This article…
http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600
…descibes 13 things that do not make sense in the scientific comunity. Are they being a little sensationalist, or are these 13 things generally considered to be the oddballs of science?
I don’t understand what you mean by “sensationalist.” Scientists genuinely have no science that fully explains these items. Some are probably not explainable because they are anomalies, mistakes, or nonsense. Some are serious problems that will probably require some deep thinking and changes to standard theories.
Is your question why these thirteen? That doesn’t have any good answer that I see. They’re just a sampling of the thousands of questions that are still unanswered. Probably they were picked because they are varied in tone, content, branch or discipline, and could be briefly enough explained to make a good article.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
…Some are probably not explainable because they are anomalies, mistakes, or nonsense…QUOTE]
Well, that my question… isnt it true that many of these are not just merely unexplained, but have actually been written-off as mistakes and/or nonsense, so -they are not really unexplained at all.
Whenever an explanation is provided for a physical phenomenon, the audience can always ask, “But why?” After an explanation is given, the audience can *again * ask, “But why?” At some point, the scientist will not have an answer. This is true of any physical phenomenon.
Hmmm. No wonder the parents of small children look so harried.
A wizard did it.
It looks legitimate to me. I often see people here and elsewhere making the opposite mistake as say, Bible literalists and charlatans. Those groups claim that much of science is invalid. That is incorrect but you can go too far and assume that science already knows most of the important things and we just have to fill in the details now. That is almost certainly false. Any of the phenomena on that list could trigger a whole rethinking about the subject that it relates to. I went to graduate school in an Ivy League behavioral neuroscience program for example and I am well aware that science cannot really begin to explain consciousness yet some know-it-alls will often tell me that I am mistaken and throw out a few key words about the subject and assume that most of the work is done. That is certainly not true in that case and it isn’t true in biology, physics, or most other subjects as well. As Crafter_Man implies, getting to the root cause of all of these things gets progressively harder and harder as you dig deeper into it.
Einstein caused a huge rethinking of basic physics even though the basics seemed pretty well worked out by that point. It is almost certain that things on that list will trigger an almost equal revolution. Science is a process and not merely a static series of facts and conclusions. It would be pretty boring and arrogant if we sat back and thought that we have it all almost figured out.
But why?
So is cold fusion possible or not?
And I don’t mean “possible within the constraints of current technology,” I mean, “possible in theory.”
The article is from 2005 so it’s somewhat out of date. (They still refer to Pluto as a planet :rolleyes: )
I believe the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics went to Dr. John Mather and Dr. George F. Smoot for research using COBE to investigate the microwave background radiation. Their research, as I understand it, shows more variation than previously thought.
It’s also interesting to note that the article claims re: the alpha constant.
emphasis added
I found one article discussing the issue (as well as other constants.) But everything seems to refer to the 2004 data.
Another article (Yes, it’s FoxNews, but it’s decent) includes the following quote as well as some reference to String Theory as it applies to variable constants.
It doesn’t seem too surprising to me to find “oddball” data in newer technologies and cutting edge approaches. Even when that data conflicts with the status quo.
I found the WOW signal most intriguing. An immensely powerful signal appeared from space and most conclusions point to it being distant and artificial. Yet, we have been unable to follow up on it or find the signal again.
Just once. In 1977. For 72 seconds.
It just is, now shut up and hand me the remote. :rolleyes:
Some of these are legitimate. Ultra-high energy cosmic rays do seem to exist, and it’s very difficult to explain how they’re possible. I’ve seen a variety of explanations, but none particularly satisfying. I’m not sure I’d put them in the top 13 mysteries of science, but they’re a legitimate puzzle.
The horizon problem was also a puzzle, but the inflationary theory seems to solve it adequately, along with several other puzzles of cosmology. The causes of inflation are still a problem, but that’s actually very closely related to the dark energy problem (mentioned later in the article), and not nearly as bad.
The dark energy problem, as described in that article, is if anything underhyped. As I mentioned in another current thread, naïve attempts to estimate the strength of the dark energy are off by 120 orders of magnitude, which probably represents the largest numerical error ever in the history of science.
Some of the things they mention are genuine, but overhyped. We don’t currently know what dark matter is, but there’s about ten thousand things it might be. Every time a particle physicist hypothesises the existance of some new particle, there’s always an afternote that this new particle might account for the dark matter. And at least some of the dark matter (though not all) is just perfectly ordinary familiar stuff that just happens not to be glowing.
The WOW event, and it looks like the tetraneutron, are both single, isolated events. Without some repeatability, it’s hard to make anything of either of them. And even as isolated events go, those aren’t the biggest: I’d give that honor to the apparent magnetic monopole detected at Stanford some time back. Magnetic monopoles theoretically ought to exist, but estimate of their density generally put them at about one in the entire volume of the observable Universe, so if that one just happened to pass through one of Stanford’s detectors, it’d be quite a feat. But the recorded even had exactly the right characteristics for a monopole detection, and I haven’t heard any other explanation for it.
The Pioneer anomoly and the variation of fundamental constants are both effects burried in noise. In neither case is it possible to thoroughly enough eliminate possible causes of experimental error. Both are interesting and worthy of further discovery, but the evidence is not yet extraordinary enough for the extraordinary claims being made (a point Dopers should appreciate).
And at least one of the “puzzles” they mention is bunk. Cold fusion was and is a collosal blunder at best, and an outright fraud at worst. It’s conceivable that we’ll someday figure out how to do it, but there’s no reason to expect it, and certainly no evidence that it’s been done.
I’m with you! I happen to know the cold fusion researcher mentined in the New Scientist article. He’s a True Believer™ in cold fusion from the beginning. 
A great guy otherwise.
There might possibly be some extrememly subtle chemical effects on nuclear reactions, if you want to talk about results buried in noise. But nobody is going to get any nuclear power out of a standard electrochemical cell.
My four year old is just getting over the uncontrolled “whys”. During the height of his “why” period I quickly reached Princhester’s theorem: there is no phenomenon that is understood with sufficient depth that you can’t reach an unanswerable question by asking “why” about it, and then repeating that five times in relation to any responsive answer given.
It could do with refinement, I admit, but you get the point.
Well it’s lucky then that we only need one to quantize electric charge.
I realize that science may not have a particularly good explanation for placebo, but the objection in the article - about morphine inhibitors inhibiting placebo, as well - doesn’t seem all that strong to me. If you’ve got a way that your body responds to a drug, and another drug that prevents that response, the other drug is likely going to prevent the response regardless of whether your body is doing in response to the original drug or to the placebo effect.
Sometimes I get to thinking about the huge responsibility lying on the head of that one monopole, somewhere out beyond the Great Wall, or wherever it is. It must be very stressful, enforcing the quantization of every charge in 10[sup]10[/sup] lightyears.
I like it!
But you’ve got to admit, that at a certain point the “whys” become a bit metaphysical or even nonsensical.
Me: 1 plus 1 equals two.
Kid: Why?
Me: Because if I have this one bean (::sets down bean) and I add another bean (::puts another bean beside it), I now have two beans.
Kid: …why?
Me: Huh?
The answer to that last “why” is “because one plus one equals two.” 
-FrL-