Somethign that cannot be explained with science

[DrPizza]

This has been one of the most annoying threads I've ever bothered to read.

And, I still don't know what the original question means... does it mean "something that cannot be explained by science YET?" or "something that cannot be explained by science EVER?"

The answer depends on which of the two.
If the question was YET, then there's a ton of stuff to choose from
If the question was EVER, then the only things that cannot be explained by science are things that are taken on faith, and not on observations. These things are mostly religious in nature.

Also, any time that a religion uses faith to explain an observation that science hasn't explained yet, they're setting themselves up to be wrong once science advances to the point where it CAN explain the observation. Example: early Christianity had the Earth as the center of the universe. We've since proven that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, etc. Christianity's views were based on faith that we were central to God's universe. A lot of Christian doctrine has changed over the years based on scientific observations. Faced with dinosaur bones, carbon and uranium (etc.) dating, most Christians accept the idea that the earth was created billions of years ago, rather than the couple of thousand years ago that religions that interpret the Bible literally are still clinging to. IMHO, the same is going to go for evolution. Asmuch as it's called a "theory", it's accepted as the truth.

Nonetheless, science does not rule out religious faiths. If you believe that your God created man, so be it. But, MY God started the process of evolution - one that began with the big bang and resulted in man..., an incredibly intricate process which took 15 billion years or so to culminate at this point with man being on earth. I'm sorry, but if my God created the machine to make man, and your God just created man, My God can kick Your God's a$$ any day of the week.

Science cannot *OBSERVE* what happened before the big bang. In fact, since information transfer is limited to the speed of light, our observations are limited by that speed and the age of the universe. Scientists will not be able to answer the "why" was there a big bang, or what there was before the big bang. You can believe an all powerful omnipotent God got the ball rolling, or you can believe that our universe is a hiccup from another universe, or you can believe that the universe ends in a big crunch, then a new universe beings with a big bang, over and over, or you can believe that the initial singularity of the universe just popped into existence, then the bang occurred, (If you don't think particles can just "pop" into existence, you deny that solid state electronics actually work based upon the way we understand them to work.).... or you can believe that the universe hatched from the egg of some enormous turtle. I don't care what you believe happened before the big bang; regardless, for a scientist, atheist, religious fanatic, or some combination or somewhere in between, what happened before the big bang is based on faith.

Also, look at all the constants in the universe.... they are incredibly fine tuned. Accepting that the Big Bang did occur (and it's accepted folks, despite the misleading name "theory"), that matter would form, and stars and galaxies, and eventually man would exist WOULD NOT have happened if any of those constants were off by just a little bit! quick example: Almost everything contracts when it goes from liquid to solid. Water doesn't. If water became denser as it froze, there would not be life (as we know it) in the universe. God is the greatest mathematician/physicist of all time. And, that's based on faith reinforced by how amazing a creation the universe is from seemingly random interactions.

sorry for any rambling... Now I feel compelled to follow this thread, at least for a week or two

 

[DAF160]

How about why you can solve for X in a poloynomial :

X^2 + X - 6

Some will say that its due to 0 being the identity element of the field of polynomals, but that is theory, not fact. It works, and we accept it as such.

 

[f95toli]

??
What do you mean?
Do you mean why you can solve the equation x^2+x-6=0?
(the roots are 2 and -3 by the way)

 

[DAF160]

I agree that the roots of x^2+x-6=0 are 2 and -3...

Ever wonder why you can set the equation equal to 0 and solve?

This is due to the fact that the ring of imaginary numbers has a property stating an element exists, lets call it ¥, such that ¥ + a = a, known as the Additive Identity Axiom. For the subset of imaginary numbers known as the polynomials, as well as the subset of the polynomials known as the real numbers, ¥ = 0.

By definition of an Axiom it is an assumption, its something that works but cannot be proven. Thus solving a polynomial cannot be explained by science.

 

[f95toli]

Ok, now I understand what you mean.
But since all math is based upon axioms I can not see why this would be that special? The existence of a null-element is just a property of the space you are working in (and isn't it enough for the null-element to be orthogonal to all elements in the set that forms the basis?)
Since we normaly do not need to define the properties of for example the Hilbert space we are working in that is not something you think about that often but it is still true.

 

[persille]

Well the only answer, though there's been an awfull lot of extremely good replies to the teachers question, i fully concur with is:


FrustratedUser
Diamond Member

Posts: 6999
Joined: Aug 2001
08/29/2003 2:53 AM


Easy!
Women.


So before anyone disseminates their disproval of the statement, please: Explain women

Though probably too late I believe that answer (unless your youir teacher is female) should you your A.

 

[bwanaaa]

in the context of your teacher's question (referring to the first post of this thread) , i would ask her what motivates her question. She is asking for a negative. just like asking for the evidence of antimatter using tools made of matter. Like asking what real number is the square root of negative one.

 

[Blackroot]

Originally posted by: FrankSchwab
If you want to answer the question, you have to step outside the realm that Science explores...or make the argument that science doesn't "know" anything, that it is a set of theories that seem to work, but can be dropped in a second if a newer, better theory comes along.

Of course, if the teacher phrased the question as "...find something...", it implies a physical object, most of which can be explained by science (if not now, then sometime in the future). However, you can certainly make the argument that "Love" exists, though it is not a physical thing.

Outside the realm of science - metaphysics, religion, human consciousness are good areas to explore.
Why did the Big Bang happen? Not when, not what, not who, but WHY.
What is God?
What is Consciousness?
What does it mean to think? (Turing Test)
What is Love?

Within the realm of science, go for the ignorance approach. Drop an apple on the teacher's desk, and announce "Science cannot explain an apple". To the astonished response, start asking questions:
What is the apple made of? Molecules, of course.
What are they made of? Atoms of course.
What are they made of? Electrons, Neutrons, and Protons, of course.
What are they made of? Well, Quarks as I understand the current theory.
Well, what are Quarks made of? Ummm...
You are at the point that theoretical physicists start getting a far-away look and start waving their hands to answer the question, and your teacher isn't going to be better.
Has Science explained the matter that makes up an apple? They certainly can't today, but as a valid (and hotly contested) field of endeavor, I have to believe that one day they will. If I were your teacher, I would argue that science CAN explain matter, and one day will - just not today.

/frank

just wanted to say something about your "What is God?" question, in my mind god is a figure created by humans so have a sort of scape goat, and to explain things that science or anything else can't explain

"God didn't creat man, man created god.

 

[Blackroot]

That took so damn long to read. Can't remember if this was said, but if there is a reason for everything, what is the reason for life, for me, for you, for him, for this computer, for this desk, for this house exct to exist. The human mind can't comprehend that there is simply no reason if that is the answer, there for that will never be answered

 

[wilki24]

Ask him to use science to prove that Schrodinger's is either definitively alive or dead...

See what Mr. Smarty Pants has to say about that ;-)

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DAF160
I agree that the roots of x^2+x-6=0 are 2 and -3...

Ever wonder why you can set the equation equal to 0 and solve?

This is due to the fact that the ring of imaginary numbers has a property stating an element exists, lets call it ¥, such that ¥ + a = a, known as the Additive Identity Axiom. For the subset of imaginary numbers known as the polynomials, as well as the subset of the polynomials known as the real numbers, ¥ = 0.

By definition of an Axiom it is an assumption, its something that works but cannot be proven. Thus solving a polynomial cannot be explained by science.

I'm not sure that this "cannot be explained by science", though. Axioms in a mathematical system are rules put in place that cannot be proved *via the other rules of the system*, normally because the other rules are dependent on them. Adding or removing them changes the underlying mathematics of what you're doing, but there's nothing there to prove or explain!

For example, Non-Euclidian geometry comes from the removal of the fourth (or is it the fifth?) axiom from Euclid's geometry, the one about two parallel lines never meeting (he stated it differently, but that's more or less what it means). There's nothing to explain or prove -- that's just how they're defined. Euclid himself was never able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why that axiom was there -- you can't prove it from the other axioms, and he needed it for his geometry to correspond with reality (at least as he saw it). It wasn't until the 19th century, with the systematic exploration of higher-dimensional geometry, that people questioned it seriously.

One might be able to ask "Why do mathmetics that correspond with reality have to have X to make sense?", however. It seems as though the "real world" obeys certain mathemetical rules (for example, the local structure of 3-space that Euclid was dealing with, although he didn't know about relativity), and there's no particular reason for that which could ever be proven scientifically. But it's along the same lines as asking why the speed of light is "c", or any other "why" question about the universe -- it presumes the existence of some guiding force or reason behind everything, and we've discussed that one already.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: MAValpha

Option two:
A famous quote: "The moment you can give me a defintion of any process, I can teach a computer to do the same thing." (Something to that effect.) How about defining, let alone explaining, the process of thought?

I'm ignoring your other questions because the first is illogical and the third is a "why" question, and we went over that.

However, I have a computer science degree and an interest in AI, so I feel compelled to put my two cents in on this.

Define "thought".

If you mean logic and reasoning -- well, computer logic systems have been around for a *long* time. Longer than either you or me, most likely. However, a full first-order logic system is prohibitively slow, even on current hardware, unless you're talking about supercomputers. Most of the ones in practice (such as Prolog) use a limited subset of first-order logic to implement what's known as an "expert system". They use them all the time to do medical diagnosis and things like that. However, this is probably not what you mean.

Game-playing computers have also been popular for a long time. Unfortunately, most chess "AI" systems are simply playing through a combination of brute force and lookup tables, and so I don't qualify them as true intelligences. However, there have been some very interesting breakthroughs in the last decade in using neural network systems in other games (such as Backgammon and Go, where the branching factors absolutely crush any brute force attempts to play well). These show more promise, but systems of that type are still essentially limited to solving (very complex) multivariable functions. It's unclear to me whether or not human thought is more than that.

A popular type of AI is one that tries to emulate human communication ability (that is, one that can pass the Turing Test). The idea is that, if humans can't tell the difference when talking to it, then the computer must be intelligent. This is an interesting goal, and there has been a great deal of interest in solving it (partly because such a system, even if not fully "intelligent", is very practical as an interface) but may not be what you're talking about.

However, if you're talking about *human* thought, really getting human intelligence into algorithmic form, then we're not there yet. Try back in a couple hundred years. I haven't seen anything that proves to me that human thought (sentience, in particular) could not be implemented on a computer, although we haven't figured out how to do it yet. This one's still got a question mark on it, but you'd be hard-pressed to prove that science *can't* figure it out, eventually. Our brains form an incredibly complicated and as of yet poorly understood computing system, but researchers are working on it.

For one theory that tries to prove true AI is impossible, see also: "Chinese Box/Room Argument". I don't buy it, though, as the argument is far less compelling when applied to simpler cases (for example, mathematics), and there's no hard proof. Searle proves that "looks intelligent on the surface" does not imply "is actually intelligent" (which should be obvious), but taking it any further than that seems to be jumping the gun.

 

[kruelintent]

Ok, Here is something that einstein was working on and never found an answer to. A "unified field theory" currently the physics that govern extremely small particles ie. atoms and smaller, do not apply to extremely large particles such as planets solar systems or the universe. There are two separate lists of equations for both. Although theoretically there should be a constant set of equations for all matter no matter the size. Just an Idea.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: kruelintent
Ok, Here is something that einstein was working on and never found an answer to. A "unified field theory" currently the physics that govern extremely small particles ie. atoms and smaller, do not apply to extremely large particles such as planets solar systems or the universe. There are two separate lists of equations for both. Although theoretically there should be a constant set of equations for all matter no matter the size. Just an Idea.

ah that is a good point! just as time is relative and time dialation at fractions of the speed of light is real. an overall equation to describe everything would be too simple, but according to physics now, it should exist, right?

 

[f95toli]

Many people are hopping that string theory will be the T.O.E and there have been remarkable progress in the last 20 years.
There is a good book about string theory called "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Green which I liked a lot although some chapters are a bit boring if you already know a thing or two about special relativity and quantum mechanics, the parts about string-teory are more interesting.

 

[Pudgygiant]

Nicely put matthias99

 

[Alistar7]

Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Human stupidity, and it's ability to flourish in the face of darwinism and natural selection.

 

[Talon37]

:brokenheart:
Why do you feel phisical pain when a girl breaks your heart? Or why do you feel phisical pain/joy with some of the other emotions out there?

 

[Dreadraven]

i dunno if anyone said this yet.. but time
how do you explain time and how does it work?

 

[element]

Originally posted by: wilki24
Ask him to use science to prove that Schrodinger's is either definitively alive or dead...

See what Mr. Smarty Pants has to say about that ;-)

Open the box "smarty pants". It is apparent you do not know what you are talking about. Your analogy to his thought experiment is so far off you blew my mind with unimaginable thoughts of human ignorance and stupidity, that I almost lost track of my thoughts on this subject.

I could go on and on about what science doesn't know to the point of driving a typical ADD/ADHD ATOTer catatonic, but instead I'll just point out 1 or two. Not that it will matter as who is going to discover what I wrote amongst all the other mumbo jumbo in here?

But I digress. Why the earths magnetic field reverses itself every so often is not known. it has been called the greatest unanswered question i the geological sciences. When and where will volcanos and eartquakes erupt? No one knows, because little is understood about them. I could think of more, maybe later.

 

[element]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
(If you don't think particles can just "pop" into existence, you deny that solid state electronics actually work based upon the way we understand them to work.)....

Can you explain what you mean by this? I'm unaware of particles "popping out of no where" Matter is not created nor destroyed as far as I know, and especially not by man. It is only "changed" from one form to another.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: element®

Originally posted by: DrPizza
(If you don't think particles can just "pop" into existence, you deny that solid state electronics actually work based upon the way we understand them to work.)....

Can you explain what you mean by this? I'm unaware of particles "popping out of no where" Matter is not created nor destroyed as far as I know, and especially not by man. It is only "changed" from one form to another.

If you ever want a course that defies intuition, take quantum mechanics. There are a lot of "that's weird, that makes no sense" moments, yet those moments are often verified experimentally. Heisenberg's uncertainty explains that at the quantum level, you cannot know everything about a particle's position and motion at the same time. This isn't due to the precision of our instruments- both cannot be measured at the same time. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle also suggests the appearance of particles that pop in and out of existence. While these particles aren't normally observed, their effect on other particles may be observed experimentally to verify the existence of these virtual particles.

Rather than continue on, I'll give you some interesting reading from here

Question

Given the First Law of Thermodynamics: that you can't get something from nothing. Where did all the stuff in the universe come from and how is it still a law if it was once broken?

Asked by: Rob

Answer

The law you cite, applies only to 'closed systems', i.e. where nothing can be added or subtracted from the 'specimen'. Obviously if you apply the law to an empty box, then open the box and dump in a handful of sand, or quarks, or energy, you don't expect the law to apply, because the system is not 'closed'.

It is not known whether the universe as a whole is a closed system now at present. As far as conditions preceding and at the very moment of the 'big bang', we can only speculate whether the universe was closed, or open (to another, larger system), or whether the First Law (or lots of other laws) even applies under those extreme conditions.

Answered by: Grant Hallman, Ph.D., Universtiy of Toronto, 1971/1967


In the macroscopic world, the domain of ?classical? physics, the laws of thermodynamics are, and have always been, true.

However, on the quantum scale, it is a very different matter. Hiesenberg?s uncertainty states that there will always be a level of uncertainty when you try to make measurements of particles and other quantum scale occurrences. You can never know everything about a particle?s position and motion at any one time. This is an intrinsic uncertainty, it is not due to limitations on our measuring devices. This uncertainty of the energy of anything of the Planck scale is size allows some very bizarre phenomena to occur.

To us, vacuums appear to contain nothing at all. But, it you were to look closely, very, very closely (to the order of 10^-35m), space is actually a foaming mass of quantum activity. This quantum foam is made of particles and micro-black holes popping in and out of existence, apparently in contravention of the second law of thermodynamics, they appear out of nothing with energy, then disappear again just as quickly. The key to this is the uncertainty principle. The disturbance is permitted to ?borrow? a tiny amount of energy and exist for a very short length of time, and then it must return the energy and disappear again. But, the more energy it borrows, the less time it is allowed to exist. These ?temporary? particles, called virtual particles, are not just theoretical, they have been proven to have real effects on scientific experiment.

The only thing that prevents these virtual particles from coming into permanent existence is a lack of energy. However, it is possible to artificially supply energy to the particles therefore promoting them into reality. This could be done in a lab by creating very strong electric fields, but these fields are very difficult to create. On the other hand, intense gravitational fields could also do the job.

It is possible that during the big bang, black holes the size of a nucleus popped into existence due to the quantum foam. The interesting thing is that the smaller a black hole is, the more strongly space-time is distorted around it and distortions in space-time imply the existence of very strong gravitational fields. Stephen Hawking has shown that the gravitational field around such a hole would give enough energy to the quantum foam to promote the particles into real existence. Calculations show that in the big bang the initial extreme conditions would also have been enough to create real particles out of the gravitational energy of the rapidly expanding universe.

And as for how the universe actually came into being itself, it is believed that also in the quantum foam, virtual space-time bubbles also continually pop in and out of existence, like virtual particles, only to disappear again. However, it is possible that one of these space-time bubbles, which is actually an unimaginably small universe, could avoid rapidly disappearing again and be promoted to a full size universe, such as ours. However, for this to work some sort of repulsive force is needed, a sort of anti-gravity. Many scientists believe in the existence of such a force at the time of the creation of the universe, but as I?ve answered your question and that?s a whole other topic, I think I?ll stop before I go off on too much of a tangent.

To summarise, due to the uncertainty principle, particles and space-time bubbles continually pop in and out of existence for short times depending on their energy, without breaking the law of conservation of energy as they dissapear again. Think of it like an accountant (the universe) who balances the books at the end of every month. If someone (a virtual particle) was to borrow some money on the 4th day of the month (pop into existence)then put it back on the 8th day,(disappear again) then as far as the bookkeeper would know, nothing had gone amiss and no rules (or laws) had been broken. If a particle is to come into complete and real existence, it must take its energy from somewhere, such as a gravitational field.

For more info, do a google search of "pop into existence"

 

[DrPizza]

Here's another link that I'm going to just cut and paste on the topic of particles popping in and out of existence.
heh heh, didn't mean to thread hijack.. the original thread was pretty dead when someone asked me a question.

In the old days before fuel injection, cars used to have a carburettor to spray the petrol into the engine - and this carburettor worked on a vacuum. Everybody has seen a vacuum cleaner in action, so we all have a rough idea of what a vacuum is. According to common sense, a vacuum is just a whole lot of nothing. But thanks to the New Physics, it turns out that a vacuum is not just nothing, but that it's actually a churning sea of particles that continually wink in and out of existence.

This churning sea is full of energy, and some physicists think we can use the energy in this bubbling mass of short-lived particles. In fact, the Nobel Prize winning-physicist, Tsung-Dao Lee said that our future engineers might specialise in "vacuum engineering".

The idea that a vacuum is an "absence of everything" has bothered people for thousands of years. Aristotle, one of the big wheels of Greek philosophy, claimed that "Nature hates a vacuum" - and in an odd way, he was probably right.

Let's pretend that we're trying to make a vacuum. Now your average carton of milk holds one litre. Suppose you remove all the matter (the solids, liquids and the gases), and try to make your carton as "empty" as the space between the galaxies. Well, it turns out that this empty "vacuum" between the galaxies actually has about 1,000 molecules floating around in each litre of space. But even if we remove those 1,000 molecules, we still have something left in our carton.

Even though that carton is empty of matter, it is riddled with various energies - like heat and light. Those energies will weaken as we cool them down. But even if we cool our so-called vacuum down to absolute zero, we find that there is still a huge amount of energy running through that supposedly-empty space. Because this energy is still around at absolute zero, it's called the "zero-point energy".

So a vacuum is not nothing, it's actually something. A vacuum is a seething sea of temporary particles and anti-particles, that continually pop into existence and then vanish. These particles and anti-particles exist for such a short time, before they wink out of existence again, that they don't disturb the weird laws of Quantum Physics and the Uncertainty Principle. Each particle is exactly the opposite to its anti-particle - so each pair (of a particle and an anti-particle) adds up to zero. This frothing sea of short-lived particles and anti-particles is involved in making the "zero-point energy".

It's quite easy to prove that this "zero-point energy" actually exists. In 1948, Hendrik B. G. Casimir from the Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands proposed that if you put two metal plates very close to each other, the zero point energy would push them together!

Consider the zero-point energy in two locations - between the plates, and outside the plates. If the plates are very close together, only the very short wavelengths of energy can fit - the long wavelengths are too long to squeeze in. So between the plates, only some of the possible wavelengths of "zero-point energy" can happen, and they push the plates apart. But outside the plates, all the possible wavelengths of "zero-point energy" can happen - this energy tries to push the plates together. Casimir reckoned that there should be more energy on the outside of the plates, than between them, so they should get pushed together!

In 1958, another Dutch physicist, M. J. Sparnaay finally did the experiment in a pretty high vacuum. It turns out that if you get two metal plates, each one centimetre across, and place them 0.5 micron apart (just a fraction the size of a human hair), the force pushing them together is equivalent to a weight of 0.2 mg. Of course, the closer the plates are together, means that you can keep out more of the zero-point energy of the outside Universe, and so the force pushing the plates together is greater. And an experiment in 1996 by Steve Lamoreaux, now at Los Alamos, agreed with the predicted results to within 5%.

At the moment, we really don't know how much energy there is in the vacuum. Some scientists say that there the amount of energy is insignificant, but other scientists reckon that there may be enough energy in a single cubic centimetre of vacuum to boil all the water in all the oceans on Earth. To really find out, we need to do theory and experiment.

This is indeed very heavy stuff, but perhaps one day in the future, we could solve our energy problems by finding order in the chaos of the seething vacuum - and then we'd really be able to clean up our polluted world.


© Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd 2003.

 

[wacki]

I know of something that your teacher may not be able to explain with science, simply because the answer is so elusive.

Take a beer can, shake it up, put a quarter on a wood table, then place the beer can over the quarter. Open the beer can with one quick snap, do not slowly pop the tab. The beer will foam up a little, but will not spray everywhere. Ask your teacher to explain that with science. It can be explained, but I would be very impressed if your teacher could find the answer.

 

[wacki]

One thing that I know that science cannot explain, as of yet, is gravity. There are theories, such as the gravitons that belong to the string theory, or more properly named M theory. But science has yet to explain why gravity exists.

Thats the best I can do.