The difference between a smart guy and a scientist is that a smart guy always claims that he knows a lot, and a scientist usually claims that he knows nothing. Ask an expert in any field and he will confirm that there are far fewer things in his business that he knows than things that he does not know.
Humanity has always wanted to learn as much new as possible, which is why there is a science in the world that helps us gradually learn all the secrets of the world. However, not everything is clear to us today. Here are some examples.
Why do we sleep and why do we dream?
Every night, almost all people on the planet are accustomed to sleeping and dreaming, and why this is happening, the researchers cannot really answer. There are, of course, many theories. According to one of them, we dream to tidy up our brain or to get rid of stress.
Research shows that sleep can be used as an indication of what might happen to our bodies in the future, such as using dreams to find out if there is a risk of diseases such as Parkinson's or dementia.
The results of research by scientists from New Mexico may seem even stranger. It turned out that trained research participants could manipulate their nightmares, thus curing depression.
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If we finally understand exactly why we dream, we can make a huge number of incredible discoveries. So far, we are far from the truth. For millions of years, a third of our lives have been spent in dreams, almost constantly dreaming, but we do not yet know why.
What happens after death?
Death is another great secret of our world. No one can say with certainty what happens after our body stops functioning. Scientists are doing everything they can to find out, but they get more questions instead of answers.
The first important problem is the state of clinical death. A huge number of people talk about seeing white light, hearing music, hovering in the air, leaving their body, and much more. This experience cannot be called hallucinations, because they happen when the brain and heart shut down.
A second question arises: what happens to consciousness after physical death? According to one of the leading experts in the field of resuscitation after death, Dr. Sam Parnia, people can be resurrected without lasting physical damage within 10 hours after death. This suggests that our consciousness still continues to exist, even if the body does not rise from the dead.
We know very little about death, despite the fact that for many millennia we have been trying to understand its nature.
Why did life arise on Earth?
We've come a long way before learning how to create artificial life. However, we must admit that we do not know for sure why the life that is boiling around us today appeared in this world.
The only thing we know is that at a certain point in the history of the Earth, more precisely, 3.8 billion years ago, molecules began to demonstrate incredibly complex chemical reactions, which ultimately led to the emergence of ribonucleic acid and, ultimately, life.
What exactly stimulated the molecules to such a reaction remains a mystery to this day. According to one version, all this is the creation of God, according to another version, ultraviolet light is to blame for everything, but no one can answer exactly why this happened.
Scientists from all over the world are trying to solve this riddle and recreate the original cocktail that was on Earth, hoping to witness the moment when life arose, but in vain.
What are the laws of the universe?
Based on observations, we concluded that the universe is expanding, this cannot be denied. It also cannot be denied that it is accelerating. According to the laws of gravity, everything should, on the contrary, slow down, preparing for the "Big Compression" - the process of the reverse Big Bang, but in reality everything is somewhat different. Why is this happening?
Many scientists blame this on dark energy and dark matter, which they believe make up most of the universe. However, where this energy and this matter come from is unknown. Moreover, there is no 100% proof of their existence.
The universe lives by its own laws, and we just have to guess and make assumptions.
Mysteries of history
We are used to seeing history as a kind of narrative that has survived to this day. However, over time, many facts have been lost, leaving huge blank spots in history.
Although we know a lot about some eras, for example, the stages of the era of Ancient Rome, many pages of history and even whole centuries are unknown to us, and we can only guess about some things in these pages.
Take 6th century Britain, for example. Roman influence at this time disappeared, Christianity only began to develop, and Scandinavia began to gain momentum. Very little is known about this important period in history. Only one sermon of a mad monk has come down to us, 90% of which is devoted to divine justice.
Even such great powers as Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece left far from complete information about themselves. Much of our knowledge of these times comes from unreliable sources. Discoveries appear every year. For example, more recently it was discovered that the Greeks had built something like a prototype of a computer 2 thousand years before Babbage.
Why does a person need art?
Ask any creative person why they draw, write, or engage in other creative activities, and you are unlikely to get at least some intelligible and understandable answer. A person is engaged in creativity, completely not knowing why exactly he is doing it.
For example, there is no evolutionary advantage, as for the species, in what we start to paint. We can only guess why we need art.
According to one theory, creative expression - music, sculpture, painting, and so on - is all just the equivalent of peacock feathers, that is, it is only needed to attract the attention of the opposite sex and, therefore, to satisfy sexual needs and reproduction.
Whether this is true or not is debatable, one can only guess. So far, we have only theories and assumptions in our arsenal.
Dinosaur riddles
We know from childhood that once upon a time on our planet lived completely different creatures that we are used to seeing today. We have no idea about most of them, since their fossil remains simply did not reach us for so many years.
For example, in order for the skeleton of a dinosaur to survive for millions of years and come down to us, a lot of difficult conditions are required. This means that even if we find skeletons of some species, these skeletons are not always complete. The remains of most of the creatures have not survived at all. For example, only a few bones of living creatures that lived in the Middle Triassic period, which lasted ten million years, have survived to us!
Even if researchers manage to find large fragments of fossils, in reality they are just small parts of a large whole. According to National Geographic, more than 59 percent of the dinosaurs known to science are known solely from small fragments. Because of such scant information, scientists often make the mistake of mistaking some creatures for others.
Ancient literature
We cannot always tell a lot about the famous writers of the past, whose works are known all over the world. Take, for example, William Shakespeare, one of the world's most readable authors, whose plays are compulsory in every theater in the world.
It is surprising that despite such a celebrity, too little is known about Shakespeare. Moreover, there is an assumption that such a writer did not exist at all, and the works were written by a group of playwrights under a common pseudonym.
Little is known about the Greek poet Homer, the author of the famous Iliad and Odyssey. More precisely, it is only known that "he probably existed." Also, we are not exactly sure that those of his works that we know today are originals.
Of all Roman literature, on the other hand, only two novels have survived, and then only fragments. Many literary works were destroyed by various warriors, fires, earthquakes and so on.
Force of gravity
We already mentioned that dark matter can explain why the universe does not obey the laws of gravity. But we forgot to mention that gravity itself also does not obey its own laws.
Gravity, to put it simply, is the only one of the four fundamental forces that contradicts itself and ceases to act if the body becomes small enough.
In fact, gravity is a real headache for physicists, and some of them argue that it does not exist at all. Every time we make some important discovery, we realize how little we know about the world.
Theories about the world change all the time
If you imagine science as a house of cards, and each new breakthrough theory as a 10-ton iron ball falling on it, you will understand the whole essence of the problem. Around the end of the 19th century, we sincerely believed that we had almost reached the frontiers of knowledge. But at this time, a citizen by the name of Einstein appeared, who published perhaps the most famous formula in history, and all ideas about the world were completely destroyed.
We began to build our ideas about the world from the very beginning, and everything went well until we noticed that black holes were behaving completely differently than we expected. Today we are on the verge of new turns in the development of science.
This means that some fundamental concepts can be revisited again.
For example, it is quite possible with the help of String Theory to "prove" that we live in some kind of hologram, which is projected from the edge of the universe. Of course, this is not the mainstream theory, but it shows how strange the truth can be.
Thus, nothing makes sense, and you may be just an image that is projected from the depths of space.