I'm one of those people who thinks too much. I don't just take things for granted. I'm always wondering about things that other people don't think about all. It seems to me that there are many unsolved mysteries in the universe we live in, and that the greatest mysteries concern important stuff. Science gives us partial answers and may someday give a definitive answer to some of the question I pose here. Others, obviously, will never be answered. Different religions, poets and philosophers have given various conflicting answers. You, yourself, may have an opinion concerning what the answers are which may be different from mine. Even your list may be different. That these are really the top mysteries in the universe is only my opinion.
Mystery Number 10. Is Reality All in Our Head. Each of us locked in our own head and look at the universe from our own point of view. What we personally believe is true is true -- as far as we are concerned. That is why it is usually useless for two people with opposing viewpoints to debate some fundamental issue such as the existence of God.
All of science is based on the assumption that there is an objective universe that is the same for all of us. But what proof is there that is true? Philosophers have argued this very point throughout the ages. The greatest of these in my opinion was the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume. He showed in his Treatise on Human Nature that it is impossible for us to determine this in any conclusive manner. He has had his critics, but so far, no one has been able to successfully punch holes in his conclusions.
Mystery Number 9. What is Outside the Universe? Have you ever thought about infinity? Or read what modern cosmologists have to say about the universe? Back a few centuries, people who thought about such things figured that the universe consisted of the earth which was surround by crystal spheres. Astronomers (actually astrologers) of those days never wrote about what was outside the outermost crystal sphere. Then came along Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and the universe expanded somewhat to the size of the solar system and the fixed stars out there somewhere; nobody knew how far. When astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and other sophisticated gear, suddenly the universe expanded to billions of light years in size.
But how far did it go? Does it stretch on forever? In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. This and other discoveries changed everything. Cosmologists began to think of the universe as a great expanding ball (or some other shape) that had a definite limit.
Okay, that is the current view of our universe. But if our universe is a great ball (or some other shape) curved in the fourth dimension, what lies outside of it? Recent articles I have read about what modern cosmologists and physicist think about the universe speak of "multiverses." I wonder what they are like.
Mystery Number 8. Is Time Travel Possible. Before we went to the moon, space travel was considered impossible, so were speeds higher than the speed of sound, and years ago people would have scoffed that machines could do what our modern computers can or that pictures and sound could be sent through the air. Up until very recently, one thing that scientists and other thinkers were absolutely sure was impossible was travel through time, that is to go to the past or the far future and return. Recently, I've read articles in Scientific American that it may be possible after all, but energy and cost prohibitive. When the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, no one could imagine the commercial airlines of today.
Of course, those who say that we will never achieve time travel point out the paradoxes involved with travel to the past. Science-fiction time travel stories have illustrated these, and other hazards of time travel, over and over again.
Mystery Number 7. What Happens to You When You Die? Most people of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim religions would say that you go to Heaven or Hell. In some other religions, it is said that you are reborn in some other form, as an animal or another human being with most of the memories of your past lives obliterated. An atheist may say that you simply cease to exist. Somehow I can't get my mind around nonexistence. None of these possibilities have ever been proven one way or the other in a totally satisfactory manner.
In the first place, it is not clear what "you" are within your physical body. Are you simply a bunch of electrical-chemical reactions centered in your brain, like a program running in a computer? Or are "the you" that thinks about such things a sort of incorporeal vapid thing that people have given such names as "the soul," "the aura," or "the spirit?" If the latter, what happens to this invisible being at death?
Some psychics and others have claimed that they can speak to the dead. Other people have sworn that they have encountered ghosts, which may be what the spirit becomes after the body dies. Are these encounters real or simply a combination of fraud and delusion?
My hope is that my spirit is awakened on an alien planet in the far future such as in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.
Mystery Number 6. Is Anyone Out There? The universe is vast. There are billions of stars in our own galaxy itself and billions of galaxies. Somewhere there has to be another species as intelligent and technologically inclined as us. So why haven't we heard from them? Of course, the UFO believers claim that we've been actually been visited by alien beings. The problem is that their proofs of this are not credible in a scientific sense.
Right now there are people who are listening to radio signals from all over the universe in an attempt to hear any that may be coming from an intelligent source. This effort is called SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and consists of listening to radio waves at various frequencies all over the sky. My personal opinion is that SETI is doomed to failure, not because intelligent aliens do not exist, but because of the vastness of space. Unless the aliens were located within a hundred light years or less from us, they would have to have extremely powerful transmitters beamed right us before we would detect their signals,
Mystery Number 5. How Does Intelligence Work? One of the most mysterious organs in our body is the brain. Medical specialists tell us that it operates by electrical currents, which arrive on dendrites, transmits the resulting electrical currents to other connected neurons using its axon. Different types of brain activity relate to different patterns of firing. In addition, such chemicals such as dopamine, seratonin and endomorphines are involved. Beyond that, all that is said about brain function is quite vague. For example, which signals and chemicals are involved as I write this article? No neurologist can tell me the exact the details of this. For example, which neuron fired when I thought the word "neurologist."
For several years now, software engineers and scientists have been trying to make computers intelligent. Their successes have been limited, probably because we don't really know how the brain does what it does.
One thing that always intrigued me is how intelligent animals are, even animals with much smaller brains than ours. For example, an insect can hardly be said to have a brain at all, merely a tiny nervous system. Nonetheless, if I'm sitting at my desk and a fly is buzzing around my head, I can swat at it and wave my hands around, and it persists its pestiness. As soon as I go get a fly swatter, it hides. How does it know that I can kill it with a fly swatter, but that my hands are relatively useless in harming it?
Mystery Number 4. What is Life? Scientists may be closing in on the answer to this one. A definition of life that I lifted from Wikepedia follows: "Life is a condition that distinguishes, organisms from inorganic objects, i.e. non-life objects or dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally. In terms, life is an organism that feeds on negative entropy." The problem here is that some inorganic objects have one or more of these attributes, yet are not living. For example, some chemicals such as sugar can grow crystals under certain conditions. Fire can be said to consume materials and grow thereby. Also, certain primitive organisms, such as viruses, are close to being nothing more than a collection of chemicals.
The thing is, although scientists have concluded that living organisms are simply complicated constructs of chemicals, no one yet has produced an actual living organism artificially. Frankenstein, where are you that we need you?
Mystery Number 3. What is Gravity? Although we are all familiar with gravity since it is what keeps us from flying off this earth in space, what makes it work is still a mystery. Isaac Newton first figured out the laws that govern gravitational effects back in the sixteen hundreds. Since then, no one has come up with a definitive explanation of how gravity does what it does. For one thing, gravity works at a distance although the gravitational attraction between two bodies weakens quite rapidly with distance. Nonetheless, the furthermost galaxy in the universe has some gravitational effect on earth, although quite negligible.
Albert Einstein proposed that a mass produced a kind of dent in space, the larger the mass, the greater the dent. But space is mostly nothing. How can nothing have a dent in it? Other scientists have proposed such explanations as some sort of particle called a graviton. But they have failed to detect such a particle. Hence, concrete evidence for either of these theories is still lacking verifiability.
Mystery Number 2. What is Everything Made of? Back in the ancient times, alchemists believed that matter consisted of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The amount of each element in the substance gave it its fundamental characteristics. But later investigators discovered that the so-called basic elements were actually combinations of more elementary chemicals. For example, water consisted of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. As for fire, it was really a process, not a substance at all. Finally, theorists, such as Isaac Newton, thought that substances that were really elementary, such as hydrogen and oxygen, when divided into their smallest components were composed of hard indivisible bits called atoms. This atomic theory lasted until the twentieth century, when it was discovered that atoms themselves were composed of smaller parts called protons, neutrons and electrons.
But scientists are never satisfied. They found that these elementary particles could be split further into even more elementary particles. And so was born our present quantum theories. The latest thinking on the composition of matter and energy is that everything is composed of some kind of multidimensional loops called "strings." I've read several articles about quantum theory and string theory, but it's so complicated with strange concepts that I wonder whether even the physicists who propose these theories really understand them. Also, from what the articles seem to be saying is that none of these theories are cast in concrete yet. They all seem to have certain holes and inconsistencies in them.
All of which had left me baffled.
Mystery Number 1. Where Did Everything Come From? Now for the big one. Where did the universe come from? According to current scientific thought, the universe began with "The Big Bang" about ten or twenty billion years ago. Fine. I'll buy that. But what caused "The Big Bang?" Some cosmologists think that the universe may reach a certain point in its expansion and then collapse on itself, causing another "Big Bang." Hence the universe keeps oscillating between expansion and collapse. But this still begs the question of where all the stuff came from originally.
Now, I know that a lot of religious folk will say that God created the universe, either as the Big Bang or as a whole a few thousand years ago, depending upon their particular faith. Nonetheless, this still begs the question. For now we must ask, Where did God come from?"
Perhaps the answer lies in Mystery Number 10. It may all be in my head.
Afterward. Some of what I've said about the big ten questions may be inaccurate or said with tongue-in-cheek. If you wish to know what scientific theories are current and what scientists and others really have to say about these questions, tons of information are on the Internet. I also highly recommend Carl Sagan's TV series and accompanying book, Cosmos, as an introduction to these concepts. Although it is a little out of date, it is a good place to start learning about the science of cosmology. A little reading about philosophy would be good too, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. Also, there are many histories of science available.
In the future, if I get the urge, I may discuss each of these questions in more detail.
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