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Questions

Entry 463, on 2007-01-25 at 15:00:08 (Rating 1, Science)

One of the web sites I spend a bit of time at is Wired. Today they had an article about What We Don't Know. These are big, ultimate questions about life, the Universe, and everything. For example: Is time an illusion? How can observation affect the outcome of an experiment? How does the brain produce consciousness? How do entangled particles communicate? Why do placebos work? Is time travel possible? and Why do we still have big questions?

These are all fascinating, and there aren't any complete answers for any of them. I think I could provide some sort of answer for many. For example, there are well understood mechanisms for how observation can affect an experiment, but this escalates into truly interesting physics when we start talking about observations causing probability functions to collapse and create a definite outcome.

How the brain produces conciousness is an interesting one. Its actually quite hard to define precisely what conciousness is, so answering the question will always be a challenge. But experiments are demonstrating a biological basis for many of what we call higher functions of the brain, so there might be a simple answer waiting there.

How entangled particles communicate is a weird one, like almost any question related to quantum physics. I really don't have a clue, but no one else seems to know either, so I don't feel quite so bad! I've just had a brief read through "Bell's theorem". OK, now I really know that I don't have a clue!

The article is set up as a wiki, so people can collaborate on producing answers. Maybe that will produce some interesting information so I will keep checking back for a few days.

Link at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions_pr.html

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