The Most Important Questions In Science

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/10/221019045/the-10-most-important-questions-in-science

by prateekj • 13 years ago

59 72 13 years ago

npr.org

VanillaCafe• 13 years ago

"Why do we dream?" doesn't seem like it ranks in the top 10.

altoz• 13 years ago

more important than "where do we put our carbon". that's an engineering problem, at best.

paul_f• 13 years ago

It was a decent list until the absurd carbon question.

huherto2• 13 years ago

It may be just an engineering problem, but it is a huge engineering problem

acqq6• 13 years ago

Absolutely 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• 13 years ago

None 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

(they require knowing more than a little bit of science to even understand the question)

bglazer• 13 years ago

I was under the impression that these are all mathematics and theoretical physics related.

macspoofing9• 13 years ago

The Millennium Problems are not the biggest question in all of science. They are big questions in Mathematics.

twiceaday• 13 years ago

"What makes us human?" has nothing to do with science. It is a strictly philosophical question.

Houshalter10• 13 years ago

I 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.

macspoofing9• 13 years ago

I 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.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals

We're not dramatically smarter than other animals. The more biologists look, the more it turns out that some level of intelligence and some level of consciousness evolves in loads and loads of carnivores and omnivores.

What we apes managed to evolve that was special was hands and culture. Hands gave us much more general power to manipulate the physical world (compare to a dog, which can achieve the intelligence of a small human child but will never be able to put Legos together). Culture let us pass down adaptations by learning instead of evolving.

We're not actually that special.

hcarvalhoalves2• 13 years ago

"Can science help us comprehend what makes us human?". Now that's a strictly philosophical question.

vacri• 13 years ago

This idea that science and philosophy are separate things needs to be killed. Philosophy isn't limited to navel-gazing about imaginary things. The scientific method is something that was determined through the application of philosophy throughout the ages. It's the application of logic and the reasoning around how best to determine robust results - this was achieved through 'applied' philosophy. Science and the scientific method relies deeply on philosophy - science could be described as being the business end of philosophy.

And the highest qualification you can get in science is a PhD - a doctorate of philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

andyl• 13 years ago

I wanna know: how/why does the observer change the behavior of quantum systems?

dougk16• 13 years ago

In 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.

hcarvalhoalves2• 13 years ago

From 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

judk• 13 years ago

Uncertainty 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• 13 years ago

The observer becomes entangled with the quantum system.

greeneggs• 13 years ago

Yes, this really is just a special case of one of the questions: "What is consciousness?" When we become entangled with a quantum system, why does our consciousness follow one path (apparently) and not another? If we can understand consciousness, then this is probably easy.

gsteinb88• 13 years ago

This is still an open question, and a really good one.

The predictive power of quantum theory is amazing; it gives excellent numerical predictions as to the outcome of experiments. But as to how we interpret that, especially the question of what a measurement is, is not at all addressed by the theory, and remains a point of intense discussion and study.

scotty79• 13 years ago

I'd like to know if there's some fundamental limit that makes it impossible to achieve superconductivity at high temperatures in any material.

hawkharris• 13 years ago

I 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.

macspoofing9• 13 years ago

It'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.

rob05c4• 13 years ago

How do you know dogs don't have repressed desires?

DavidWanjiru• 13 years ago

In 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.

read2• 13 years ago

One reason it might be one of the 10 most important questions in science is that dreaming helps solve problems. When you sleep on a problem the mind magically presents an answer to the problem the next day. Aside from it's metaphorical implication that it's important to dream big, dreaming could literally help answer the other 9 questions.

I find it intriguing HN readers don't consider it important, actually.

dnautics• 13 years ago

what, no solvolysis of the norbornyl cation??

rob05c4• 13 years ago

3. Are we alone in the universe?

With regards to this question, I highly recommend http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-ali...

He makes a compelling argument.

acqq6• 13 years ago

Still 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.

rob05c4• 13 years ago

"You're getting warmer. Kip — I think they eat meat." - Have Spacesuit—Will Travel

pacala• 13 years ago

Almost. 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• 13 years ago

Any 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• 13 years ago

I do not see why there couldn't be a Roadside Picnic - Stalker like encounter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

True we would not be important, but at least we would know we are not alone.

lifeformed3• 13 years ago

I 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?

rob05c4• 13 years 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

justinpombrio• 13 years ago

1) 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.

eli_gottlieb5• 13 years ago

Or in other words, every universe we can possibly think of has to have some kind of internal logic, except maybe the Lovecraftian ones.

lifeformed3• 13 years ago

Hmm. I've never read about constructive logic, it looks pretty interesting. Thanks for bringing it up, I'll look into it.

Maybe those two examples I gave are bad. But in general, I guess that the question itself (of whether or not logic holds true in all universes) sounds like it is fundamentally unanswerable by using our logical system. Since the fundamentals are axioms, and presupposing an axiom to be false would always be contradictory, we could never prove such a universe to exist.

What even is logic? The more I think about it, the less fundamental it seems, and the more it seems like just an aspect of our brains. It's like they are just descriptions of the internal consistency in how our brains are wired. What does it even mean for something to be true or false? Reality is just reality, and any "sense" we make of it is just a state of equilibrium in our brains.

Is a mathematical statement in our minds (like 1+1=2) true because of the nature of reality, or true because the structure and rules of arithmetic that we've created happen to trigger some pleasurable sense of consistency in our minds? And perhaps the whole derivation of mathematics is just a discovery of how our brains perceive "correctness".

Well, I'm rambling, I guess it's an unknowable thing, because we're always operating in the bias of our own minds.

Houshalter10• 13 years ago

Why you perceive time the way you do is easy enough. At any "point" in time your brain (or any physical system for that matter) is influenced by the points before it. Play around with cellular automata and it kind of gives you a sense of how time can be viewed as a dimension similar to space.

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?

The laws of logic are true in all possible universes (according to logic.) Can you imagine a universe where 1+1=3? Where someone has one object, and puts it next to another object and suddenly he has three objects? It just makes no sense. The "laws" of logic are not laws in the sense that things like physical laws are laws.

floobynewb• 13 years ago

The question of time is deeper than this. Why is it that your brain or for that matter any physical system is dependent on it's previous configurations? Why is it that there is such a thing as previous? The mathematical descriptions of reality we have devised are symmetrical in time...

I can imagine a universe where alternate number like systems are more appropriate as heuristics for day to day living. Why should every universe be easily described through isomorphisms to the infinite cyclic group? Why could a universe not be more easily understood (compressed) within the minds of it's inhabitants with systems which are non-abelian groups? Perhaps you could say that there can exist no universes where intelligent beings can exist which contain aspects which are compressible using such systems. But you would have to prove it.

I think the arrow of time question is very interesting, I would love to see and understand an answer to this before I die.

TausAmmer• 13 years ago

My way about time is: Past and future is like reflections from current moment. Both are changed at will and alter everything at whim. Everything is altered so you don't have so much "Déjà vu", your perception of solidity is altered.

In a moment you have sister, in a moment you don't, but your whole past/future and recollections about that is altered and you have no way of preserving previous state.

Without alterations you would go mad realizing that everything is at the same time.

There must be sensible explanation of what I am trying to day, but I yet to find one.

Might be like looking at busy bazaar from every possible angle at the same time in same viewpoint, or focus down to small opening at one viewpoint how bread is sitting on shelf.

m_eiman• 13 years ago

There's only one question in science: "How?"

swatkat• 13 years ago

10. 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

rdpi• 13 years ago

What is the meaning of Life, Universe and Everything?

typon• 13 years ago

I would put "Does P = NP?" up there.

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