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10 Unsolved Mysteries In Physics by Gluthatione: 7:11pm On Oct 10, 2015 |
It can seem like an uphill challenge to try to understand the universe
around us. We have found many answers to the mysteries in our
world: how planets orbit the Sun, why an apple falls from a branch to
the ground, and why the sky appears blue. The quest to uncover all
of the secrets of the universe is guaranteed to be filled with difficult
challenges, unimaginable problems and a mountain of ingenuity
needed to overcome them.
Many physicists have already wrestled with the riddles of existence,
but there are many more conundrums to solve. Get ready for the ten
greatest unsolved mysteries of physics... the enigmas that have
evaded the most eminent minds the world has ever known.
Dark energy
We can't see it and we can't feel it, but we can test for it, and nobody
knows what it is. In spite of this, scientists think that dark energy
makes up around 70% of the universe. It was imagined to explain
why galaxies don't just drift apart but instead accelerate away from
each other. You can think of it as a repulsive gravity that pushes
matter apart. How it works, however, is still a mystery.
Dark matter
The other "dark" substance in our universe. Dark matter , like dark
energy, cannot be seen or felt. This elusive substance has some
differences to dark energy though; the only way that we have
observed it is indirectly. We know that there must be more matter in
the universe than we can see because we can measure its
gravitational effects, but no one knows exactly what makes up this
mysterious stuff.
It's a wave... it's a particle!
Rays of light have a split personality. They create interference
patterns that are typical of waves. They reflect off surfaces,
suggesting that they could be a wave or a particle, or both at the
same time. They can also be used to liberate electrons from their
shells: something that indicates that they are particles. But how does
light determine whether it acts as a particle or a wave?
Time, the onward march
We only get older, not younger. Trees only get taller; they don't return
to acorns. Our Sun only ever uses up its fuel, never returning to a
cool ball of hydrogen gas. Time only goes in one direction ... but why
is it impossible for us to reverse the clocks?
We are living in a hologram
This one boggles the mind. The universe, everything we see and feel
and experience, may actually have two spatial dimensions. Think of a
2D hologram, like the one on the back of a credit card: it can have all
of the information of a 3D image but in only two dimensions. Some
scientists have postulated that our universe is like the hologram on
your credit cards: space seems like it has three dimensions, but it
may turn out that all we are seeing is a projection from a 2D universe
outside of our perception.
Matter and antimatter
There is a definite discrepancy between the ratios of these two
substances. There was supposed to be an equal amount of ordinary
matter and antimatter – particles with the same mass but opposite
charge – in the early universe, but now the universe is overwhelmed
with regular matter . Many theories have been thrown around, for
example that particle genesis favored one way of creating matter, but
nothing conclusive has popped up. The mystery of how matter "won"
over antimatter may be revealed in the newly-upgraded Large Hadron
Collider at CERN.
The lifetime of the universe
This mystery, the end of the universe, might not keep you up at night,
but it will certainly be of concern to beings alive far into the
future. This epic event is predicted to occur in about 10 billion years.
Two opposing theories are the Big Crunch and the Big Rip . Neither of
these outcomes sound terribly fun. The big crunch is the opposite of
the Big Bang – all of the pieces of matter in the universe will stop
accelerating away from each other and start accelerating
toward each other. A boiling collision of all of the matter in the
universe ensues (and mankind is unlikely to survive that). The Big
Rip is where all of the pieces of matter in the universe continue to
accelerate away from each other, faster and faster until eventually
space-time moves so fast that it rips atoms apart (mankind is also
unlikely to survive that one).
These two possibilities aren't the only possible outcomes for the
universe – sadly it seems unlikely that our generation will ever know
its fate.
Why can't we imagine four dimensions?
We little humans struggle to envision a world with four spatial
dimensions. Some theories (such as string theory) need as many as
eleven dimensions to be hypothetically possible. If string theory
turned out to be correct, we'd have to figure out how there are
six missing dimensions tangled up in our reality. I can feel a
headache coming on...
Why does light have a universal speed limit?
c, the speed of light constant, is valued at 3x10 meters per second.
But why this figure and not, for example, 4x10 m/s? Is it a random
digit pulled out of a bag of numbers when a new universe explodes
into existance? It's currently impossible to know why the speed of
light is the speed that it is... all we know is that our universe couldn't
exist without this limit.
Unifying the big and the small
Everything big, like stars and black holes, is made up of small things:
particles. Einstein's laws of relativity govern the very big, while
quantum mechanics is king in the realm of the very small. But
physicists can't seem to jam the two theories together. The trouble is
that gravity just doesn't appear to work on the nanoscopic scale. And
bizarre quantum effects, like quantum tunneling (whereby an atom
can "tunnel" through an otherwise impenetrable boundary), can't be
applied to planets or stars. Your eyes would likely pop if the Moon
suddenly "tunneled" through the Earth. It seems barmy that there
would be one theory for everything big and another for everything
small. Some scientists are trying to tackle this problem, and even
making headway, but the missing link is still incredibly elusive.
http://www.iflscience.com/physics/greatest-mysteries-physics |
Re: 10 Unsolved Mysteries In Physics by Mskrisx(f): 7:12pm On Oct 10, 2015 |
Art inclined |
Re: 10 Unsolved Mysteries In Physics by Warlord3000(m): 7:02pm On Oct 11, 2015 |
Whatever happened to punctuations, line spacing.. Paragraph, etc... Sorry as much am interested in the write up... I ain't punishing my eyes with that sh#t up there ![]() |
Re: 10 Unsolved Mysteries In Physics by MightySparrow: 5:09am On Oct 12, 2015 |
Warlord3000: The OP is too excited to present the article. Kindly open to link, the details are well presented there. Happy reading. |
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