• Question: What is the one unanswered sciencie question that you are dying to know the answer to?

    Asked by topshopprincess to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      Oooh there are loads of questions I would love to know the answer to! I think the big one for me is whether dark matter and dark energy exist or whether we have just got it all completely wrong and we know nothing about the universe we live in! Other big questions are whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe or whether the Higgs boson exists. There’s loads we still don’t know the answer to in science and that’s what makes it so great!

    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      jings, there are millions of unanswered questions. Here’s one:

      How do we ‘think’?
      (at least, I don’t know the full answer)

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Just one??? It’s so hard to choose…….(ahhhhhh). At the moment I’d like to know what signals cause a plant to die. So many scientists have looked into this but no one has found an answer yet so it would be great to uncover this mystery.

Comments

  • Photo: kirstysargeant

    kirstysargeant commented on :

    i would like to know if global warming really exsists

  • Photo: Michael

    Michael commented on :

    yes, good point kittysargeant there is a lot of discussion about this in the popular press. I think one issue is that the equilibrium between the earths atmosphere, it’s ecological systems and core temperature is determined in part by a very long time cycle. Nearly all natural events involve cycles. Take some human situations for example – a nerve cell is stimualted in less than one hundredth of a second, a heart beats every second or so, a menstrual cycle is 28 days(ish) and we, as the overall sum of these parts, live for decades. The earth is a little bit like this – cycles within cycles. One issue is that we don’t have many measurements of events in the longer cycle comapred to how long the earth has been in existence. And we won’t be around to see the next cycle and so we have to predict what it might be like. The worry for a lot of people who make the necessary measurements is that if it looks to be bad then what do we do about it? It is a bit like having an hyothesis you cannot test but that future students will be able to unless ….. something happens in the meantime. So, it’s a bit of an issue. If you think of many events of the last two hundred years or so (huge population increase, industrial revolutions and use of natural resources, nuclear explosions to name a few) then it’s maybe not too far-fetched to think that we have increased the environmental ‘cost’ and that the present cycle is warmer than expected. As mentioned elsewhere, science quite often isn’t about truth or falsehoods but is about enabling you to asses the probability of something happening over it not.