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The difference between a smartass and a scientist is
a smartass thinks he knows everything, while a scientist admits he knows
nothing. Ask any expert in any field and they’ll admit the stuff they
don’t know vastly outweighs the stuff they do. That’s why we have
science—to try and unravel the vast mysteries of the universe. Only some
of those mysteries are so commonplace it feels like we’re still stuck on
the universe’s training level. After all, we still don’t understand:
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Dreams
Every single night, you, me and a few billion other people all lie down
and get on with dream, and science has absolutely no idea why. It’s not
like we’re lacking in theories: researchers have suggested everything
from dreams being a way of de-cluttering our brains or dealing with
stress to ‘just because’. This isn’t just idle speculation—studies have
found that dreams can be used as an indicator of future surprises our
bodies have in store for us, such as Parkinson’s or dementia. Even
weirder, a New Mexico study has suggested teaching subjects how to
manipulate their nightmares may be key to curing depression. So figuring
out why we dream has the potential to lead to all sorts of amazing
breakthroughs. Only we’re not even close. Despite it happening to every
human being for millions of years, we still don’t know why. |
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Death
Death is one of the last big mysteries. No-one can say for certain what
happens when our bodies stop working—but scientists are trying their
damndest to find out, and throwing up way more questions than answers.
First off there’s the problem of Near Death Experiences. A huge number
of people have reported visions of white light and music and floating
above their body and so on—experiences that can’t be explained away as
hallucinations because they occur while the brain is flat-lining. This
raises a second problem of what happens to our consciousness after
death. According to world-leading expert on resuscitation Dr Sam Parnia,
people have been revived with no lasting damage over ten hours after
dying, suggesting our conscious mind somehow continues to exist even
after our bodies have called it a day. While this isn’t proof of an
afterlife—the minute brain cells begin to decay there’s no way you’re
coming back—it does show how little we really understand death, despite
our millennia of practice at it. And it’s not just dying either, right
down at the other end of the scale, we still don’t understand… |
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Life
Make no mistake; we’ve come a long way in creating artificial life.
However, try as we might, we still can’t say for certain why life—the
life all around you—arose in the first place. All we know is there was a
point in Earth’s history some 3.8 billion years ago when molecules
started performing increasingly-complex chemical reactions that resulted
in RNA and, therefore, life. What triggered these reactions is a
question no-one has the answer to. Theories range from chance to God to
ultraviolet light to a form of proto-evolution, but no-one has yet hit
on the definitive solution. And it’s not for lack of trying: researchers
across the globe are busy recreating the conditions of early-Earth’s
primordial soup in the hopes of it witnessing that moment—but, so far,
nothing. Right now, the only answer to perhaps the biggest question
mankind will ever ask is just a gloomy shrug. |
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The Universe
We know from observation that the Universe is expanding—it’s pretty much
undeniable. Also undeniable is the fact it’s speeding up, something it
shouldn’t be doing. See, by rights, gravity should be slowing everything
down in preparation for the ‘Big Crunch’—a kind of reverse Big Bang we
now know will never happen. So why is this happening? Well, most
scientists blame Dark Energy and Dark Matter, two parts of a package
deal that supposedly make up roughly all the universe. But here’s the
kicker: we don’t know where the hell they are. For something that’s such
a big part of, well, everything, we have exactly zero evidence of
either. Now, they may yet turn up—or the answer may turn out to lie in
quantum gravity, some obscure branch of String Theory or even human
error. The point is, the universe currently seems to be disobeying its
own laws and all we can do is guess why. |
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History
We’re used to seeing history as a sort of narrative leading up to the
here and now. And it kind of is—only one with ridiculous great holes in
it. While we have a decent handle on what went on in, say, Roman times,
there are whole centuries of history where our entire knowledge comes
from a single source or guesswork. Take sixth century Britain. Rome’s
influence has collapsed, Christianity is rearing its head and
Scandinavia is gearing up for an epic rumble. Want to guess how many
accounts we have of this vitally important era?
One. That’s it, just one – one single sermon written by a half-mad monk
that spends about ninety percent of its length ranting about divine
judgement. Even with periods like Rome or ancient Greece, we’re missing
a heck of a lot of information. Most of our knowledge of the Emperors
comes from biased, unreliable sources; while we only recently discovered
the Greeks built a computer two thousand years before Babbage decided
it’d be cool to invent the future. Thanks to such poor records, we
apparently can’t even say with absolute certainty that the Early Middle
Ages actually happened and this isn’t really 1716. Chew on that for a
second. The fact that a qualified historian can honestly claim three
hundred years of history didn’t happen should at the very least prove
how frustratingly little we know about the past.
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Art
Ask anyone who writes or paints or whatever why they make art, and
you’ll likely get a vague answer. That’s not just them trying to seem
all sexy and mysterious either—as a species we honestly have no idea why
we do it. Think about it: there’s no evolutionary reason for us to start
drawing on cave walls. It confers no advantage on us as a species; it
doesn’t keep us warm or fed or anything, so why the hell do we do it?
Like everything on this list, no-one knows. But that hasn’t stopped us
guessing. One theory is that all creative expressions—music, sculpture,
writing entertaining lists for popular websites—are nothing more than
the human equivalent of a peacock’s tail feathers. In other words, we
get creative to get laid. If that’s true, every painting or song or film
you’ve ever loved is just a by-product of our ancestors’ collective
boner. Is that true? Who knows—there are plenty of other theories out
there and, right now, that’s all we have: theories.
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Dinosaurs
If you were a kid around the time Jurassic Park came out, you almost
certainly went through a dinosaur phase. Maybe you even went along to
your city’s Natural History museum to check out the skeletons in the
entrance hall. What you probably didn’t realize was how many of them
were sheer guesswork. See, things don’t just fossilize. It takes a set
of very specific conditions to turn a T-Rex carcass into something you
can stick in your museum. This means not every species makes it into the
fossil record, while those that do are often incomplete. And I mean
incomplete: our entire fossil find for the Middle Triassic period—for
example—is an arm and a bit of spine. That’s a couple of bones from a
period lasting ten million years. Even when we find a comparatively
large amount of fossils they’re almost always tiny fragments. According
to National Geographic, over fifty nine percent of all dinosaur genera
are known by a single set of incomplete remains. Unsurprisingly, that
means we often have to fill in the gaps as best we can—meaning we often
wind up making ridiculous mistakes.
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Literature
By now you’ve probably figured out how this works—so when I ask ‘guess
how much we know about our greatest playwright’, you know the answer’s
going to be: ‘not much’. And you’re right. About the life of William
Shakespeare we basically know he made some plays, bought two beds and
died, which is still way more than we know about, say, Christopher
Marlowe. Go back even further and we can’t even say that. Take the Greek
poet Homer, author of the Odyssey. The entirety of what we know about
him can be summed up as ‘maybe he existed’. We don’t even know if our
modern versions of his books in any way resemble the original, since
they weren’t written down until three centuries after the supposed date
of his death. Of the whole of Roman literature, on the other hand, only
two novels survive—and those in fragments. And that’s before you start
getting into lost works and those destroyed in various fires and wars
and so on. Basically, there’s about a bazillion gaps in our literary
history that most scholars would sell their grandmother to see closed
again. |
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Gravity
Remember how earlier I said Dark Matter was a way of explaining why the
universe doesn’t obey the laws of gravity? I forgot to mention that
gravity doesn’t obey them either. Without getting too headache-inducing,
let’s just say that gravity is the only one of the four fundamental
forces that manages to both contradict itself and just seemingly switch
off when you get small enough. In fact, it’s such a massive pain in the
butt that some physicists have simply declared it doesn’t exist a
position either insane or enlightening, depending on where you stand on
things not making any sense. But that’s modern physics for you—every
single time we make a discovery we find out we know way less about the
world than we thought we did. Leading me nicely onto the last thing we
have yet to understand…
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Anything
If you think of science as a house of cards and each ground-breaking
theory as a ten ton steel ball smashing into it you’ll see the problem.
Around the end of the 19th century we honestly thought we’d almost
reached the limits of knowledge—then some guy called Einstein published
history’s most famous equation and everything came crashing down around
our ears. So we built it all back up again and things were going fine,
until we noticed black holes weren’t doing what they were supposed to.
So right now, we appear to be in the middle of another slow-motion
crash. And that’s gonna mean re-writing some pretty fundamental notions
of existence. For example, it’s perfectly possible, using String Theory,
to ‘prove’ that we’re all just living in a sort-of hologram being
projected from the edges of the universe. Sure, that’s not exactly a
mainstream theory, but it goes to show just how bizarre the truth may
yet turn out to be. So, to sum up, nothing makes any sense and you might
just be an image projected from the edge of space for no other reason
than existence is insane. Good luck getting your head around that.
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