13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time

by Michael Brooks

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not"Eureka!," but "That's funny…" —ISAAC ASIMOV

science, being completely and utterly stuck can be a good thing; it often means a revolution is coming.

string theory, the attempt to tie quantum theory together with Einstein's theory of relativity.

debated how it was that radioactive materials could apparently defy the laws of conservation of energy and momentum.

Quantum theory encapsulated the novel idea that some things in nature are entirely random, happen entirely without cause.

of the string theorists present, some of the greatest minds in the world, are now convinced that we can never fully comprehend the universe.

Analysis of the light from a distant supernova led astronomers to a startling conclusion: that the universe is expanding, and that this expansion is getting faster and faster all the time.

All they can say is that some mysterious"dark energy" is blowing up the universe.

anomaly, an apparently simple observation, has brought string theory to its knees. It cuts away at everything its pro...

they say: our universe must be one of many universes, each with different characteristics.

try to find reasons why those characteristics are as they are in our universe, they argue, is a waste of time.

paradigm shift. Scientists work with one set of ideas about how the world is. Everything they do, be it experimental or theoretical work, is informed by, and framed within, that set of ideas. There will be some evidence that doesn't fit, however. At first, that evidence will be ignored or sabotaged. Eventually, though, the anomalies will pile up so high they simply cannot be ignored or sabotaged any longer. Then comes crisis.

Crisis, Kuhn said, is soon followed by the paradigm shift in which everyone gains a radically new way of looking at the world. Thus were conceived ideas like relativity, quantum theory, and the theory of plate tectonics.

matter, was first spotted in the 1930s.

she showed that the shape, size, and spin of galaxies means either there is something wrong with gravity or there's much more matter out there in space than we can

Put together, dark matter and dark energy make up 96 percent of the universe. Just two anomalous scientific results have told us that we can see only a tiny fraction of what we call the cosmos.

There is the placebo effect: carefully planned, rigorously controlled experiments repeatedly show that the mind can affect the body's biochemistry in ways that banish pain and produce startling medical effects. Except that, like dark matter, no one is quite sure that the placebo effect really exists.

enigma of our sense of free will despite all scientific evidence to the contrary; the spacecraft that are being pushed off course by an unknown force; the trouble we have explaining the origin of both sex and death using our best biological theories…

The philosopher Karl Popper once said, rather cruelly perhaps, that"science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification."

The future of science depends on identifying the things that don't make sense; our attempts to explain anomalies are exactly what drives science forward.

Through several decades, plenty of people noticed the strange jigsaw-piece similarity between the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa, but it wasn't until 1915 that someone pointed out it could be more than a coincidence. Alfred Wegener's insightful observation led to our theory of plate tectonics and continental drift; it is an observation that, at a stroke, did away with the"stamp-collecting" nature of geologic science and gave it a unifying theory that opened up billions of years of Earth's history for inspection.

The things that don't make sense are, in some ways, the only things that matter.

the majority of the particles and

forces it is supposed to describe are entirely unknown to science.

Almost all of the universe is missing: 96 percent, to put a number on it.

dark matter—is nearly a quarter of the total amount of mass in

the cosmos.

Dark energy is scientists' name for the ghostly essence that is making the fabric of the universe expand ever faster, creating ever more empty space between galaxies.

One of the biggest puzzles facing astronomers of the time was the enigma of the spiral nebulae. These

The question he asked of the world's astronomers was this: Is the universe expanding, contracting, or holding steady?

Slipher realized that the various colors in the light would change depending on whether a nebula was moving toward or away from Earth. Color

one were hurtling away from Earth, with just four getting closer. They were all moving at startling speeds—on average, at more than 2 million kilometers per hour.

you find that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. If one receding galaxy is twice as far from Earth as another, it will be moving twice as fast. If

According to his calculations, the only explanation was that there was about four hundred times more mass in the Coma cluster than could be accounted for by the cluster's visible matter.

NO one knows what the dark matter actually is.

weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

Dirac's quantum field theory eventually led to the prediction that empty space has energy.

There are genes, for example, that encode for the instructions and apparatus for making proteins. This violates biological dogma straightaway; viruses are supposed to let their hosts make the proteins. Some of the protein-making apparatus in Mimivirus is exactly the same as you'd find in all the things we call"alive." There are also genes for repairing and untangling DNA, for metabolizing sugars, and for protein folding—an essential step in the construction of life.

Their signature is a seemingly inhospitable habitat. Halobacterium, for example, thrives in saline water. Others live in the intestines of cows, in hot sulphurous springs, in deep ocean trenches feeding off the black smoker vents, in petroleum reserves…

says that viruses are parasites. Which means, logically, they can't have existed until after some other life-forms came into existence.

Around half of Mimivirus's genes are unknown to science; no one has a clue what they encode.

Unless, that is, Mimivirus really is from another age.

for example, sees viruses as"the world's leading source of genetic innovation" and thinks they are most probably the root of life on Earth.

that LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor, was some kind of virus.

Reovirus is currently being tested in clinical trials. The list of cancer cells it will kill is impressive—

Blanding's turtles don't get old and decrepit; they don't show any increased susceptibility to disease through their lifetimes.

several species of fish, amphibians, and reptiles that don't senesce.