10 Things You Take For Granted But Never Actually Happened

One of the hardest things to face in life is realizing that you believe something that isn’t true. Challenging your beliefs and coming up with something that changes your worldview can be both enlightening and devastating. And when you realize that something you believed never existed, it can shake you to your core. Or at least make for a cool story.

10. It is statistically unlikely that any particular shuffle of a deck of cards has ever existed before.

United States Playing Card Company annually sells 100 million decks kart. And that's just one company. It's safe to say that cards are the most popular gaming accessory in the world. They can be traced back before 1300s in Europe, and the number of different card games a person can play runs into the thousands. With all these cards and all these games, one of the most amazing things about a deck of cards is not what they can do, but what they can't do. And statistically speaking, they can't be shuffled the same way twice.

While it is not impossible (though it is impossible to know one way or the other), mathematically unlikely , that when you shuffle a deck, what you end up with has never existed in the entire 700-year history of playing cards. There are factorial 52 ways to arrange a deck of playing cards when you shuffle it. This means that after you shuffle it, there are 52 cards that could end up on top of that deck. Turn it over, and now you have 51 potential cards that could be the second card, and so on. Any of the 52 cards could be the first, any of the 51 could be the second, and so on. Eventually, the total number of possible arrangements boils down to a number you probably don't want to try to name, which is:

80 658 175 170 943 878 571 660 636 856 403 766 975 289 505 440 883 277 824 000 000 000 000.

Simply put, it's an eight with 67 zeros after it. That's a big number. If everyone who ever lived spent their entire lives shuffling cards, we'd still never come close to shuffling all the combinations.

9. Monastic vows of complete silence do not actually exist.

Monks taking a vow of silence have been a staple of pop culture for years. IN Hangover 2 There is even a Buddhist monk , who plays for laughs and doesn't speak. It's true that some devout monks or nuns may choose periods of silence, but no monastic order practices this fully. Moreover, when individual monks choose silence, it is not an all-encompassing and unbreakable practice. Instead, it involves choosing to “speak silently” and become closer to their faith. Time is still being allocated for conversation, usually at the end of the day.

Mostly the idea of a vow of silence is to prevent a person from speaking carelessly. It allows for self-reflection and a better understanding of oneself. This can happen between designated prayer periods, for a few days or weeks, or perhaps longer if one chooses. But it is not observed, nor is it expected. Also, if something needed to be communicated, there would never be a reason not to share important information.

8. 10 days in 1582 never existed

If there’s one thing most of us can always count on, it’s time. Time passes whether we pay attention or not. You go to bed and wake up eight hours later. The world kept spinning, and it didn’t care that you weren’t there to pay attention. You can count on that, you know. Unfortunately, you can’t. Time, as we understand it, is a human concept. We created years, months, and days, and divided them into specific denominations. Because of that, we’ve also found ways to manipulate them, and never more so than during 10 very strange days in 1582.

In 1582 we adopted the Gregorian calendar, and here we find a problem. The whole world has never been unified in its understanding of concepts like time, so from time to time you will hear about the Chinese calendar and the Aztec calendar. Before the Gregorian calendar, we used the Julian calendar.

The Julian calendar dates back to 46 BC , when Julius Caesar introduced it, and it had problems. The Julian year was 365.25 days long. Almost exactly the same as the Gregorian calendar. But almost doesn't count. After 1,600 years of too-long years, everything was out of sync, especially the equinoxes and solstices. The calendar was off by one day every 314 years, and so when the Gregorian calendar came into effect, 10 days just disappeared.

7. Abraham and Moses probably never existed

Moses

For about as long as the Bible has been around, people have wondered how legitimate it is. Obviously, more people back then accepted the stories on faith, whereas people in today's world are less likely to believe that Noah's Ark was literal rather than allegorical. That's not to say that no one believes it, but it's a mixed bag these days, even among people who are generally Christian. That's why it's surprising to learn that Bible scholars consider things to be completely unreliable, like the stories of Abraham and Noah. That is, they don't believe that either of these men were real people.

Back in 2002 United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism released a new Torah and commentary that helped shape their beliefs in the context of history, archaeology, anthropology, and more. The information they shared traced the origins of many of the stories from the Exodus to other sources and explained how Noah's Ark was likely borrowed from the Epic of Gilgamesh and there was no anthropological evidence for Israel's trek through Egypt or indeed anything in the entire book being true in any historical sense.

Figures such as King David, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and King Solomon were likely just a fiction, according to Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world's foremost biblical scholars. This was based on his own 15 years of research into the archaeological evidence associated with much of what is detailed in the Old Testament.

While the information no doubt shook the faith of some, rabbis and others found ways to try to reconcile what was known with what was believed, since faith is not really something for which you need concrete evidence all the time. The most serious scholars and religious leaders were are well aware of these facts for many years, but it took them time to communicate this to their parishioners and believers.

6. Wild cows as we know them never existed.

Most pet owners have at some point looked at their dog or cat and thought, “How would you ever survive in the wild?” Pets, of course, are not designed to live in the wild. They are the result of years of selective breeding for very specific traits that essentially make them unsuitable for life in the wild, and cows are no different. In fact, it is highly unlikely that cows will ever survive in the wild, because there have never been any true wild cows.

The animals we raise for beef today evolved from species like bulls and aurochs, the closest thing that ever existed in the wild to cows, but not cows. The domestication of cows from their wild relatives was a monumental andan extremely difficult task. All of the cattle in existence today, about 1.3 billion, are descended from just 80 animals , domesticated 10,500 years ago. They have been bred into a much more tame and manageable variety.

5. Matriarchal societies have never existed.

Search social media these days and you will see patriarchy mentioned a lot. It is a society in which men are the dominant force. This means that there can also be a matriarchy, where women are in charge. This definition is true and reasonable, but historically speaking, it is completely made up. Anthropologists Not found evidence existence a real matriarchal society .

For a long time there was an opinion that there was a time often referred to as 5000 years ago, when women were respected and governed before the idea of patriarchy existed, but the evidence does not support this. This is not to say that there were not more egalitarian societies in the past and obviously female rulers, but in general, this has never been the case in society.

4. Ninjas were probably more like spies than assassins.

Everyone knows ninjas, even if only in mutant turtle form. The cloaked and mysterious warriors of ancient Japan, armed with deadly weapons and superhuman stealth, they've been a staple of pop culture for centuries. Turns out, they were mostly born there, too.

It's not that ninjas never existed. But ninjas as we understand them probably didn't. The history of the ninja in at best, vague , and there is reason to believe that much of what we think we know about ninjas was fables, suppositions, exaggerations, and conjectures.

What is known about them makes them sound less like stealthy killers and more like ancient intelligence agents , like the old-school CIA. Who, of course, are sometimes killers too.

3. True photographic memory never existed.

Every now and then you'll come across a movie where a character claims to have a photographic memory. This quirk of biology seems to be very useful, and there have been people who have demonstrated amazing memories in the lab. The guy the movie " "Rain Man", learned more by heart 9000 books from cover to cover. However, photographic memory as depicted in fiction never shown in real life.

So how can someone memorize 9,000 books but not have a photographic memory, you ask? It comes down to how they remember things. Someone who can recite pi to 67,890 digits, as Lu Chao did, is amazing, but they probably couldn’t do it backwards. And that’s important, because a true photographic memory would allow them to see any detail in any order at any time. You might think that’s a small difference, but it is a difference.

2. The authors of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were fictitious

Both The Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew series of novels are extremely popular. It was sold more 70 million Hardy Boys books. Nancy Drew can do the same. So you'd think their authors, Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, respectively, would be thrilled. Except neither of them is a real person.

Dixon and Keane - aliases , used by many writers. Both were made by Edward Stratemeyer in the 1920s, who came up with names and passed on the ideas he came up with to other writers so they could develop them into entire books. It's very similar to how content factories operate on the Internet today.

1. The color purple does not exist in the visible light spectrum.

Where on the rainbow do you find the color purple? The answer, of course, is nowhere. And for some people, that means the color purple doesn't exist at all. Except you can also go buy a purple crayon right now, so what's going on?

First, you can find purple on the color wheel where red and violet occur together. However, in light spectrum this is not happening . This means that purple does not have a wavelength like the other colors we recognize in the rainbow. But it exists in a combination of wavelengths, and that is what our brain perceives when we look at the color purple. This means that our brains are filling in some of the gaps created by the way we perceive wavelengths of light with our eyes, and gives us a purple color . But to be fair, every color is constructed in our brains based on how light waves are processed and interpreted, right? It's real because every color is real, but it takes our brains to make it real.