List of unsolved problems in physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics

by Kortaggio • 10 years ago

119 39 10 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

Kortaggio• 10 years ago

Wikipedia has some interesting lists, including this one of a more general list of unsolved problems across many fields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems

Numberwang2• 10 years ago

Thank you, very interesting.

I wonder how they were able to agree on a list of "Unsolved problems in philosophy". My best guess is they didn't involve philosophers in the creation of the list.

sklivvz19713• 10 years ago

Many of those problems are of the "seriously, who cares?" sort! For example: "How many straws can you remove from a bale before it's not longer a bale?", which has the answer "Words are not meant to be numerically precise so stop inventing problems"

taejo• 10 years ago

Perhaps more interesting would be a list of solved problems in philosophy :p

e2e8• 10 years ago

Speaking of list of list on wikipedia, there is also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists, to which I just added your "lists of unsolved problems".

ikeboy2• 10 years ago

http://www.raikoth.net/lololol.html

List of lists of lists of lists

MichaelMoser123• 10 years ago

and i thought that this wiki article was created automatically by a wikipedia bot - in this case it would have been more complete (interesting why they don't use a bot to create the list of lists of lists)

skierscott• 10 years ago

There are many open ended questions here. There's more flexibility to sci Fi then I thought.

dudeget• 10 years ago

are there any unsolved problems in classical mechanics?

Avshalom• 10 years ago

if you want to include fluid mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existenc...

_v7gu• 10 years ago

3-body problem is still unsolved if collisions are involved

dnautics2• 10 years ago

there's still interesting issues of numerical accuracy in the point-mass case: E.G. is there a "good" way to calculate positions to arbitrary precision given starting conditions given in arbitrary precision, and what the relationship is.

dnautics2• 10 years ago

I think the granular pile problem is still unsolved: Can you predict the cone angle of a pile of granular material given a small set of initial parameters?

antognini• 10 years ago

Absolutely. A lot of my thesis could be considered classical mechanics (orbital dynamics, specifically). A very old problem that is still open is the question of whether the solar system is stable. (Newton worked on this question 300 years ago.) The state of the art can only reliably integrate orbits for the next few million years. After that, numerical limitations and chaos make it hard to predict exactly what the dynamics in the far future will be. All we can do is make statistical predictions (which we hope are unbiased).

The best predictions are that there is a ~1% chance that two planets will collide before the Sun dies. Here's a nice article:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_s...

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA2• 10 years ago

Does this count as having testable solutions?

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA2• 10 years ago

I remember being told once that we don't have good simulation techniques for predicting the sounds produced by, for instance, the collision of two solid bodies. Lots of work has been done on modeling the kinematics and the optical appearance, but not on the audio side.

I don't know if this is still true.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

Work has been done on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flOevlA9RyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaFqvM1IsP8

augustl• 10 years ago

I heard somewhere that when we apply all our knowledge to compute the position of the moon, it is a couple of feet off when we measure it, and we don't know why.

I have been trying to find a source for that, but I've failed. Perhaps someone reading this knows? :)

Havoc• 10 years ago

The fact that there is an actual (short) list boggles my mind. (And yes I understand this is a case of "questions raise more questions" but still).

acadien• 10 years ago

These are general overall topics. Dive into any one of them and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of open questions. My particular field was amorphous solids and the glassy phase transition but yeesh boiling it down to just one questions is big over simplification.

Don't worry, plenty of things out there we don't understand :)

haddr• 10 years ago

Some things should be probably updated on that page, I think the Sonoluminescence problem has been mostly explained.

ISL• 10 years ago

I've not yet seen a conclusive resolution of the sonoluminescence problem. Have a reference?

WhitneyLand• 10 years ago

Does anyone else feel inspired by reading this list? And fantasize about being able to dedicate multiple lifetimes purely to the pursuit of knowledge?

crocal• 10 years ago

Count me in... Can we imagine a society dedicated only to this and would it be viable? Hmmm...

yolesaber• 10 years ago

A society dedicated only to the pursuit of some so-called objective physical truth? I don't see how that could ever become a technofascist state!

peter303• 10 years ago

It is amusing in the late 1800s some physicists were declaring physics a dead end because most problems had been solved, save for a few rough edges.

There are people today making the same claim.

__Joker• 10 years ago

I have reconciled to the fact that, we will never be able to solve physics. There is recursive why, which we can never stop with, there will be always smaller and bigger things to deal with.

wallace_f• 10 years ago

By what reasoning did you come to the conclusion that there will 'always be bigger and smaller things to deal with?'

I'm interested in if there is a compelling reason to believe this? I'm not attempting to argue that we are near complete knowledge of the universe (and especially what potentially may lie beyond or outside of it, if there is anything or not).

List of unsolved problems in physics

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