Although the basic chemical structure of materials in this microscopic landscape remains unchanged, the materials often exhibit surprising properties shaped by the unfamiliar forces of quantum physics, which governs the behavior of individual atoms.
There are some lessons worth learning from this record: First, when authoritarian regimes that Washington has long supported start unraveling, there's not much that can be done to save them; they are up against powerful and unfamiliar forces that they don't even comprehend.
"What I'm always doing is trying to pose thought experiments in the old-fashioned philosophical way," he said, "imagining from a radically different perspective circumstances that are very familiar to us, in order to make them unfamiliar and force us to start to pull them apart.
Being placed in an unfamiliar environment forces you to use your initiative and develop self-confidence – surviving 10 days of camping in the wild is something that three years of university could never provide.
Thrust into an unfamiliar environment, forced to change his name (becoming Larry, because Americans think Lauries are girls), he had emerged from an uneasy start to become a star inside the classroom and out.
So when the board of Qwest Communications International forced out the well-known Joseph Nacchio Joseph Nacchio, they replaced him with Richard Notebaert Richard Notebaert, whose face has adorned few magazines and whose unfamiliar surname forced reporters to double-check the spelling.
Others stimulate creativity by exposing themselves to novel situations or unfamiliar surroundings, forcing themselves to deal with reality in a non-habitual manner.
To land somewhere unfamiliar is to force yourself into alertness, to redraw whatever maps you have, to set the stage for creativity more than mere pattern-matching productivity.
New or unfamiliar surroundings often force people to evaluate profound questions like "Who am I?".
Go to an unfamiliar area and force yourself to navigate it.
