What, no love for O’Lielly? It’s even using the exact words of the thread title!
When I was a kid, I remember hearing and reading in more than one source that physics “can’t explain” why a bicycle stays upright, or how a bumblebee can fly. Have these pressing mysteries been explained since then?
Speaking as a gall-bladderless person who is currently posting while sitting on the toilet in fairly unpleasant distress, I can assure you that we do NOT live perfectly normal lives post-op and that the gall bladder certainly has a function. It stores a reservoir of bile that can be released when the liver is overwhelmed.
We can model gravity quite precisely mathematically, but we have no idea what it really is. There is a theoretical particle called the graviton which has not actually been detected.
As to the OP, no matter how far we dig down with science, there are still going to be unanswered questions. We determined that particles were made of quarks, but we don’t know what a quark is made of (at least I don’t think so; I am quite the layman).
Truly. It has a lot of grativas.
Love is an evolved adaptation to support pair bonding that encourages mating and increases the probability of offspring surviving to reproductive age.
The accuracies of the predictions are limited by how well we can test them experimentally. Since it’s a lot easier to do QED-sensitive experiments in the lab than it is to do GR-sensitive experiments, QED happens to be tested to many more decimals places. But the underlying precisions of the predictions are not in competition, as one can (in principle) get arbitrarily precise predictions out of either class of theory.
Further reading:
That’s right, your sweety is dealing oxytocin.
Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in…
PERIOD.
{sigh} There’s so much bullshit in this thread, I don’t where how to begin. Why don’t some posters do a minimal research before posting such inane questions? Just Asking Questions doesn’t cut it at SDMB.
So I’m going to cherry-pick some items that I know about to comment on.
We have no reason to believe the Easter Island natives DIDN’T move them. Thor Heyrdahl’s expedition ca. 1957 transported and erected a statue using only the tools available to the natives at the time. Others have demonstrated how the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, South American temples, etc. were likely constructed. It’s impressive work, but not a mystery in the slightest.
As far as the age of the stone, what makes you think that a stone becomes a different age because it’s carved? The shape makes no difference whether it’s part of a church or a statue. Chiseling it doesn’t make it younger.
Absolute nonsense. No more ships have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle, no matter how you define it, than any other highly-trafficed area in the world. There is no “anomoly.” There is no mystery.
I suggest you google for Larry Kusche.
And I look like an alien if I dress up for Halloween, too, but that doesn’t make me one. Imagination runs wild – it’s one thing that makes us human.
This. Not that it cannot be explained . . . but that there are too many explanations, no two in agreement. And introspection in general; consciousness conscious of itself.
I don’t think scientists (or anyone else) understand the variety of sexual attraction. Why is one person attracted to tall, skinny men with aquiline noses and heavy eyebrows . . . and another person is attracted to pear-shaped women with frizzy red hair, an overbite and a limp?
There are tentative first steps towards an explanation, but actual scientific models of what consciousness is have not been arrived at yet.
Unless you count the denialist hypotheses of Dennett et al (which I wouldn’t, but some people might).
Since there’s been done extensive seismic studies of the moon I’d like a better cite than “here’s what I remember from some list”.
Giving specific, case by case, explanations might be difficult, but I do not see anything particularly mysterious or incomprehensible in principle here. Probably your first person was treated kindly by a tall, skinny man with an aquiline nose and heavy eyebrows when they were a child, or perhaps they happened to see such a man (or even a picture of one) at some crucial moment in puberty when they were just beginning to become conscious of their sexuality, or… well it might be a million other things that caused them to associate such men with niceness and sexiness. To discover the specific details in each case, for every person, might well be beyond the reach, and, perhaps more importantly, beyond the will, of science to discover, there is just too much contingency and variation, but that does not mean that the general principles by which such things work cannot be discovered, or, indeed, that they are not known, in broad outline, already.
Actually, I think it rather more mysterious just what it is about the female body (never mind idiosyncratic preferences for specific types of female) that makes (most) men sexually attracted to women (and vice-versa). Why are boobies a turn-on for men, for instance, but not for women (who, after all, also suckled on them as babies).* I expect science knows something about this, but I am fairly sure there is still a lot we don’t know.
*Hmmm. I am now seriously regretting that I didn’t in for boobie science when I was setting out on my career. I could have had a Nobel Prize by now! 
I hadn’t heard that one before. I’ll have to work it into the act.
These are the kind of stupid things that creationists use to make the impression that god is active in all things and scientists don’t know shit. Fact is, though, that these are just BS. There was a time when we didn’t really understand how a bicycle worked, until someone did the research. I saw a science special on that research when I was a kid. It just took some cool thought processes and experiments to figue out some key questions.
There is a published paper that noted that, given the size of a bumblebees wings, and the maximum speed that nerves a can fire and reset and fire again (thus, maximum number of muscle contractions/wing beats) that the bees would not be able to get airborne. Shortly after, someone looked at the problem and noted that bumblebee wing muscles beat twice with every nerve impulse. No more question, but people who love to point out the fallibility of science don’t look any farther. My entomology prof went over this 35 years ago, so it is not new.
Women.
Or, according to female scientists, men.
Except that the bicycle thing really still hasn’t been explained. We thought we knew, but some people proved our old explanation wrong. I don’t remember all the details, but we really don’t know.
Plus, we kinda know that bikes were created by a higher power–us.
Specifically, what women want.