Our resident scientist asks some still-unanswered questions
Here’s the thing about Science: It’s never afraid to admit when it doesn’t know the answer to a question. In fact, saying, “I don’t know” is the fuel that allows the engine of Science to creep our civilization forward.
The simple act of humbly admitting when you don’t know something, combined with a desire to actually know that thing, along with the scientific method, is what’s taken us from caves to space stations in the span of less than 10,000 years.
With that in mind, I thought I’d take a look at some of the current unanswered questions in Science, and see where they might lead us in the future.
What are dark matter and dark energy?
The universe is massive. But, as far as we can tell, there’s not enough actual visible mass in it for gravity to hold it all together.
Remember a couple months back when we talked about how gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces? That’s the issue here. There has to be way more mass out there to generate the gravity needed to hold the galaxies together in the shapes we see.
As far as we can tell, the mass we can “see” makes up just about five percent of the universe. The rest is some sort of invisible matter that’s undetectable via the electromagnetic spectrum. What is it? Nobody knows. But there is a lot of research underway to figure it out.
As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s also an invisible force that’s “blowing up” the universe, causing its bits and pieces to fly away from each other at greater and greater speeds.
Imagine, if you will, a balloon (our universe) that’s getting bigger and bigger, but you can’t see where the new air inside is coming from. Not only that, but more air is being added more quickly all the time! This mysterious, repulsive force was discovered fairly recently (the 1990’s) and is called “dark energy.”
Here again, nobody knows exactly what’s causing the expansion, but there are a lot of people trying to figure it out.
What is consciousness?
Seriously. What is consciousness? I mean, it’s a thing that you are doing right now as you read this. And I was doing it as I wrote this. So in a way, right now, you are inside my consciousness…but what is it?
Is it biochemical? Is it a side effect of quantum processes? And why are those philosophy students over there laughing at me? (Don’t get cocky… You philosophers have had way more time to work on this than Science, and you know even less.)
There are some who think dissecting consciousness is going too far. After all, we humans started out as the divinely crafted pinnacles of creation.
But, over the centuries, Science has shown us that we’re really just water and some different cuts of meat, stretched over a ridiculous-looking stick figure made of rocks.
If we reduce the seemingly divine spark of consciousness to the equivalent of “Windows Me” running on the lumps of fat in our skulls, what does anything matter anymore?
On the other hand, actually understanding consciousness would let us hack, modify, and improve it, just like we’ve done to every other part of our bodies. So, I say, bring it on.
Know it all
Of course, there are lots of other unanswered questions out there. And, believe it or not, there are even some scientists who think it’s impossible for us to answer all of them. Personally, I think those scientists suffer from a lack of imagination and should be laughed at.
We may just be electric rock monsters hauling around meat sacks with a lump of fat in our heads, but we’ve used that electrified fat to crack the atom, create digital watches, and send robots out to the stars.
I firmly believe that, given enough time, there’s absolutely no question we humans can’t eventually answer, and that one day, we will, as a species, know it all.
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.