25 of the most provocative questions facing science

NY Times (Science Times) ^ | Nov. 11, 2003 | Anon.

[Pharmboy]

(1) Does Science Matter?

(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?

(3) Will Humans Ever Visit Mars?

(4) How Does the Brain Work?

(5) What Is Gravity, Really?

(6) Will We Ever Find Atlantis?

(8) What Should We Eat?

(9) When Will the Next Ice Age Begin?

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?

(11) Could We Live Forever?

(12) Are Men Necessary? ...

... Are Women Necessary?

(13) What Is the Next Plague?

(14) Can Robots Become Conscious?

(15) Why Do We Sleep?

(16) Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?

(17) Can Science Prove the Existence of God?

(18) Is Evolution Truly Random?

(19) How Did Life Begin?

(20) Can Drugs Make Us Happier? Smarter?

(21) Should We Improve Our Genome?

(22) How Much Nature Is Enough?

(23) What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?

(24) Where Are Those Aliens?

(25) Do Paranormal Phenomena Exist?

[rintense]

Completely agree. I was just talking to my best friend about the Renaissance the other day. Science has become a 'if I can't prove it, it doesn't exist' religion of its own.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I've seen Chaitin's work. I still disagree because of the nature of RH. Chaitn doesn't mention that before adding RH as an axiom, one should prove that RH is consistent with the rest of arithmetic. Cohen proved that CH and its negation was consisten with ZF set theory.

[StriperSniper]

Over the eons, more than 900 of its 1,000 genes have shifted to other chromosomes, and it could theoretically become extinct in 10 million years.

Let's see who's laughing last(posthumously) when their mitochondrial DNA wears out 100 million years later! ;-)

[E Rocc]

Completely agree. I was just talking to my best friend about the Renaissance the other day. Science has become a 'if I can't prove it, it doesn't exist' religion of its own.

That's not really a religious view as much as it is a skeptical one. Science keeps an open mind on things which are unproven, at least officially. Unofficially, scientists are rather skeptical about things for which no repeatable proof exists. Still, questions can be asked without fearing for one's life. This wasn't the case when the Inquisition was in power, as Galileo found out.

If science has a flaw, it's the occasional inability to differentiate between possibility and probability. When I was in college, the science professors were far more likely to be opposed to building nuclear power plants than the engineering professors. They saw severe disasters as possible, the engineers recognized that they were extremely improbable.

-Eric

[rintense]

Well, it's the need to prove various things that, IMO, doesn't allow for the possibility to accept things on faith.

[longshadow]

The Continuum Hypothesis seems to have been settled by Cohen in 1964 or so. It's consistent with set theory; it's negation is also consistent with set theory. (Zerlemo-Frankel set theory anyway.)

I understand that that the conjecture, and it's negation, are both consistent with set theory, but I wasn't aware that it had been resolved whether or not it is true.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I'm not sure the concept of truth applies here. Neither choice can be shown to be "wrong." It's like non-Euclidean geometry; you get to choose which axioms to use.

I prefer ZF + Countable AC which makes all Lebesgue sets into Borel sets (no unmeasurable sets.) Of course, I lose tricotomy among uncountable sets. In this case CH is false. Of course, were I working on another type of problem, I might choose some other set of axioms.

[stanz]

10) What Happened Before the Big Bang? The big foreplay, no doubt.

Best one!

[longshadow]

I'm not sure the concept of truth applies here. Neither choice can be shown to be "wrong."

But they are mutually exclusive; either there exists a set whose cardinality lies between that of the Natural numbers and the Reals, or there isn't. If there is, then someone should be able to give an example of one, and if there isn't someone should be able to prove it is impossible. I don't think either has been done, thus the CH is still a hypothesis or conjecture.

[Stewart_B]

27. Does a wet bird fly at night?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Scientific American had an article about this a few years ago. There are two annoying examples, yours about a set with cardinality between the Naturals and the Reals is one; with CH, there ought to be a well-ordering of the Reals, which hasn't been found either.

There are models (Scientific American again) of the Reals for which there are sets of intermediate cardinality. I haven't studied this stuff in years. All I can remember is that CH implies AC but that AC doesn't imply CH.

[dfwgator]

26.) What do they use to pack styrofoam in?

27.) What if the "Hokey Pokey" really IS what it is all about?

28.) If a man is in the forest and his wife isn't around to hear him, is he still wrong?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Riemann Alert

[AFreeBird]

Does time exist?

Isn't time just an artifical construct, derived from our limited linear perception?

[glorgau]

Isn't time just an artifical construct, derived from our limited linear perception?

Apparently. That was the big topic of a book by Julian Barbour "The End of Time".

[Virginia-American]

Thanks