Scientific Mysteries, which one interests you the most?

Thought I would start a thread to discuss peoples favorite scientific mysteries. I have many favorites such as gravity, the supposed existance of 'scalar' or longitudinal waves in space, quantum entanglement, some simple mysteries that still surround 'electricity' and the like. (That's right, lots double EEs think they know everything about electricity but they don't.) Before we get started, I'd like to mention that I've run into quite a few arrogant people here that think because they have some huge education that they somehow know everything and that man will eventually become God and figure everything out. I'm going to try to not to argue this philosophical side of things but the fact remains, there are HUGE mysteries out there and no amount of fleshly intellectualism is going to save you.


So what is your favorite and why?

Good topic.

Here's a page that lists a dozen or so of additional mysteries:

13 Things that do not make sense

There's a lot of cool stuff about star formation that is quite mysterious (some of which are included above)

This one is cool, too.
Top 10 Star Mysteries

There are so many it's hard to pick a favorite!

Well one mystery is what causes evolution, what caused mammals to go back into the ocean and evolve into Whales

Meanwhile other mammals continued to evolve in land ...

How do brains simulate the future?

Is there an edge to the universe. Or is it constantly expanding.

Which then goes to another scientific mystery, can the universe continue to expand for ever.

There's alot of goodies out there in physics, but the reason why I went to Biophysics was because there's so many more mysteries that are actually useful to solve in biophysics than in, say, particle physics, at least in my mind. So I guess some of my favorites involve the question, "why does this protein behave this way?"

To deviate off topic, ever so slightly...

"I've run into quite a few arrogant people here that think because they have some huge education that they somehow know everything and that man will eventually become God and figure everything out."

Well, this is something everyone must deal with in every field. I have a degree in physics, and my favorite things to watch on TV are shows about, say, String Theory, and to watch people with Ph.D's say that we're close to understanding it all - that's entertainment beyond which any sitcom can provide. My advice is to just ignore people like that - I do that on an almost daily basis

The platonic solids were discovered, not created by man. I currently believe shape is the language of God.


Here's a really cool story.

“It is seldom that you see a new stable structure appearing spontaneously in a completely symmetric environment,” explains Tomas Bohr, a physicist at the Technical University of Denmark. “Usually you have to do something to break the symmetry. But we’re not doing anything to break the symmetry. The system does it all by itself.”

Shapes in rotating water.

The unusual phenomenon in question involves rotating a bottom plate under a liquid in a circular (cylindrical) container. Bohr and his team of students at the Technical University and at the Niels Bohr Institute set up an experiment to find out whether or not such conditions would lead to stable deformations of a water surface into polygon shapes. The findings from their experiment were published May 3rd in Physical Review Letters.

Bohr tells PhysOrg.com that a somewhat similar experiment took place eight years ago with a different team (including Clive Ellegaard and others). “We had fluid falling on a plane, like water from a faucet. We found that even if the rim of the plate is completely circular, the fluid surface can be shaped like a polygon.”

While the first polygon experiment Bohr did involved stationary polygons, the most recent effort shows rotating polygons. “Not only are these shapes rotating,” says Bohr, “but they are rotating at a different speed than the plate beneath them.”

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[edit on 24-8-2007 by Jbird]