Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

Science list: Things that don't make sense

New Scientist has an interesting little article about "13 things that do not make sense" -- basically, odd experimental results from the past couple of years that nobody really feels comfortable explaining yet.

Now, the crackpots will be out in force saying "See! Science is at an end! There are things it can't explain! There therefore must be an intelligent designer intentionally confounding the attempts of humans to tinker with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know..." et cetera. I'll just leave them out in the pottery shed; these thirteen things are really interesting, and while most of them probably won't pan out, if any of them do then there's some damned interesting advances going on. These are all under fairly active research (for the theoretical ones and the more well-understood experimental ones [like cosmic rays] people are working hard on them, and for the stranger experimental ones [like tetraneutrons, or one they forgot, the magnetic monopole] people are still waiting for experimental confirmation).
Tags: science
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  • 4 comments

grandmoffdavid

January 3 2006, 17:24:38 UTC 9 years ago

That's actually one of the things I love about science. It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem. Not only do we not know everything, we can't know everything.

moof

January 4 2006, 12:02:57 UTC 9 years ago

the magnetic monopole is actually a homeopathically diluted magnet!

hanumann

January 4 2006, 14:02:24 UTC 9 years ago

I thought Blas Cabrera distroyed the only magnetic monopole in the universe :-)
Is he still working on it? (I am assuming you know some inside track since you were at the Standford.)

zunger

January 4 2006, 17:42:12 UTC 9 years ago

Nobody's working on it; he's just got that old signal still sitting there. So if by some chance anyone ever replicates it, we'll all be able to go back and say that it was the first genuine sighting, and if not, it'll just sit in the "mysteries" bin.