and has been compared to a small cougar.
Fossas are most closely related to the mongoose, splitting off from them ~20 million years ago.

List of examples of convergent evolution

Post your favorites in this thread!

[Yuli Ban]

Light Pillars




They're rare and basically winter-only, but when you get to see them, they are magical. What's funny is how easy it is to create them, once the atmospheric conditions are right. Basically just shine a light into the atmosphere so that it's reflected on light crystals, and voila.
But the ice crystals have to just right, with no wind, or it won't work.
Observe:

[Yuli Ban]

Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds are always cool to watch, but that's probably because of how incredibly rare they are.

[Yuli Ban]

Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. They consist of ice crystals and are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the Equator. They are visible only during local summer months and when the Sun is below the observer's horizon, but while the clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggest that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere – creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds.

They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 km (47 to 53 mi). They are too faint to be seen in daylight, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow.

[Yuli Ban]

As a lover of meteorology, atmospheric phenomena is by far the most fascinating to me. And lightning is already plenty weird— we actually don't know the precise mechanisms that cause it, and it might even include cosmic rays!
So take something that's already a bit mysterious and add phenomena that we only scientifically discovered within the past 35 years, including one which was literally discovered within the past two or three: upper atmospheric electrical discharges!

[Yuli Ban]

Quantum physics are just plain weird, and the fact there's a quantum effect you can play with just by using liquid nitrogen and some offkilter materials is even stranger.

Quantum locking and the Meissner Effect in Superconductors:



Going even further, there's superfluids, which seem to defy gravity


And just like superconductors, "room-temperature superfluids" have been made. Indeed, the absolutely most outrageous thing is that we've made a room-temperature superfluid out of light. LIGHT!
I want you to step back and think about that: we've exploited a glitch in the laws of physics to use another glitch in the laws of physics to physicalize the property of light so it acts like a glitchy fluid.



Oh, and about superconductors, I want to remind you of something very strange in physical terms.

SUPERCONDUCTORS HAVE AN ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE OF ZERO.
As in "absolute zero."

I don't know why that blows my mind as much as it does. The idea that you can actually witness a real life "absolute". It's not like there's negligible resistance or maybe a few nano-ohms of resistance. No, there's absolutely ZERO resistance. The only resistance in a superconductor is from the material itself causing issues, but in more pure materials, not even that. Not even on a quantum level. It's perfect. It's perfect and it feels like it shouldn't be.

[raklian]

I want you to step back and think about that: we've exploited a glitch in the laws of physics to use another glitch in the laws of physics to physicalize the property of light so it acts like a glitchy fluid.

This is precisely the reason we can't exactly say everything we consider to be presently in the realm of sci-fi and impossible to realize in real life IMPOSSIBLE.

Never say never, so the saying goes.

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

That reminds me:

[Yuli Ban]

The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the Sun's disk; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the Earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate, or refract, into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others





It's also not a flash.

[Yuli Ban]

Hector the Convector is fascinating to me. It forms so regularly, you can use it to tell time.

Hector (cloud)
Hector is a cumulonimbus thundercloud that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia, from approximately September to March each year. Hector, or sometimes "Hector the Convector", is known as one of the world's most consistently large thunderstorms, reaching heights of approximately 20 kilometres (66,000 ft)

[Yuli Ban]

Vela incident

The Vela incident, also known as the South Atlantic Flash, was an unidentified double flash of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on 22 September 1979 near the Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean.

The cause of the flash remains officially unknown, and some information about the event remains classified by the U.S. government. While it has been suggested that the signal could have been caused by a meteoroid hitting the satellite, the previous 41 double flashes detected by the Vela satellites were caused by nuclear weapons tests. Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 flash was caused by a nuclear explosion– perhaps an undeclared nuclear test carried out by South Africa and Israel.

[Yuli Ban]

Sailing stones (also called sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks) are part of the geological phenomenon in which rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large sheets of ice a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond break up on sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin, floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.

[Yuli Ban]

Ice has almost two dozen different phases, which makes it a premier example of what I mean by "alternative forms of normal things."

We on Earth are familiar with ice-I, which forms when water becomes colder than 0°C. But are you aware of ice that forms when water is compressed via gigapascals of pressure?
There are plenty!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice#Phases

Ice-XVIII, or "superionic water," is one of the coolest. Ironic as it's also one of the hottest.

[Yuli Ban]

Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. They consist of ice crystals and are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the Equator. They are visible only during local summer months and when the Sun is below the observer's horizon, but while the clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggest that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere – creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds.

They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 km (47 to 53 mi). They are too faint to be seen in daylight, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow.

And now here are noctilucent clouds on Mars

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

Fakenadoes: Scud clouds, non-tornadic clouds touching the ground, and misidentifications | One of the rarest weather phenomena types, fakenadoes include very-low hanging clouds (ground-scrapers) and alternative whirlwinds not related to a supercell



Imagine it's a stormy-looking day. Dark clouds and evil-looking scuds everywhere. And then you see it: a funnel cloud dipping lower and lower. Soon, it makes touchdown, and it's barreling right at you. So you take cover and watch it pass, until you notice: nothing's flying. There's no wind. No debris. No "freight train" sound. The cloud's not even rotating. And then it passes down your street so close that you can run your hand through it, and the shaft lazily continues on. The chillest tornado in history.

It's like tornado.exe failed to load properly and glitched out.

Tornadoes are already rare as shit, but you just got to experience something so rare, it's borderline paranormal in meteorology.

I MAY have seen a fakenado when I was really young.

[Yuli Ban]

I want you to step back and think about that: we've exploited a glitch in the laws of physics to use another glitch in the laws of physics to physicalize the property of light so it acts like a glitchy fluid.

This is precisely the reason we can't exactly say everything we consider to be presently in the realm of sci-fi and impossible to realize in real life IMPOSSIBLE.

Never say never, so the saying goes.

We already know this is the case. It's all but accepted that humans at our current level of intelligence will NEVER understand dark energy. It's a problem too far beyond our understanding, individual or collective. Unifying quantum physics and general relativity may be this way too.

I recently thought extensively about this, about the fact there are things that not only do we not know but in fact CAN'T know. We as Homo sapiens² simply do not have the necessary brain resources to do it, even when we put our brains together and build tools to help. It's like chimpanzees trying to understand fire. They just can't. It's physically impossible for chimpanzees to master fire, even though they are usually aware it exists. They don't know the mechanisms or physics behind it or what fire is; it just happens and is very hot.

[Yuli Ban]

Quantum gas goes below absolute zero
Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero
Negative temperature

Certain systems can achieve negative thermodynamic temperature; that is, their [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_temperature]temperature can be expressed as a negative quantity on the Kelvin or Rankine scales. This should be distinguished from temperatures expressed as negative numbers on non-thermodynamic Celsius or Fahrenheit scales, which are nevertheless higher than absolute zero.
The absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale can be understood loosely as a measure of average kinetic energy. Usually, system temperatures are positive. However, in particular isolated systems, the temperature defined in terms of Boltzmann's entropy can become negative.