Impressive first occurrences

Here’s a list of things that impressed me when I saw or heard about them for the first time.

• My mom had some alcohol based solution in her make up kit. It was in a green bottle and 3/4^th full. Everyone knows that when this bottle is inverted (of course with the lid closed), air trapped inside moves up. Man!!...the first time, I was so thrilled to see that happen. Well, I could not have the same thing though. Instead, my dad made an ink solution and poured it into a glass bottle, used for homeopathy medicine. That made my day.
• Filter paper; simple, isn’t it? Well not until I saw that and felt it with my own hands. When I was in the 4^th grade, the only paper I knew was that used for writing and wrapping. When my teacher used a special kind of paper to filter out the impurities from water, I was really impressed. How could she do that? How come the paper didn’t give away? She had me there. Then when I felt the paper at the end of the class; it was much thicker than the ordinary ones. I come to the US now, and it’s difficult to imagine life without the various kinds of paper!!
• Magnesium ribbon: This involved some pyrotechnics. Simple…my teacher took a small piece of Magnesium ribbon and held it in a flame. It took some time, and then burned with a blinding white color. I had never seen anything burn so brilliantly before (apart from the Sun) right in front of my eyes. At the end of the day, I took a small bit of it home to show it to my mom.
• Dispersion of seeds: I grew up in a colony near Hospet. Atleast when I lived there, every house was surrounded by a garden, and separated by hedges made of thorny twigs and bamboo. Some gardens were bare without any kind of vegetation and some were like miniature forests. Ours was the second kind. We had two mango trees, a lemon tree, a guava tree, several plantains, a jackfruit tree, couple of papaya trees(I can go on)…The garden floor appeared to be spotty during midday with patches of sunlight here and there. There were several weeds too. I and my friend had spotted this particular plant that produced tiny sword like seeds. When these were put in water, they would explode. What a sight that was. Later in 8^th grade I came to know the practical implication of such explosions. Well, back then it was like bursting crackers under water. The first time I literally jumped. That was pure thrill man, it was. Defying the normal….
• Galaxies…hmmm. Everyone, at some point, would have wondered what lies beyond the blue or black sky. I grew up listening to Ramayana, Dhashavathara, Mahabharata…Big fan of Amarchirakatha…I wasn't a stranger to fantasies and imagination. But things like Galaxies were still beyond my comprehension. Until, an introduction of the same sometime in the middle school. That feeling was really huge; something vast really exists. It was thrilling too, that I’m part of such a humongous structure, an organization of a billion stars, a control beyond our imagination. Although, the question “how?” can be answered to some extent, the question “why?”, still remains unanswered.
• Off late, the fact that a particular thought processing can occur amongst two different individuals, who are not in touch with any form of communication with each other, impressed me. There is a particular model, conditional moment closure, used in modeling combustion in practical devices. The theory behind this was developed independently by two researches in Australia. If two people could come up with such a specific theory, without any form of communication with each other, I guess there would be several people writing similar annals in their blogs, as I’m doing right now!!