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Science's 125 Big Questions
Shadow Wrought writes "To celebrate their 125th anniversary Science is running a series of articles on the 125 Questions of Science. The top 25 each link to an article exploring the subject of the question in depth. Included are such questions as: Are we alone in the Universe? What are the limits of conventional computing? How did cooperative behavior evolve?"
A preditor/parasite found that it's easier to keep eating if it doesn't kill off it's host completely. Small steps from there could make it benign to it's host; and further small steps can make it cooperative.
Given this average height, toast doesn't have time rotate more than half a turn before hitting the ground. If tables and people were something like 10 feet tall, then people would be wondering why toast allways falls with the butter side up.
Well, the 10 feet figure is made up but that's the basic idea from the article.
Or to put it another way: Why does the entropy of any closed system always increase? Why do we take the 'causal' solution to Maxwell's equations when determining the field generated by an accelerating charge? Why does the evolution of a quantum system appear to involve an irreversible step - wavefunction collapse? These may in fact be the same question in different guises. I think it's the number one question in physics. Every fundamental law of physics has time reversal symmetry (or at least CPT symmetry) and 'future' and 'past' look as similar as 'left' and 'right' at a fundamental level. So the arrow of time we see so blatantly around us is in serious need of explanation. It's almost as if physicists live in denial about the fact that their fundamental theories clearly just don't seem to match up with reality. But there are some good books on the subject such as Zeh's.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The article on why humans have so few genes does some nice hand-waving but fails to answer the core question. Sure, the genome can do some interesting combinatoric stuff to get more out of a given length of DNA, but that does not answer the question -- why should humans have fewer genes than something so simple as a mustard plant or rice?
I suspect the answer is related to human (mammalian) mobility and thermoregulation. If a rice plant gets stuck in a hot place, all it can do is use a different part of its genome to make proteins suited for hotter weather. In contrast, people can move out of the sun while their body basically maintains a constant temperature. Similarly if the plant faces too much cold, too much water, too little water, to much sun, too little sun, too much salt, etc. it can do nothing but sit there and hopefully pull something out of its genome that can cope.
The point is that plants must adapt to whatever their environment gives them much more so than humans. Human mobility and the ability to modify its environment means it is less reliant on gene-based adaptability.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What is the nature and origin of the Universe?
It is and has been. (seriously, that's all the answer there is).
What existed before our universe?
Unknowable. "Before" the universe began is "before" the concept of time has any meaning. Alternatively, if we could observe things that were "outside of the universe", we would have to expand the scope of the universe to include those observations, meaning that they were no longer "outside of the universe".
What is the original nature of existence...of what we call "reality"?
This is a vague question. One possible interpretation is that you're asking about the "super-universe" in a different way from the "before the universe" question. It has the same problems as the "before the universe" question (if we could know, we'd have to redefine the universe).
The other interpretation is that you're asking if the nature of reality has changed through the lifecycle of the observable universe, presumably though alterations of fundamental laws from some initial "ideal" state. This question, while clearly less "grand", is more relevant, because it offers a source of falsifiable assertions and possible experiments.
Being able to classify questions as "irrelevant" and "not answerable" for various reasons is a part of "knowing what you don't know" and the rather tricky subset, "knowing what you can't know". Wisdom (and a lot of saved time) lies in a deeper understanding of how to determine the value of questions.
I must admit that about 12 years ago, I got comfortable with saying "I don't know" along with the realization that people are capable of asking bad questions as if they were the most important questions around. My favorite is "Why are we here?" It's worthless because it begs about four other questions that have no objective answer.
The interesting form of the question is, "Why am I here?" and it can only be conclusively answered by exactly one person: the same person who asked the question. What's really tragic is how many people are afraid of answering it themselves and accept someone else's answer out of fear of "getting it wrong". *sigh*
Regards,
Ross