NS: 13 more things that don't make sense

[bystander]

13 more things that don't make sense
New Scientist | 02 Sept 2009

1. Axis of evil:
   • Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern
2. Dark flow:
   • Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed
3. Eocene hothouse:
   • Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Now let's talk about climate change
4. Fly-by anomalies:
   • Space probes using Earth's gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Call in dark matter
5. Hybrid life:
   • The fusion of two distinct evolutionary lines is not supposed to work – but the seas are teeming with chimeras that prove it can
6. Morgellons disease:
   • Fatigue? Do you feel insects under your skin? Seen any strange fibres sprouting from your body? Then you've got a disease that's not supposed to exist
7. The Bloop:
   • During 1997, US undersea monitoring equipment heard a series of sounds far louder than any whale song. They were never heard again
8. Antimatter mystery:
   • The big bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts – so why didn't the universe disappear in a puff of self-annihilation?
9. The lithium problem:
   • The universe only contains a third as much lithium as it's supposed to
10. MAGIC results:
    • High-energy radiation from a gamma-ray burst reached Earth 4 minutes later than the lower-energy rays. That's not how Einstein said it would be
11. The elusive monopole:
    • Why do magnetic poles always come paired as north and south, never alone?
12. Noise from the edge of the universe:
    • Are dud signals from a gravitational wave detector evidence that the universe is a holographic projection?
13. The nocebo effect:
    • How a diagnosis of terminal illness can come true – even if it's wrong

13 things that do not make sense

• New Scientist | 19 May 2005
  
  There are many scientific observations that simply defy explanation. In this classic article from 2005, New Scientist takes a tour of exceptions that could rewrite all the rules

[BMAONE23]

Could #4 have anything to do with the lessening effects of gravity and the effect of time dilation? Merely giving us the visual appearance of a relative ncrease in speed?

[Beyond]

Has #4 thrown off the positions of any spacecraft?
As to #8, look at the Atom. The +proton and the -electron do not cancel each other out. Perhaps because of the neutral neutron? Could there be neutral matter out there that just hasn't been noticed yet?
As to #10, computers have shortcuts also.

[Chris Peterson]

Has #4 thrown off the positions of any spacecraft?

Well, that's the result of this effect. If you mean significantly, then no.

As to #8, look at the Atom. The +proton and the -electron do not cancel each other out. Perhaps because of the neutral neutron?

They do cancel each other out, which is why atoms are normally neutral. They don't normally come together because the nature of quantum states prevents it. When forced to collide at high energies they simply produce a spray of different particles. That's very different from the behavior of matter and antimatter particles when they come together. #8 isn't much of a mystery anymore, since there is good theory to explain why only one type of matter dominates the Universe.

As to #10, computers have shortcuts also.

#10 isn't a very big mystery, either. The reason for the delay is reasonably explained by a delay at the source caused by the GRB mechanism.

This is a strange list. A few items represent genuine mysteries. A few are just silly (like the Bloop or Morgellons or the nocebo effect). And a few have been reasonably addressed since this was originally published. None of them are things I'd describe as not making sense.

[orin stepanek]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -flow.html
intriguing! I hope were not being sucked in! Actually; it makes one wonder how much we don't know about whats beyond our boundaries of the universe.

[Beyond]

Forget about whats beyond the boundries of the Universe, scientists do not even know how big the Universe is!! The Hubble showed them that.
When they pointed the hubble at a small section of empty space and found more there then they had known to exist before, they were overwhelmed, to say the least. That alone should indicate that there's what, a million times more to the Universe than what was originally thought? And what if they point the Hubble (or a newer telescope) at a seemingly empty part of space in the newness of space that they dicovered and find more there than they had known prior to that point, does that then increase the known Universe by a factor of a Billion? For now it would seem that knowing anything outside the boundries of the Universe is a long way off for scientists. They have too much work to do to try and figure out what is inside the boundries, for now.

[Chris Peterson]

Forget about whats beyond the boundries of the Universe, scientists do not even know how big the Universe is!! The Hubble showed them that.

Quite the opposite. The HST helped refine our knowledge of the size of the observable Universe, and that is something that is probably known with a high degree of accuracy. Additional or better observations are not going to change that. The size of the entire Universe is not known. If we are ever able to know this, it will come from well developed theory, not from observation.