I got to have dinner last night with Robin Hanson, who blogs at Overcoming Bias. Robin is a creative big-picture thinker, who took a twisting career path from physics through philosophy of science and artificial intelligence research to become a tenured professor of economics. He posed a question, which he just re-posed at his blog: what is the most surprising thing we’ve learned about the universe?
Obviously the right answer depends on a set of expectations; surprising to whom? I originally suggested quantum mechanics, and in particular the fact that the outcomes of experiments are not perfectly predictable even in principle. I think that was the most surprising thing to the people who actually discovered it, in the context of what they thought they understood. But what about the most surprising thing to our pre-scientific hunter-gather ancestors? I suggested the fact that the same set of rules govern living beings and inanimate matter, but if you have any better ideas feel free to chime in.
But we can ask the complementary question: what is the most surprising thing about the universe that we haven’t yet discovered, but plausibly could? Something that is not already reasonably excluded by experiments that we’ve done, but also wouldn’t be readily accommodated by a theoretical model. So “string theory is right” certainly wouldn’t count, but neither would “the proton is heavier than the neutron.”
I once discussed this with Bill Wimsatt on an episode of Odyssey (RealPlayer). I went with “reproducible violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” But there are plenty of other good possibilities; what if we discovered tachyons, or that there really was an Intelligent Designer? Suggestions welcome.
In terms of possibilities that I consider _plausible_ but _extremely unlikely_, I would be very surprised to learn that Earth has been visited by intelligent extra-terrestrials, or that this occurs in my lifetime.
If we want to elevate the level of surprise, let us presume the extra-terrestrials land their UFO and out steps a creature that is indistinguishable from a modern human. To go further, let’s say this creature is a genetic clone of someone who lives here on Earth. But now I’m getting silly I guess.
On an entirely different note, I think discovering that us, and the universe as we know it, are all part of an enormous computer simulation — this would have to compete for most surprising too.
It would be tremendously surprising to me for us to experimentally prove that there is an continuity of our existence beyond our physical existence here on earth. Life after death. I am however highly skeptical that this will be the case.
Another very surprising discovery would be that complex information processing is happening elsewhere in the universe in environments (i.e center of stars) that we currently consider not candidates for life.
e.
Sean:
Regarding the most surprising thing we know about the universe, there is one that is perhaps second nature to us physicists but when you stop to think about it is really remarkable, and would surprise anyone to whom it was explained:
The speed of a light wave is the same regardless of your motion relative the source of the wave or any other reference object moving in any way.
Mike, any message of finite length is contained in the digits of pi.
I guess this is a variant of the “intelligent designer” angle, but discovering the universe really is a simulation would certainly surprise a lot of folks, I’m guessing. Hell, it’d rock the spiritualists just as hard as the empiricists, and probably trigger a global mental meltdown. The way I suppose it would play out would be a steady build-up of increasingly implausible, yet reproducible, experimental results from our latest satellites and accelerators that no sensible physical model we can conceive of could ever accommodate. PAMELA just being the tip of the iceberg, in other words. Ultimately we figure out that we’ve discovered the limitations of our simulators’ computational power and/or handle on complexity, and are now seeing the code they couldn’t debug, or their sub-godly physics engine, or whatever.
Well, granted, as I understand the physics it is somewhat predicted, but… I would say that them most surprising thing we could discover about the universe would be another one.
Peter: Sagan’s point was that the existence of a interesting message surprisingly early within pi’s digits.
We could plausibly discover evidence of past civilization on Earth, say, dinosaur technology. The geological/fossil record is not perfectly fleshed out (heh!) at the level of a couple million years. Keep in mind that hominids a couple million years ago were pretty different from today.
The fact that this past technology was lost, and went undiscovered so long, might then help explain the short lives of civilizations, and thus why we have not heard from extraterrestrials.
The Riemann Hypothesis is undecidable.
But I don’t know if that counts.
Actually. Does anyone know of a good discussion of the consequences of the RH being false?
To me the biggest surprise is that the Universe is capable of generating complex enough structures that actually attempt to understand the rules that formulate them in the first place.
I’d be surprised if the LHC destroyed the Earth. Or unleashed a plague of radioactive zombies.
Seriously, how about the the LHC doesn’t find the Higgs Boson? Or anything else beyond the standard model?
The LHC discovers a particle with a spin (in units of h-bar) of 0.36
Sili, if the Riemann Hypothesis is undecidable, then there can be no proof of that fact. This is because if the Riemann hypothesis is false, then there always exists a proof as you can always point out that particular root that is not on the critical line. So, the only way the Riemann hypothesis can be undecidable is if it is true. A proof of undecidability would thus be equivalent to a proof of the Riemann hypothesis itself which would contradict the undecidability.
How about experimental proof of CPT violation.
The sad truth is that, after the last few years, discovering *anything* new and really interesting would surprise me. I mean, apart from the cosmological constant, nothing really exciting has happened observationally. And theory-wise, nothing since about 1999.
Quarks and their friends are described at one level. At an higher level, here are the atoms. Then the molecules, the cells, the living bodies, the ecology, and so one.
For convenience we use to describe each level using its own laws (no QM in cells description!), but everybody believe that the higher laws are in fact special cases of bottom laws.
Imagine that’s not true, i.e. we have to introduce new laws to describe the highest levels, and that these laws do not come from the bottom. I’d be surprized. And a lot of folk too, I’d guess.
We discover that the universe is radically smaller than we suppose.
“reproducible violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
That’s mine as well, kinda. I have this… ‘wish’ or ‘fancy’ I guess you could call it… that maybe the Second Law of Thermodynamics has a caveat built into it so that it doesn’t fully apply on gigantic scales.
Probably not true, but it would be kinda cool:).
Obviously, that would only apply if it took place within our universe. Clearly if we could open a portal to another universe, or create mini purpose-made universes that we could extract usable energy from (like the Ancients on Stargate with their Zero Point Modules:P), then it would be simple to violate the Second Law on any scale (though that probably wouldn’t be a true violation, since the law only applies within a closed system).
I also think it would be surprising if we found out that the universe was… how could you put it… um… “dimensionally consistent” maybe. IE: the 4 dimensions shrink as we go back in time, and expand as we go forward in time. So when the universe was very young and small (from our perspective), time was going very quickly, so for anything living in that era, it would appear just like the universe today.
And as you go forward in time, and the universe experiences heat death (from our perspective) if you zoom out far enough, and speed up time far enough, you’d find out that all those little photons zooming around were actually the building blocks for reaaaaalllly big quarks and such things.
It would mean that while our universe is finite in our 3 familiar spacial dimensions, it would be effectively infinite in the time dimension do to the compression and expansion of time (it would have to expand and contract in order for the speed of light to appear constant from any reference frame).
Again, probably not true, but I think it would be cool. It would be nice to know that the universe wasn’t going to die a long, slow death, forever.
errr, obviously I meant “So when the universe was very young and small (from our perspective), time was going very slowly”.
What came to me as a surprise is what Feynman predicted on quantum mechanics “…and you will find someday that, after all, it isn’t as horrible as it looks”. Feynman’s Epilogue in The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
A reconciliation of modern science with spiritual experience. Human culture has spawned both these directions of enquiry and discovered commonalities in both directions. Perhaps such a reconciliation leads to a totally novel aspect of human culture. Maybe the nature and structure of time becomes better understood and assimilated. (I have not distinguished between past & future items and not addressed the surprise motif, but feel that what I write has connection with the theme of discussion.)
Anything that would add credence to mind-body duality would and should be the most surprising and important discoveries of all time. I’m not holding my breath, but if evidence was found to show that some part of our minds were not bound by the material brain, than that would literally blow my mind.
That would also have repercussions in everything from biology to fundamental physics to even mathematics.
I’m sure the most surprising thing to early hunter-gatherers was motions of celestial bodies. The second most was the discovery of beer.
I think the most startling discover in the future would be the discovery of non-human intelligence, whether it was AI or other. I think it would be more startling if intelligence was discovered in some unexpected environment.
The biggest surprise to date? How utterly predictable (and pathetic) human behavior is. Hopefully a non-human intelligence wouldn’t share the same flaws, but I doubt that WE could be the creators of such an intelligence.
Oh …
It shows that I never had a head for maths, doesn’t it?
Thank you.
So what if it is false? Not that I think it is, but someone must have looked at what the consequences would be in order to attempt a proof by contradiction.