To get back to the original question of what are some large and basic mysteries which remain unpenetrated, here are some examples which come to mind:
How does glue work? (Cecil cited this question in a column some years back).
How much voltage is in a lightning bolt?
Is there such a thing as ball lightning for sure and, if so, how is it produced and how does it work?
If dinosaurs are ectotherms (see today’s column), how were the large ones ever able to move; for the environment to have been warm enough to provide energy for them to move, they should have baked to a crisp.
How were the big stone balls in the jungles of Costa Rica fashioned? And how, exactly, were the pyramids built?
Nikola Tesla was quoted as saying that, after a lifetime of research, he still wondered just what is electricity, really.
William Corliss’ Science Frontiers books (and newsletter and website) might be a good resource if you’re interested in this sort of thing. He’s spent several decades now collating journal articles (as opposed to “my friend’s brother saw something weird in the swamp” sort of stories) that report anomalous findings. I think quite a bit of the material in his older books has been resolved by now, but the books are still very interesting, if hard to find.
Perhaps you missed the exactly part. The dynamo model gives us a general idea how magnetic fields are generated, but it fails to explain a number of issues: the offset of the magnetic field pole from the rotational axis of most planets, the magnetic field of Mercury, which is a slow rotator, etc. And there certainly isn’t a good detailed model to explain the complex magentic fields of Uranus and Neptune.
It’s one of the big outstanding problems in planetary astronomy.
I think there are too many mysteries and no objective way to quantify their greatness for this thread to fit neatly into GQ, so I’ll move this thread to IMHO.
The exact position and momentum of any random electron (although to be fair, that’s impossible to know). And lots of other stuff about atoms and atomic particles. Like what is an electron really? A probability smear?
I seem to remember an article about some odd properties of sand: it behaves in different ways when poured in different ways, but nobody’s quite sure why.
To be honest, when I opened this thread, I thought, eh maybe 20 or so.:eek: I don’t know what I was thinking…
I do have an excuse, in case anyone is interested: I was at work and I remembered a little blurb about dark energy. It was in an article with something like 10 other mysteries. So I figured their couldn’t be many more…Not the wisest deduction I’ll grant you…
As I understand it, although we know HOW an electric current flows through a conductor and can measure and control it quite handily, we still aren’t sure exactly WHY this happens. Perhaps that’s what Tesla was talking about.
This was discussed in a recent JREF newsletter. I’m not saying that this is the definitive answer (IANAGeologist), just thought you might be interested.
Hmm… Zweistein, that’s a problem of math, though, isn’t it? We know the equations to describe the interaction of three or more objects, it’s just that these equations can’t be solved exactly. Are we including math as a science?
