Unexplained scientific mysteries

Well, I guess there can be better ways to spend your Sunday night than watching a show from the History Channel. But to my surprise, I was actually quite entertained. I saw this piece called “Unexplained” – it tried to describe in lay man’s terms the critical scientific problems that physicists are trying to tackle today and its impact on our daily lives. More specifically, here are the problems discussed in this piece:

— First mystery was based on the observation that fossil records indicate a periodicity in the occurrence of mass extinctions on earth. This period has been noted to be 26 million years. One of these phenomenon, 65 million years ago, spelled doom on the dinosaurs. Though there hasn’t been any real proof yet, some scientists have a theory that our sun exists as a part of a binary star system. Its twin, aptly named Nemesis, comes closest to our sun every 26 million years. When Nemesis gets close to our sun, it manages to dislodge some of the asteroids lying at the periphery of our solar system which results in a cloud of comets being sucked into our solar system by the gravitational pull of the sun. Earth along with other planets in the solar system end up colliding with some these comets – bam! there goes the life as we know it.

— Next mystery, as expected has to deal with our fascination with time travel. According to this University of Connecticut Physics professor called Ronald Mallet, it is possible to time travel. Being inspired by Einstein’s work on relativity, he has been diligently working towards demonstrating, in his lab, how light can create wormholes that can be used to send particles through time and back. The basic premise of his work is that if a large mass can cause the spacetime continuum to bend with gravitational pull and since mass can be expressed as energy (E=mc^2) so we can use light (energy) to do the same and create wormholes. Hmmm, lemme try and describe wormholes a little bit – imagine that space and time form a bed sheet, now place a heavy ball on top of this sheet. The ball will cause the sheet to sag in a funnel shape form. Now imagine that the bed sheet consists of bunch of balls placed on them and bunch of these funnel shaped forms combine on meeting each other – these are basically wormholes that will essentially provide you a shortcut to travel from one part of the bed sheet to another. Inevitably, the notion of time travel brings up some fascinating paradoxes – the one mentioned in the show was the grandfather paradox that basically tries to describe a scenario where each possibility seems to deny its own existence. The paradox is the following: You travel back in time and kill your own grandfather before he meets your grandmother. So, now if your grandfather died then you could not exist and if you could not exist then your grandfather could not die and if he did not die then you would exist and could kill him. You see the logical paradox here. Anyway, it was interesting to note that scientists today don’t count it as a paradox since they can explain this with the notion of parallel universes. Ok, I won’t get into the details of this but its a cool theory and you should check it out.

— Next mystery dealt with our evil twins who can cause a complete annihilation of our being if we ever run into them. Under the assumption that we started with a zero-sum, there had to be an equal amount of matter and its evil twin anti-matter when the universe began. So, scientists are trying to describe why is it that we only see matter in the universe. Well, the current explanation is that in our neighborhood matter was a bit more than anti-matter so after the combination of matter and anti-matter resulting in nothing but energy, matter prevailed. It was interesting to note that the concept of matter and anti-matter is not as science fiction as the general population believes. It is employed in PET scans where “P” essentially stands for positrons that are anti-matter to electrons. So when they are inserted in our brains they quickly combine with electrons and release gamma rays that are studied for brain activities.

— Then, it came down to the study of Mars. Did you know that Mars was once a tropical planet with oceans and seas? One of the key scientific mystery is why did all the water suddenly vanish and where did all the water go? Key theories currently are asteroid strikes, and gone underground.

— Finally, how can any scientific mystery be complete without a discussion on the “big bang”. According to current estmates, the big bang occured around 13.7 million years ago. Scientists are trying to answer if anything come before big bang and what set the big bang into motion? It was interesting to note that we are closer to getting an answer to these than we realize. Scientists are already placing laser beams up in space to capture any vibrations (both big bang and pre big bang ones). These vibrations will give us a better picture of the events that transpired into our existence today. Optimistically, we should have these answers by next decade.

~ by manand76 on April 14, 2008.