The big questions of science

In the most recent issue of the German magazine Zeit Wissen, a discussion is devoted to what is called “The 12 great (big) questions of science”.

At first sight some of these strike one as being more philosophical (even metaphysical) than scientific, but on reflection, the German word Wissenschaft, which means “science” in the narrower sense, could also mean “knowledge” (Wissen) in the wider sense. And behind this there is the age-old insight, that scientific questions are driven by the same curiosity and wonderment that has motivated philosophy since its inception, even if answers or “solutions” to them take a different form to philosophical “answers”. Hence, these twelve questions are questions which are ineluctably confronted in the human quest for knowledge. The questions listed there are (my translation):

What is reality?
Why are we not immortal?
Is there a world formula?
What happens, or is happening at the Earth’s core?
What was there before the Big Bang?
Can all illnesses be overcome?
Could machines be (become) more intelligent than humans?
How did life originate?
What is the shortest route for garbage collection? (An unlikely-looking candidate!)
What does the universe consist of?
Why do we sleep?
Will we ever know everything?

In the introduction to the multifaceted article, Stefanie Schramm alludes to the fact that, no sooner had physicist David Gross received the Nobel Prize for Physics, than he presented his colleagues with a list of the most important “open” questions of his discipline. Far from wishing to exasperate the other physicists in this way, however, Gross pointed out, “fundamental questions encourage (spur) people (on)”.

In other words, “big” puzzles do not merely stimulate the curiosity of scientists in all disciplines, they also point researchers in a certain direction. Gaps in knowledge are not signs that knowledge has broken down; they represent opportunities for new discoveries.

From the list of questions, above, it should be apparent that these are questions covering a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from philosophy and cosmology through geology and medicine to mathematics and biology. In all of these fields there are questions that challenge the ingenuity of scientists and thinkers.

What this suggests, is that the historically recurrent belief, that all (or most) of the fundamental questions have been answered, has turned out, time and again, to be unfounded. When Pope remarked famously (in the 18th century), “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light!” he probably articulated the widely held belief on the part of people in the world of learning at the time. And while Newton’s macro-physics is still used for understanding the mechanics of events in the everyday “commonsensical” world, its limitations have been shown as far as certain sub-atomic and light-related events are concerned. Here one has to turn to relativity physics, quantum mechanics and field-theory, which overturned the secure world of Newtonian physics when they first emerged at the beginning of the 20th century in the work of Einstein, Niels Bohr and others.

Few scientists today would believe, as physicist William Thomson did in 1900, that only two little problems remained to be resolved in the discipline, namely those concerning the properties of light, and “black body-radiation” — both of which were resolved by relativity physics and quantum theory a few years later, but not without opening up new areas of investigation.

Schramm observes that the current situation in biology is comparable to that which existed in physics a hundred years ago: contrary to expectations after the 2003-decipherment of the human genome, knowledge of human beings in this field is, all of a sudden, not worth that much any longer. Instead of being able to “read off” answers to questions from the genome-formula, it has confronted biologists with a confusing collection of genetic or heredity-information of which no one (yet) understands the complex interplay.

Again it appears that every new discovery or breakthrough in the sciences, instead of resolving all former questions, generates a plethora of new ones. Nor should it surprise us: the questions we are able to ask — whether philosophical or scientific — depend on what we know. With “new” knowledge comes new questions.

Over the next few months I shall be looking at each of the questions listed above in light of (but not restricted to) the discussion provided in Zeit Wissen. They are humbling indeed, and serve to emphasise Socrates’s (eminently philosophical) belief, that the only thing we can be sure of, is how little we know.