Posted on 07/02/2005 3:23:31 PM PDT by Asphalt
SCIENCE has come a long way since Thomas Edison founded the leading research journal of that name in 1880. But many of the greatest scientific mysteries, from the nature of the cosmos to the secrets of the human genetic code, still baffle us.
To mark the 125th anniversary of Science, its editors have compiled 125 “big questions” that show the extent to which humanity still struggles to understand our Universe. Although the list is not meant to be exhaustive, it offers an insight into the fields that will be illuminated over the next 125 years.
All are subjects already under investigation, and at least some are likely to produce compelling answers in the foreseeable future.
Science examines 25 of the questions in particular detail in today’s edition. There is no league table, but pride of place goes to the issue of what the Universe is made. Current thinking is that the visible matter so far detected makes up just 5 per cent of the Universe’s mass, with the remainder composed of mysterious “dark matter” and even more elusive “dark energy”.
Other prominent posers include the biological basis of consciousness, a question that troubled the philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century, and for which scientists are little closer to supplying a definitive solution. Many of the questions involve genetics: how genes affect a person’s susceptibility to disease, and how so few human genes can account for such intricate biology.
It was originally thought that human beings have about 100,000 genes, but the mapping of the human genome has shown this estimate to be four times too high. Our 25,000 genes are fewer than both the puffer fish and a tiny plant called Arabidopsis thaliana.
The journal wants to know whether the two greatest theories in physics — quantum mechanics and relativity — can ever be unified. The former makes supremely accurate predictions at the smallest of scales, and the latter at the largest, but they appear to be incompatible under current knowledge.
Other questions include whether it is possible to prolong human life routinely beyond 100, and whether there is an upper limit; which genetic changes made people human; how altruism evolved; and how memories are formed and stored.
Issues with immediate political relevance include how hot the world will get under the influence of global warming, and whether an effective HIV vaccine will be developed.
Perhaps most intriguing of all are the matters of how life on Earth began, and whether we are alone in the Universe. There are plenty of theories, but no firm answers.
Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, said: “Today, science’s most profound questions address some of the largest phenomena in the cosmos and some of the smallest. We may never fully answer some of these questions, but we will advance our knowledge and society in the process of trying.”
Science is the world’s best-selling research journal and is considered, with its British-based rival Nature, to be the most prestigious. Its first issue, on July 3, 1880, featured articles on the potential of electric trains and advice to science teachers on studying animal brains.
TOP 25 QUESTIONS
What is the Universe made of?
What is the biological basis of consciousness?
Why do humans have so few genes?
To what extent are genetic variation and personal health linked?
Can the laws of physics be unified?
How much can human life span be extended?
What controls organ regeneration?
How can a skin cell become a nerve cell?
How does a single somatic cell become a whole plant?
How does Earth’s interior work?
Are we alone in the Universe?
How and where did life on Earth arise?
What determines species diversity?
What genetic changes made us uniquely human?
How are memories stored and retrieved?
How did co-operative behaviour evolve?
How will big pictures emerge from a sea of biological data?
How far can we push chemical self-assembly?
What are the limits of conventional computing?
Can we selectively shut off immune responses?
Do deeper principles underlie quantum uncertainty and non-locality?
Is an effective HIV vaccine feasible?
How hot will the greenhouse world be?
What can replace cheap oil — and when?
Will Malthus continue to be wrong?
My favorite question.
The answer, of course,is yes - as long as man continues to be free.
I'm not convinced. Malthus' basic principle was sound, but his numbers were off by orders of magnitude because he missed two factors -- that technology would continuously improve the food supply, and that death control among the poor would be accompanied by birth control. The former can postpone a crisis for centuries. The latter can prevent it altogether.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of these "population bomb" folks who pop up every few years. It's a distant threat, but we'll eventually get there -- especially if there is any success in reducing deaths from poverty in Africa without controlling birth rates and improving agricultural efficiency at the same time.
Which won't happen if more money is handed over to the same bunch of plutocrats as before, which brings me back to your point -- the spread of freedom is a wholly necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
Define human questions as opposed to other than human questions.
What is it? rock questions? plant questions? clam questions? grasshopper questions?
Aahhh... little grasshoppah, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Is an effective HIV vaccine feasible? Yes
How hot will the greenhouse world be? No hotter than it has been in the past.
What can replace cheap oil — and when? Nuclear energy; now
Will Malthus continue to be wrong? Yes
Do I detect just a tiny wee bit of politics??? Yes,
Next
I was going to tackle that one after I figure out where the lint in my pockets comes from.
I took some acid once...and....like..every one of those answers appeared in the air before me, in color and every thing...and I couldn't find a pencil, man...I COULDN'T find a pencil. I was bummed...for...like...a week, man....
Yes. Develop an anti-Levitra and vaccinate all the homos. As soon as the current crop of AIDS people go to their reward, the disease would be eliminated.
Funny ... and seems to be true. Haven't heard that one before.
So that women can get even.
Also consider: Hydrogen is extremely flammable, and Oxygen supports combustion. If you fired a squib in a roomful of Hydrogen and Oxygen, you'd get a huge fire. If you spray Hydrogen and Oxygen on it in the form of water, it puts it out. You can breath them in the form of air, but not in the form of water.
Some of nature's little oddities.
Are you saying 20 pairs is too many? Then there's the stack out in garage that have holes in the knees .... my summer shorts.
Hmmm, sounds just like the inner cities...
Dude is probably right.
This but not: "Is a CANCER vaccine feasible?"
Makes me wonder about the list.
Taking things in purely Darwinian terms, leaving out questions of human suffering and pain, HIV is more relevant. HIV usually strikes people of childbearing age, while cancer usually strikes people who are done having children. HIV is transmissible, and cancer isn't. It is therefore the more urgent issue.
Looking at it coldly -- I haven't lost a loved one to cancer, and don't envy those who have -- the rise in cancer deaths over the last century is a side effect of a victory of medical science. Eveyone who lives long enough to develop cancer is someone who didn't die young of malaria, cholera, yellow fever, pertussis, smallpox, polio, or fatal sepsis from relatively minor injuries.
Penecillin and vaccinations have done more than anything to increase deaths from cancer, heart disease, alzheimer's and other chronic conditions, because they've helped people live long enough to develop them. Sooner or later, everyone dies of something.
HIV is rampant in the homosexual population in North America. Not so in the rest of the world. You could neuter every gay man on Earth, and it wouldn't put a dent in HIV in Africa or Asia.
Since it's obvious you're talking about God, tell me, dear sir, how would you scientifically test for the Almighty?
Expensive oil and, at the right price point, any number of substitutes.
This can be derived from the well-known Murphy's law.
Okay, let me take a stab at some speculations on these questions ...
What is the Universe made of?
A: stuff ... or more specifically, energy and information.
What is the biological basis of consciousness?
A: To do is to be. The active planning part of the brain is the genesis of consciousness. We sense, think, act, and emote in a brain that cycles major brain pulses in beta-state (wakefulness) at 30 cycles a second. That's a control loop. Consciousness is about self-awareness, knowing the environment, knowing yourself, and knowing your place in it.
Why do humans have so few genes?
A: We have 'enough' apparently, and have learned that early reports of most of our DNA being 'junk' is not quite true. Nature has discovered what software developers discovered, complexity through hierarchical control. So there are mechanisms for reuse of genes, and master genes that turn other genes on and off under different condition.
To what extent are genetic variation and personal health linked?
A: Significantly. "Dangerous truths" are usually the last truths to be acknowledged, but many behaviors, mannerisms, and personal outcomes in life have a genetic component.
That truth has been suppressed by egalitarian political correctness, of the type that tries to tell us SAT scores don't matter, etc.
Brain size correlates with IQ. IQ correlates with job performance. So much for Gould's Marxist-derived "mismeasure of man", the brain size studies of the 19th century were no less valid than Freud's early and incorrect foray's into dream interpretation.
For personal health, its not a matter of nature versus nurture, but simply the interactiong of natural capabilities interacting with environment.
Can the laws of physics be unified?
A: Yes and no. Since Maxwell's equations and later the development of quantum mechanics, there has been a dream to unified force physics. Yet we keep discovering more wrinkles in reality - more particles, more strange interactions at the boundaries of space, time and energy.
The world of science will some day come to realize that all of the universe is made of two things - energy and information. It is information which gives the form and structure to that energy (sometimes called matter), so that waves, particles and forces are facets of the same thing.
Yet that unification, whether concepts of strings or new dimension are brought in, or new concepts, will always boil down to the underlying reality of configurations (ie informational content) of energy.
Science will never end in filling out the details of that answer, and a 'unification' does not preclude great complexity in understanding the universe as a whole.
How much can human life span be extended?
A: Long enough to get bored with retirement. :-)
We die of disease, accident or degeneration. Organ degeneration is such that once mechanisms for regeneration or artificial replacement are understood, we could be extended quite a bit. That mechanism is related to telomeres and the 'loose ends' on RNA/DNA that fall away in cell reproduction, in effect preventing us from regenerating ourselves forever. We die, in the end, because nature and our DNA wants us to. Fix this, or slow it down, and lifespans could easily double or triple.
If the human mind is what is to be preserved, then Ray Kurzweil's dream of human immortality by porting the 'software' of a mind to new hardware is conceptually possible with another century of amazing technology advance ... and would make for good Sci-Fi speculation in the interim.
What controls organ regeneration?
A: Flash a pic of the latest hottie (Paris Hilton?) and ask me again. :)
Answering this Q would help answer the questions about longevity. We don't know much about the 'magic of how a differentiated mass of cells can organize itself into an embryo and then a human. How does a cell know part it plays in the overall architecture of the body? (see question below). Alas, we have the politicized 'stem cell' research calls going on, which frankly misses many points about how in *adults* cell and organ regeneration goes on all the time (eg bone marrow cells), and we need to understand that better to help cure many diseases.
How can a skin cell become a nerve cell?
A: It uses positive thinking! :-)
How does a single somatic cell become a whole plant?
A: Again, this an previous questions involve issues of inter-cell communication and how a cell 'knows' what role it is to play in the larger whole. We have a lot to learn there.
How does Earth’s interior work?
A: It doesn't work at all! It just spins around, all hot and bothered, spinning off a magnetic field... one of these days it ought to get up off its lazy ass and do something! :-)
Are we alone in the Universe?
A: No. We have eachother. :-)
If the question is - are there other life forms in the universe, the jury is out, and the Sagan view of decent probability IMHO leaves much to be desired. We can really expect to know until we figure out ...
How and where did life on Earth arise?
A: This is big mystery #1 in my book.
The "God did it" answer seems about as plausible as any of the materialist "stuff came together and a miracle happened" speculation. They really are the same answer because we don't really know in a profound way how it could happen.
What determines species diversity?
A: Studying the economic behavior of firms in an economy may help explain this. It's about the possible amount of niches available to be exploited.
What genetic changes made us uniquely human?
A: You can't pin it to one thing. Boundaries of species are hard to delineate. It's like asking what are the differences between a zebra and a donkey.
How are memories stored and retrieved?
A: I knew the answer, but I forget.:-)
It's interesting that biological brains dont have the kind of explicit strict boundary between 'active logic' and memory logic like computers do. nevertheless, the memory centers for short-term and other memory have been located. they've tried to use AI to pursue cognitive psychology. neural network research has scratched surface on this, and previous AI-based cognitive models really don't seem to live up to billing.
I think that approach is wrong, and you need to let the biology lead you to the answer. Read recently that a single neuron is enough to recognize a particular face. That is amazing. The power of the brain is underestimated, and we have a lot to learn there.
How did co-operative behaviour evolve?
A: Re-read "Sociobiology"
How will big pictures emerge from a sea of biological data?
A:
How far can we push chemical self-assembly?
A: Not too far in real production environment IMHO.I'm bearish on Drexler'style nanobots. Complexity is very hard to engineer, and the most successful industry doing it is the semiconductor industry, which creates the most complex products (billions of transistors on a 1 inch chip) today.
The manufacturing process is strictly controlled, very complex, but ultimately is about using light (photolithography) to make patterns in silicon wafers.
The equipment to do this costs millions of dollars.
If you could build a little nanobot to do it, great, but I can't expect that precision in a useful manner.
What are the limits of conventional computing?
A: The sky's the limit... power is the limiting factor. OTOH, attempts to try different and strange kinds of computing have generally failed and the highest performance computers today are prosaic collections of networked CPUs.
We've had "Moore's law" since 1965 predict a doubling of IC density every two years and in 40 years have seen that happen - from a handful of transistors per chip to billions. In conjunction, the power of computing has also improved by more than a million-fold. Moore's law in semiconductors has another decade to run, by which time fundamental quantum physical limits will prevent progress. Light will be used increasingly for chip communications; energy consumption per transistor will fall; computing parallelism will increase, and we will have 'pervasive computing'. When circuits hit 2D limits, they will go in the third dimension, and stacked 3D ICs.
The challenge of cheap pervasive computing is the question "What to do with all that power?" In many respects, hardware has advanced much more than software ... a desktop PC has hardware that is
but the OS and software, UNIX-like OSs, spreadsheet and word processing programs, email and 'newsgroup'-like interactions, all were familiar in the 1980s, the innovation of the browser is the largest change since then and that too is now a decade old. What profound change in our personal computing interfaces will take place? I believe there will be further technological shifts. Tech workers are drowning in information and we need a way out. David Gelertner mave the answer there.
Can we selectively shut off immune responses?
A: Yes.
Do deeper principles underlie quantum uncertainty and non-locality?
A: Dunno, I won't gamble on an incorrect answer. :-)
Is an effective HIV vaccine feasible?
A: Yes. In the meantime, nothing defeats STDs better than abstinence and monogamy within marriage.
How hot will the greenhouse world be?
A: Biased question. We are tracking the world's temperature.
A better question is: How well can we predict future climate? So far, the models havent been that good.
What benefits will higher CO2 levels bring to plants?
What can replace cheap oil — and when?
A: Nuclear and hybrids with rechargeable batteries to get 100 mpg ... anytime you want.
Will Malthus continue to be wrong?
A: Yes. But the worlds population will peak and then decline ... so the biggest societal question will be: What will be the consequences of a fall in Europe's population? What about a fall in total world population?
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