Is fact really stranger than fiction?

Strangeness is when what we expect is not expected. Thus the context of any given thing is important to determine strangeness. In fiction, you expect nonsensical stories, but in fact, you don't expect light to be both and particle and a wave. You don't expect time to be relative and objects to bend spacetime and cause gravity. You don't expect these things, making them strange.

Fiction is artificially unexpected in order to create suspense and excitement but the real world doesn’t need any artificial help. Chaos theory gives us a mathematical way to model how unpredictable and strange the world really is. It reveals how some things that might seem very simple – earth orbits the sun, or how a leaky tap drips – are in fact incredibly complex and impossible to predict. Our weather is another example of a chaotic system. No matter how well we can model the weather, and no matter how accurately we can measure the current weather, tiny errors and fluctuations are quickly amplified, making it impossible to predict the weather accurately more than two or three weeks in future. This is famously known as the “Butterfly Effect”. A butterfly flapping its wings in South America could have a dramatic effect on a storm brewing in Europe two weeks later. Nothing in fiction can match how beautiful, complicated and strange the real world is.