THE QUESTIONS
THAT STUMP THE SCIENTISTS CONES AND CALORIES
THOMAS HAYDEN
Newsweek; U.S. Edition - January 19, 1998
WE'VE COME TO ``the end of science,''
writer John Horgan declared recently, saying that all the
really important discoveries have already been made. Stung
in their job prospects, scientists quickly responded with
lists of what they don't know. After all, somewhere between
the big unanswerables like the meaning of life and the
specialized esoterica of most doctoral theses--the
biogeochemical implications of zooplankton fecal-pellet
formation, say, or the evolution of sexual dimorphism in the
South American capybara--there must be some questions left
that are both important and answerable. More than 30,000
future scientists start out in American Ph.D. programs each
year, and they'll need more than a few mysteries to solve.
An informal survey of young scientists in a variety of
fields turned up some topics that might be worth a look:
Brain teaser: We may never fully
understand the human brain, but that doesn't keep
researchers from trying. The trick is that you have to use
the brain to understand itself, and this can get you caught
in horrible self-referential loops. ``It's an awful
existential situation to be able to ask the hard questions
without the ability to ever answer them,'' laments Bill
DeCoteau, a neurobiology grad student at the University of
Utah. ``The biology is pretty well understood,'' he says,
``but how does biology get us pride, jealousy, love, hope
and all that crap?'' How indeed.
Memory: ``The big Kahuna is `how is
knowledge represented in the human brain?' '' says Sarah
Schuster, who studies neuroscience at USC. The brain is a
physical organ, so the memories it stores must have a
physical basis. We haven't found it yet, but if we do, the
repercussions will be seismic. Start with the possibility
that memories could be isolated, tinkered with or
transferred from person to person. Now see how many handy
technologies and terrifying sci-fi scenarios you can come up
with.
High-temperature superconductors:
Resistance (friction for electrons) is an unavoidable hassle
for electrical devices--except for when it isn't.
Superconductors are materials that allow electricity to flow
through them unimpeded, a kind of electronic perpetual
motion. Once thought to occur only at the outrageously cold
temperatures near absolute zero, the discovery of
superconductivity at relatively balmy temperatures (as warm
as -200 degrees Fahrenheit) was worth a Nobel Prize. But a
decade later, there still isn't a theory that can explain
why it happens. ``Every tool known to solid-state physics
has been brought to bear on this problem,'' says Doug Bonn,
a physics professor at the University of British Columbia.
Technical applications are already on the way, but the lack
of a solid theory is holding things up.
Turbulence: For all we've learned about
weather and the atmosphere, we still don't know much about
clear-air turbulence--the kind of violent air motion that
blind-sided United Airlines Flight 826 last month. Unlike
the convective turbulence kicked up by thunderclouds,
clear-air turbulence is almost impossible to detect or
predict. Scores of people are injured by turbulence each
year. Finding a way to detect and avoid it would make the
skies much friendlier.
Missing matter: Simply put, we can't find
most of the universe. Physicists have calculated what its
total mass should be, and that number is about 10 times what
we've been able to observe. Either the equations are wrong
or there are entire new classes of matter we haven't found
yet. Either way, it'll make for a lot of textbook revisions.
Are we alone? It's a simple yes or no
question. Statistically, there's every likelihood that life
has evolved elsewhere in the universe. We're still waiting
for the first shred of hard evidence of extraterrestrial
life. A key question: would we know it if we saw it?
Most scientists will cheerfully admit that
what they do know isn't much compared to what they don't.
Could the end of scientific discovery really be nigh? No
way, says UBC's Bonn. ``I'm just getting started!''
Is frozen yogurt losing its cool? By 2000,
sales may drop by 25 percent as waist-watchers shift to
low-fat ice creams.
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