13 Things that don't make sense....

[Moonliner]

And here I was worried about where my socks disappear to.

From New Scientist: 13 Things that don't make sense (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html?full=true)


#2 The Horizon Problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

I never was a fan of mysteries. Just goes to show that knowledge is infinite and we'll never know everything - but we'll keep moving "closer".

[Ghoulish Delight]

I have issue with these being labeled as "don't make sense". Just because it's not currently understood doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense.

[Alex]

Also, some aren't really "big mysteries" but rather "someone says it is a big mystery."

For example, on the Ennis homeopathy one, since she published her results in 2001 nobody has been able to replicate them. Odd one-off results happen all of the time.

(Also, the top of the article linked to is a bit misleading. The date says April 2009 but the article was actually written in 2005 so some of the science has shifted since then. For example, the evidence for Inflation Theory has been greatly strengthened in recent years, going a long way to explain the Horizon Problem.)

And the Cold Fusion one is just silly:

That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."

Um...the point is that the experimental case barely exists. Nobody has ever replicated the cold fusion claims experimentally and new claims by others since 1989 have only found weak support. But one engineer says otherwise so it is one of the great mysteries? Research into cold fusion should by all means continue but I'm not sure what "does not make sense" currently.