10 Unsolved Scientific Mysteries 1. Hot Water Can Freeze More Quickly Than Cold Water boiling water freezes Known as the Mpemba effect, after the student who co-published the first research on the subject, it has been demonstrated that if you place two equal volumes of water into a freezer – such as one at 35C and one at 100C – the hotter water will freeze first. This appears to directly contradict the laws of thermodynamics. Despite further research into the effect, no conclusive single explanation has been found for this bizarre phenomenon. 2. What Causes Ageing bush aging before after It’s fairly commonly known that because our cells are constantly dying and being replenished, we replace almost all of what makes up our body every few years. What isn’t known, is the precise reasons that this process eventually stops and organs degrade to the point of causing natural death (saving for the presence of disease or trauma). Some theories suggest that aging is programmed into our genetic makeup, while others posit that products of oxygen metabolism known as ‘free radicals’ slowly damage cells over time to the point where they are not able to repair or replicate. 3. Is There Life Elsewhere In The Universe? SETI space While increasingly sophisticated detection techniques have allowed us to pinpoint the location of hundreds of planets outside our solar system, we do not yet know if any of them are capable of supporting life. There are some so-called ‘mini-Earths’ which are of a similar size to our own planet and a suitable enough distance away from their parent star that life as we know it could theoretically survive there, but as yet we have no way of knowing whether there is indeed anything alive on these or any other of the innumerable planets in our galaxy, let alone the universe. 4. Is Light The Fastest Thing There Is? Speed of light The speed of light as it passes through a vacuum is a scientific constant, relied upon for much of what we understand about physics to be true. Unfortunately for science fiction fans or anyone who wants to travel outside the solar system, measurement after measurement in a range of different scenarios has done nothing to shake science’s confident assertion that nothing can travel faster than light. There remains an element of mystery however, when you consider that if the Big Bang theory is correct, the universe would have expanded faster than light, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity doesn’t rule out the possibility of manipulating space-time to get around the problem of a light-speed limit. 5. What Is The Space In Space? inside an atom Consider that space, excepting the celestial objects within it, is a vacuum, i.e. free of any kind of matter as we know it. Even if there is nothing in this space, it still contributes to the overall mass of the universe, meaning that there must be something there – this strange form of matter is referred to as dark matter. According to the standard model of cosmology, dark matter makes up 84.5% of all the matter in the universe, with the stuff we can detect making up just 15.5%. While dark matter is purely theoretical and cannot actually be detected at present, research is ongoing into what it is and ways to identify it, with preliminary results from instruments on the International Space Station (ISS) potentially detecting hints of dark matter as recently as April 2013. 6. Is Time Travel Possible? worm hole space This is a bit of a trick question, because depending on your definition of ‘time travel’ it already is. Gravity has a demonstrable effect on the passage of time – not so noticeable if you’re restricting things to things on Earth, but enough that GPS satellites have to be programmed to compensate for the fact that their onboard clocks tick faster than those on the planet’s surface. By the same principle, astronauts aboard the ISS are technically time travellers. Travelling into the future is therefore not too much of a stretch of the imagination then, but travelling backwards in time is a whole different issue, though, not least because of the classic paradox in which you could kill your own grandfather and therefore cease to exist. 7. The Space Roar infinite universe galaxy Discovered only a few years ago and announced by Alan Kogut of NASA in 2009, the space roar is a radio signal emanating from outer space of unknown origin. The roar was detected while scientists were trying to detect traces of heat from some of the universe’s first stars and, while it bears some resemblance to radio signals emitted by certain types of galaxy, it is six times louder than would be expected. NASA remain stumped at what might have caused the roar, having ruled out early stars and all other known sources of radio wave transmissions. 8. Are There A Finite Number Of Elements? periodic table elements Most of us will have at least a passing familiarity with the periodic table thanks to high school chemistry class. At the moment, 118 elements have been observed and most chemists believe that several more could be synthesised, each with relatively predictable properties due to the way in which the periodic table is structured. The periodic table model dictates, however, that element number 137’s electrons would have to travel faster than the speed of light, something not currently understood to be possible within the laws of physics. 9. How Memory Works human memory The brain is an exceedingly complex thing and the one organ about which we know the least. While movies from Total Recall to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind like to riff on the idea of what might happen if we could write or delete memories at will, the truth is that while we can pinpoint some areas in the brain where memories are stored and how various neurons and synapses fire and strengthen to do so, we don’t know exactly what signals or data are transmitted to create or forget a memory. Some relatively recent research seems to point towards the idea that a memory is simply the brain repeating what it did the first time something occurred, though this is not yet accepted as conclusive. 10. The Future Of The Universe big crunch theory The generally-accepted Big Bang theory of cosmology states that rapid inflation and expansion began roughly 13.7 billion years ago, and many cosmologists once thought that this would eventually reverse into a ‘Big Crunch’, whereby the universe would collapse in upon itself. While the current consensus seems to point towards the likelihood of a ‘Big Freeze’, whereby the universe expands indefinitely until it reaches a temperature of absolute zero (-273.15C), we are still a very long way from knowing what will eventually happen to the universe, if indeed we ever understand it at all.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 08:58:21 +0000
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