Scientific Puzzles

There are a lot of things that puzzle scientists, some might not puzzle us. It is not that some of us are so smart that we know the answers to these things, it is more that many of us just don't care. It is understandable that we might not care what a particular atom is composed of, or why certain stars are hotter than others. It just doesn't effect most of our day to day lives . I am not saying that it is wrong not to be interested in such things, just that it is almost a religious experience to understand the universe around us and ourselves. As we learn more about things, it seems that we find more to learn. Things are usually a lot more complex than how they first seemed. The ancient Greeks believed that everything was composed of only five elements, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Aether. Boy were they wrong.

Photo Source: Stock.xching

One of the greatest mysteries in science is us. Have you ever thought of yourself as being a mystery, I know that I certainly haven't? Well we are. Scientists know that we are composed of certain chemicals and some have said that we are some sort of bag of chemicals. The question is why can't we take the chemicals that make up our bodies, proportion them correctly and create new life? I am not talking about creating a Frankenstein monster, but another human being. It just can't be done and nobody knows why. It is that spark of life added to the mix that makes us what we are. It may be possible to clone a human, but that is not the same. Cloning uses a human cell that is already created and is a form of a living thing. It is hard to imagine how many people in the past have tried to make life where none existed. Let's not limit ourselves to human life, no one has yet to create animal life either.

Photo Source: Stock.xching

I have talked about SETI in the past. Sometimes I have been quite critical of it. In case you don't know what SETI is, it is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There are some people out there that believe that SETI has already discovered the existence of alien life, maybe not on other worlds, but at least on craft that are exploring earth. SETI uses radio signals to determine if other life exists and its new equipment can tune into millions of channels, but are radio signals the way to go? I have always thought that since radio signals only travel at the speed of light, they would be impractical for communications between distant worlds, or between a world in one solar system to a ship in another. Yet among all this conjecture SETI did receive an amazingly strong unknown signal. It was called the WOW signal because when it was received it was printed out and a researcher had written WOW in the column next to it. SETI protocol called for the signal to be found twice and it was only found once. There is no explanation that has ever been found for the signal to this date.

Another thing that baffles science is the creation of the universe. Many different theories have been put forth for how it came about, but none can explain how something can come from nothing. The best that science can do is say that all the matter in the universe was contained at one time in a super atom that exploded and gave us what has become to be known as the Big Bang. Matter was said to expand and then slowly come back together forming another super atom that would eventually explode. The theory didn't work, because the expansion of the universe is not slowing down but speeding up in some cases. A new theory states that the universe will expand forever and eventually things will grow so far apart that there will only be icy worlds left. None of this explains where the universe came from originally. When we think of things, we humans are not happy with thinking about something that has no beginning and possibly no end. It just doesn't make sense to us. If we eliminate God from the equation then there just isn't any answer.

Photo Source: Stock.xching

Science has recently been trying to figure out why such high numbers of people, when given placeboes, recover from their symptoms? It is amazing really and yet I believe that the drug companies have stopped any real meaningful study into this phenomena. The reasons for this are readily definable, if we could figure out how to cure people without giving them drugs by some sort of mind control, the drug companies would be put out of business. The link between mind over matter can be seen easily during these tests. It might only work for 20% or so of people taking placebos, but it works. We have to find out why it doesn't work for all. It may be that the other 80% didn't believe that they were getting the real medicine and those 20% did and by believing this the brain was fooled into curing the symptoms. It is a very interesting problem that will probably never be given the attention that it deserves.

Lastly I would like to talk about something that seems impossible to run correctly. If I said to the scientific community that I was going to take roughly 600 politicians, divide them among the House of Representatives, Senate, Supreme Court and Presidency, allow lobbyists to throw all sorts of money and gifts at them, allow foreign countries to influence them and then expect them to come up with bills and laws that would benefit the average person on the street, do you think that they would say that it was possible? Taken as a scientific exercise I think that it would fail miserably and indeed it is failing. It is sort of like the planets. They get formed by the material around them, material from the sun, dust and such. The politicians get influenced by what is around them and that is the world's greatest bribery efforts called lobbying.