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Here are some things that are like magic to me, in that I can see them happening but they don’t make sense. You can explain and I can follow the explanation but it still is a mystery.

• How a knot makes a rope weaker. You have a rope. It can hold so much weight. You tie a knot in the rope. Now it can hold only half the weight. But the rope is still all there.
• How British people sound American when they sing. I have heard some new song by some new singer and not thought much about it. Sounded fine. Sounded normal. Then later I heard an interview with this person and realized at that point they were British or Australian or whatever. Only rarely (e.g. “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers) do singers have such thick accents that it comes through in their singing.
• Where dirt from a pothole goes. I have a dirt driveway. It gets potholes. I want to fill in the potholes. Ideally the dirt that came out of the pothole should go back in the pothole, but there is no pile of dirt anywhere. Matter has been destroyed.
• How a grain bag stitch holds. Grab a bushel bag of grain from a feed store. Pick it up and toss it in your car’s trunk (or pickup bed). Take it out and toss it in your wheelbarrow. Do just about anything normal with it and it stays together. Then pull the string and the whole end unravels and opens up and you can dump the grain out. It’s like the Prince Rupert’s Drop of bulk storage.
• How a baby starts to breathe. This one I’ve seen in person a few times. Baby is surrounded by fluid. Lungs not using air. Baby is born and then the lungs just start working. It’s even more amazing if you can see a video of an en caul birth.

The Refrigeration Cycle was going to be on this list, but I found an explanation that made sense to me. For those interested in that, here it is. Phase change is not affected by only temperature, but also pressure. If you have a fluid in a closed system, you can make the phase change by adding or removing heat. If you add or remove heat, you’re also affecting the pressure as the fluid expands or contracts. The Refrigeration Cycle is just that equation but from the other direction, like in math you can flip the equation around and it still works (because energy must be conserved). So the cycle works by adding or removing pressure to a fluid to change the phase and that has the result of adding or removing heat. Because if it didn’t add or remove heat then energy would not be conserved.

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