I got to have dinner last night with Robin Hanson, who blogs at Overcoming Bias. Robin is a creative big-picture thinker, who took a twisting career path from physics through philosophy of science and artificial intelligence research to become a tenured professor of economics. He posed a question, which he just re-posed at his blog: what is the most surprising thing we’ve learned about the universe?
Obviously the right answer depends on a set of expectations; surprising to whom? I originally suggested quantum mechanics, and in particular the fact that the outcomes of experiments are not perfectly predictable even in principle. I think that was the most surprising thing to the people who actually discovered it, in the context of what they thought they understood. But what about the most surprising thing to our pre-scientific hunter-gather ancestors? I suggested the fact that the same set of rules govern living beings and inanimate matter, but if you have any better ideas feel free to chime in.
But we can ask the complementary question: what is the most surprising thing about the universe that we haven’t yet discovered, but plausibly could? Something that is not already reasonably excluded by experiments that we’ve done, but also wouldn’t be readily accommodated by a theoretical model. So “string theory is right” certainly wouldn’t count, but neither would “the proton is heavier than the neutron.”
I once discussed this with Bill Wimsatt on an episode of Odyssey (RealPlayer). I went with “reproducible violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” But there are plenty of other good possibilities; what if we discovered tachyons, or that there really was an Intelligent Designer? Suggestions welcome.
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78 responses to “Big Surprises”
The biggest surprise ? That there really is a God and in the end all of us, even the worst criminals will be *saved*
I have blown interlocking smoke rings.
That the universe is unfolding as it should, but that unfolding involves a phenomenon we are not yet aware of.
Related: Fundamental particles can’t vibrate.
That the law of conservation of energy is violated?
“That the law of conservation of energy is violated?”
That wouldn’t surprise me at all, because we know for sure that it is happening right now. The vacuum energy density is constant, hence the amount of vacuum energy increases all the time as the universe expands.
Regarding the digits of PI, most of the cognoscenti reckon it is normal, in that every finite digit sequence eventually occurs. I don’t think this has yet been proved; but if it is true then every conceivable message in whatever general encoding scheme one chooses to use must be there somewhere if you look far enough (although of course in practice “far enough” is almost certainly far out of reach of any conceivable calculation).
As for the most surprising future result of science, how about a model (susceptible to experiment somehow) that presents physical interactions occurring at all scales, resulting in something akin to a logistic map where all known phenomena occur in a range of scales corresponding to a “clear” layer and the Planck scale is merely the onset of an impenetrable “chaotic layer”?
Sounds like a kook idea now of course; but then that’s almost a prerequisite for a future surprise 😉
The links in my previous post don’t seem to work. So let’s try square brackets, and I’ll give the URLs explicitly
[a href=”http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Normal:number.htm]http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Normal:number.htm[/a]
[a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map”]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map[/a]
It’s been touched on earlier, but the first thing that pops into my (biased) mind is general artificial intelligence. I work in AI, and I’ve had many conversations debating whether or not it is possible to write a sentient computer program (or some other implementation). From my personal experience, it seems most people have deeply ingrained notions about what it means to be sentient. These notions appear closely tied to what it means to be human, which includes but goes beyond any religious views people might have.
How about the universe turning out to be analog after all and that “information” isn’t as fundamental as we currently think? Perhaps below the Planck scale fundamental processes cease to be quantized and become continuous again? That would require revisions to all kinds of current ideas about QM, entropy, and “conservation of information” as a basic principle.
It’s an interesting observation that in each generation we tend to view the universe as an example of the most complicated mechanism we are familiar with. In the 19th century, we saw the universe as being analogous to mechanical thermodynamical machines like steam engines. Newton and his contemporaries saw the universe in terms of clockwork. And so on.
In that spirit, is the current preference to think of the universe as the ultimate information processor really a fundamental idea, or just us projecting our fascination with digital computers onto the universe?
I agree that “surprising” has to mean to “most” people, so anything in quantum mechanics doesn’t count. Neither does FTL, since most people believe in it anyway! So, I go either with time travel (most people don’t equate that with FTL) and ancient, advanced technological civilizations on earth. The latter obviously doesn’t violate any known laws of physics, so it has to be my top choice.
Oh, how about a couple more: 1) a communicating interstellar community (with interstellar travel by at least some of the species) and 2) another technological society in our solar system NOW (which also originated in the S.S.)
Johnathan Pace wrote:
“Maybe if scientists were able to prove mathematically that the Hokie-Pokie really IS what its all about. That would certainly blow minds.”
Babylon 5 reference?
As far as (already figured out) well I think Feynman said it best, when asked if he could pass on one message to a future generation, what would it be? He replied, “that everything is made of very small things called atoms; and they move!” (loose quote!) But I think that is very informative. . .
How about if it was established somehow that in principle, the human mind is capable
of understanding our universe. That is, there is nothing that could be learned which is beyond human understanding.
[…] very interesting question was posed on Cosmic Variance lately. What would surprise you? What sort of scientific discovery would really shock […]
Most surprising thing?
Discovery of the remains of an advanced, industrial, nuclear-capable civilization in the deep (>50 Ma) fossil record would turn a couple of heads.
[…] 9, 2009 by dberenstein Over at Cosmic Variance, they had a recent post on big surprises that one could have in physics. In the comments someone suggested that we should be looking for […]
Surprizes so far: the size and age of the universe. Surprizes in the future: Time travel, fossil evidence of high-tech dinosaurs, reproducible psi powers.
Once you stop taking our existence for granted,
I think the most surprising thing is that anything EXISTS at all!
I know think of the Universe as a closed multidimensional (including one or more “time like” dimensions) system that no more a start point than a sphere in 3 dimensional space
>>> made some obvious grammatical corrections <<<
Once you stop taking our existence for granted,
I think the most surprising thing is that anything EXISTS at all!
I now think of the Universe as a closed multidimensional (including one or more “time like” dimensions) system, that no more has a start point than does a sphere in 3 dimensional space.
Carl,
I think quantum mechanics predates the digital revolution by a fair ways. But Analog gravity and digital everything else would be cool.
The item that will surprise modern physics is that the present concept of time is not correct. It will be found that time is really composed of three distinct dimensions and that time really passes from the future to the past. This discovery will also change General Relativity by revising the notion of inertia being not tied to the gravitational field and being a function of the future dimension (FT) providing the extra energy that inertia requires, and that the inertial energy passes thru the present time [Time Now, TN] (which contains all of our physical universe) into the past dimension (TP). The past dimension TP is a closed dimension embedded in our present time dimension TN which expands due to the extra energy passing from the future time dimension (dark energy). Tachyons act as messinger particles from TN to TF, which orders the zero point energy (which is in the future time dimension) and allow a modified Wheeler Many Worlds scenerio in which there is only one “real” world at TN creating future worldlines which obey quantum mechanics in TF. The Time Now (TN) dimension is expanding as a consquence of the Big Bang pushing into the Future Time (TF) dimension. There are way too many ideas that are generated by having distinct time dimensions and time passing to add to this short discussion. By observation, time does pass, it does not run backward, static (block time) violates causuality and the Uncertainy Principle.
I don’t what it would be, but I’m pretty sure it won’t come from high-energy physics. There are enough fancy weird things we know about quantum fields and tiny particles. Even if we find weirder physics in this scale, it would only shock those few who understand how weird it is, and why it is unexpected.
If we find out that there ain’t no Higgs particle and spontaneous symmetry breaking is not enough to explain a big deal of the microphysics it would of course be a surprise to many (not all…) physicists. But it wouldn’t change the world in a short time scale (like quantum mechanics did).
The next great big surprise will come, in my opinion, from neuroscience. And it’s already happening: we are finding out that it’s not that hard to interface the brain with electronics, we are now able to make neural circuits with (very simple) specific purposes, etc, etc.
What we now know is that there is a reasonable probability that in a few decades the next technological leap could be related to the use our brains to directly control electronic machines. This was unthinkable science-fiction garbage 15 years ago. It would be a really great surprise.
[cite] But it wouldn’t change the world in a short time scale (like quantum mechanics did). [/cite]
I probably should have said:
like the atomic hypothesis, together with the understanding of the microscopic quantum mechanical structure of matter did.
[…] a comment » Uns dias atrás em um post do blog Cosmic Variance o Sean Carroll estava se perguntando sobre grandes surpresa na ciência. Entre perguntas sobre […]
Ok, Ok… most surprising thing so far? Got to be quantum mechanics.
Now, most surprising things that might turn out to be true? My list is, ahem, unsurprising:
1. That consciousness isn’t necessarily tied to our physical brains and can be transferred and preserved to facilitate immortality.
2. That intelligent life on earth is unique in the universe.
3. That intelligent life on earth isn’t unique in the universe and its evidence turns out to be nearly ubiquitous, once we have the ability to properly look for it.