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

by Michael Brooks

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

If you take the galaxies moving away from Earth, and plot their speeds against their distance from Earth, 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 it is three times more distant, its speed is three times greater. To Hubble, there was only one possible explanation. The galaxies were like paper dots stuck onto a balloon; blow it up, and the dots don't grow, but they do move apart. The very space in between the galaxies was growing. Hubble had discovered that the universe is expanding.

Karl Popper said that science progresses only by falsification: Someone throws up a hypothesis, and then anyone can use experimental data to attempt to shoot it down.

Schrödinger came to the conclusion that life is the one system that turns the natural progression of entropy, moving from order to disorder, on its head; living things are, effectively, machines that create order from disorder in their environment.