5 Mysteries of The Universe
Feb. 27th, 2009 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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anna_iWritten by Michael Brooks
Dark matter ring in galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. Some 96% of the universe is dark energy or dark matter. Photograph: Johns Hopkins University/Esa/Nasa
Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?
1 The missing universe
Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there’s not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - “dark energy” and “dark matter” - but that doesn’t really tell us anything about them. And it’s not as if they’re not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.
2 Life
I know you think you’re more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define - instead they’re investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.
3 Death
Here’s the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there’s no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn’t have survived natural selection. Then there’s the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly - if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).
4 Sex
Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn’t understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning - sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don’t know the answer. The suggestion that sex’s gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.
5 Free will
If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.
• Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, published by Profile on Thursday
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 07:28 pm (UTC)А почему кстати ссылка на меня? Я ничего такого умного не постила.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 05:53 pm (UTC)Stars move away with acceleration as if some unknown "5th" force pushes them.
Happy birthday!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-28 09:56 pm (UTC)The most promising approach to 3 is along the lines "what is best for the species as a whole". Essentially, people die to give room for the next generation. The alternatives would be either not to be adaptable or to waste scarce resources on constant adaptation throughout one's life. The way it works is that you adapt (learn) while young and then continue on under the "assumption" that the conditions won't change much. The problem is that it is very hard to build a model that is possible to quantify and check against nature.
4 - it has been essentially accepted as proven that you need "sex" for proper adaptation. The main quetion is why in pairs and not triplets or more (remember Lem?). There are some theories, but again - same problem as 3.
5 - this is a very divisive issues. There are those who really think that "free will" is a mirage. But the example given is not a proof of anything. You can't really address the question scientifically until you understand what consciousness is (and not just how it expresses itself in brainwaves and blood flows on brain MRI's). What is well known (and proven) is that person's actions are mostly unconscious.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 03:49 am (UTC)isn't it already here?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 09:17 am (UTC)