This article lists what it calls 17 ‘outstanding’ scientific mysteries that have currently eluded researchers’ ability to solve. Any such list is always subject to criticism about its choices and one could quibble with what is included and what has been left out. But it is useful as a discussion starter. I question the use of the word ‘mysteries’ for most of them because that implies questions that we have little or no idea how to address. These questions are what I would call ‘puzzles’, in that we do know how to tackle them even if we have not achieved success as yet.
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But the questions are undoubtedly interesting and of those, two in particular caught my attention because I wrote about them in my book The Great Paradox of Science. They are: What is the universe made of? Was there an advanced civilization on Earth before humans?
What is the universe made out of?
This one is about how the search for dark matter is proving to be so elusive. In chapter 17 of my book I suggested that we may be in the midst of a crisis that precedes a paradigm shift (using the model proposed by Thomas Kuhn), similar to what happened with the ether back at the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time, the existence of the ether was strongly believed even though it had not been directly detected. Various explanations were given to explain away the negative results but they became increasingly strained and it would be fair to call the situation a crisis. The time was ripe for a change and when Einstein proposes his special theory of relativity, although it did not disprove the existence of ether (something I argue cannot be done), it did make it redundant. Since it was no longer needed as an explanatory concept, and special relativity proved to be a fruitful source of new research it was possible to deem the ether to be non-existent and embrace relativity, which is what happened.
Something similar is happening with dark matter. In my book, I wrote:
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