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The Most Important Questions In Science
- VanillaCafe 13y ago"Why do we dream?" doesn't seem like it ranks in the top 10.
- altoz 13y agomore important than "where do we put our carbon". that's an engineering problem, at best.
- paul_f 13y agoIt was a decent list until the absurd carbon question.
- huherto 13y agoI think it is a very important question that may actually impact our survival in the planet beyond the other questions that are more to satisfy our own curiosity. So I am not sure if you think the question is already solved or is it not actually a problem.
- huherto 13y agoIt may be just an engineering problem, but it is a huge engineering problem
- acqq 13y agoAbsolutely not. It's a problem of our civilization's survival. How this civilization treats it will ultimately decide if it deserves to survive. The contributions like "engineering problem at best" make me sure that we can't expect much.
- waps 13y agoNone of these questions rank anywhere near the top10, at least not in the exact sciences. Actual top10 problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems (they require knowing more than a little bit of science to even understand the question)
- bglazer 13y agoI was under the impression that these are all mathematics and theoretical physics related.
- macspoofing 13y agoThe Millennium Problems are not the biggest question in all of science. They are big questions in Mathematics.
- twiceaday 13y ago"What makes us human?" has nothing to do with science. It is a strictly philosophical question.
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- Houshalter 13y agoI disagree. Questions like how the human brain works and how we can think abstractly, and how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals. There isn't really anything philosophical about it.
- macspoofing 13y agoI have no idea what the heck the author is talking about with that point. The question is either too simple, in that you can just itemize all the ways we are different (just so happens that "consciousness" - #5 - would be a pretty big bullet point, though we can just generalize and say our DNA makes us human), or nonsensical. Case in point: >how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals Because we have three times more neurons than the closest competition. Why do we have so many neurons? Because there was a selective pressure acting upon our ancestors. Furthermore, WE ARE ANIMALS. We have certain special traits unique to us, but every species has something special about it.
- Houshalter 13y agoI get 1.7 to 2 times as many neurons as elephants, a little more for whales, and they don't seem even half as intelligent. Homo floresiensis had a brain considered small for a chimpanzee and was capable of making tools and lighting fires and very likely language. Meanwhile neanderthals had even bigger brains than us. The number of neurons alone isn't responsible for intelligence. Even if it was, that doesn't explain how intelligence works or what the hell the brain is actually doing.
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- andyl 13y agoI wanna know: how/why does the observer change the behavior of quantum systems?
- dougk16 13y agoIn order to observe something you have to bounce photons off of it, which changes its behavior...little over-simplified, but I believe that's the gist.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoFrom what I understand, there are two phenomena at play, often mixed together. The observer might interfere when it tries to measure (the observer effect, which is true to any system), but there's also an inherent uncertainty on the way waves are measured (the uncertainty principle). The observer effect is well-understood, there's nothing magical about it. For example, a multimeter acts a (very small) resistor, affecting the circuit it's measuring. Sometimes the error you introduce can be ignored, but get unmanageable when you try to measure really small systems, where things are more easily disturbed. The uncertainty principle, on the other hand, is something else. There's a video that I think explains the uncertainty principle well, with a practical example (it's explaining why there's a limit to how many pulses you can send down a fiber optic and still be able to measure on the other side): http://youtu.be/0OOmSyaoAt0?t=7m28s http://youtu.be/0OOmSyaoAt0?t=7m28s
- judk 13y agoUncertainty principle is about shape, not measurement. Unless you mean "how you define the measured aspect of the system" . Position and momentum are Fourier transforms of each other, and therefore their waveforms cannot both be confined to small range at the same time. It is loosely analogous to the concept that a rectangle of area 1 can never have both side lengths less than 1.
- moultano 13y agoThe observer becomes entangled with the quantum system.
- scotty79 13y agoI'd like to know if there's some fundamental limit that makes it impossible to achieve superconductivity at high temperatures in any material.
- hawkharris 13y agoI think #6, the question about sleep and dreams, is especially interesting. On another NPR broadcast, I heard a researcher talk about how our bodies make up for sleep we lose. It's not like owing a debt to the bank and paying it back all at once, he said. If we go days without sleep and then crash, we won't quite cognitively recover from the lost sleeping time - even if we sleep for many more hours than usual. One biological explanation, he said, is that the need to make up for many hours of lost sleeping time has not been a significant factor in evolution; modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time. I thought it was fascinating to think about the concept of humans evolving to go longer periods without sleep and to cognitively recover by "cashing in" on rest, so to speak. I'm sorry that I can't remember the author's name to provide more concrete details; if anyone else also heard the talk, please share a link if possible.
- macspoofing 13y agoIt's a fascinating question, but I don't see why it is one of the "10 most important questions in science". >modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time. Is that correct? It feels wrong. Plenty of species will endure all kinds of stresses when it comes to survival. From the article: >Was Freud right about his theory that dreams are some sort of expression of repressed desires? This one is easy. No. Dogs dream.
- rob05c 13y agoHow do you know dogs don't have repressed desires?
- macspoofing 13y agohah. Touche.
- DavidWanjiru 13y agoIn my dreams, I may "express" fantasies, like flying, or jumping ridiculous heights, or falling from such heights without hurting myself like a super cat/ninja hybrid, or giving enthralling musical performances. I never express repressed desires though. Like, if a girl has rejected me in real life, she usually does the same in the dreams. If in real life I wouldn't dare touch, say, her butt, I'm just as restrained in my dreams.
- dnautics 13y agowhat, no solvolysis of the norbornyl cation??
- rob05c 13y ago3. Are we alone in the universe? With regards to this question, I highly recommend http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-aliens.html http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-ali... He makes a compelling argument.
- acqq 13y agoStill the argument "they have their ships therefore they don't need our Earth" is more than shaky. I concur with Hawking: we can definitely imagine aliens who wouldn't blink an eye before they won't care for life of humans, the same way we eat other animals or simply destroy them as the side effect of doing something for us more important.
- rob05c 13y ago"You're getting warmer. Kip — I think they eat meat." - Have Spacesuit—Will Travel
- pacala 13y agoAlmost. Wanderlust. The ebb and flow of disaster and recovery. A pond overflows, a forest burns, a volcano erupts, a comet hits Earth. We always send out the scouting parties and come back. There is no immediate economic logic, just the 1 billion old instinct to check out the next habitat. By Tyma's cold logic, there is no point in tourism, yet we spend 10% of our global resources for an utterly useless activity. Why?
- lukifer 13y agoAny life form that can (a) divorce its intelligence from its physical substrate, and (b) forge a sustainable energy relationship with one or more stars, has the capacity to be very, very long-lived. I think if there exist aliens that we are capable of finding, they will be in the form of slow-moving, slow-spreading "Space Ents", beings who are perfectly content to send SYN/ACK messages with 500,000 year ping times. Play out natural selection in the ginormous sandbox that is Universe, and I think that's the only inevitable outcome (barring FTL).
- sireat 13y ago
- lifeformed 13y agoI would replace a couple of the anthropocentric ones with: 1) What is the nature of time, and how/why does our consciousness perceive it as such? 2) What's inside a black hole? I also have a philosophical question that maybe has already been explored: Are the laws of logic always true in every possible universe? Could there exist a universe where p|^p is not always true? One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi? I guess these things would be impossible to imagine, but is logic just a description of reality, or is reality an implementation of logical axioms?
- rob05c 13y ago> One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi You don't need a different universe for that. You just have to be in Indiana. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- justinpombrio 13y ago1) We perceive time as such because the future determines the past but not vice-versa (H(t|t-1)>0 and H(t-1|t)=0 in terms of entropy) -- thus our brain can at a given moment contain relatively complete information about past moments, but necessarily limited information about future moments. I think relativity gives a pretty good picture of the nature of time; it is a partial order. Quantum mechanics treats time very differently though, so there is almost certainly more to say. I think this is a good question to be asking. 2) There's something inside a block hole? It's funny that you should use those two examples in your last question. The first one is true or false depending on the logic you use, and the second is physically false. The first statement -- that (p or not p) is always true -- is true in Boolean logic but not always true in Constructive logic; in fact this is what separates these two forms of logic. My very rough understanding is that boolean logic best describes situations in which propositions like p are taken to mean "p is true", whereas in constructive logic p is taken to mean "p is provable". The second statement -- that the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is equal to pi -- is false under general relativity. In fact, if you were to measure the circumference and diameter of a big circle around the sun, their ratio would be a little off due to the sun's gravity (I forget in which direction). You ask whether the laws of logic are true in every possible universe. It depends entirely on what you mean by every possible universe. To really consider one possible universe, though (say the one where everything is made of cheese), we have to be able to reason about it. So if the laws of logic are not true in it (maybe the cheese is also not cheese), we can't really consider it to begin with. So yes, the laws of logic are true in every possible universe, though for a rather boring reason.
- m_eiman 13y agoThere's only one question in science: "How?"
- swatkat 13y ago10. How can we get more energy from the sun? I would love to see high efficiency[0] photo-voltaic cells in all sorts of consumer electronic devices. Imagine solar cells embedded in Gorilla glass on the back of your phone, camera, laptop etc. :) [0] http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/130614.html http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/130614.html
- rdpi 13y agoWhat is the meaning of Life, Universe and Everything?
- typon 13y agoI would put "Does P = NP?" up there.