Exercise your critical thinking skills

Popular news stories trumpet new scientific discoveries and breakthroughs( though many turn out to be premature) so we hear a lot about what we know and think we understand. One of the things you learn as you become educated IMO is how little we actually do know and understand about many of the things that we take for granted as being explained.
As an exercise in critical thinking lets see how many things we can come up with that we do not really understand.
Some things that we can sucessfully manipulate according to sets of rules that we have developed from experience are nonetheless not understood at the fundamental level.
I will start with one of those things: gravity is perhaps the most obvious example. We can calculate it's effects with extreme precision without having a basic understanding of it's nature.

Can you think of an example? It need not be something that we can manipulate or predict with precision like gravity just anything that we don't really understand.
Not like where is Amelia Earharts plane or Jimmy Hoffa's body please

ps..lets keep this thread on subject and not veer off into other areas like Intelligent Design. This thread isn't about ID it just so happened that debating that topic caused me to think about this related topic which is something that has always interested me.

 

Why does a fertilised 'egg' split, and thus begin the process of growing a new creature?

 

ricky wrote:

Good one Ricky.

Guess there isn't a lot of critical thinking going on this morning

How about light (or electromagnetic radiation) and the duality problem. It behaves like a particle in some situations and like a wave in other situations. Is it either one or something different altogether?

We don't know.

 

How about thought?
We know there are chemical and electrical reactions in the brains when thinking, but what does really happen?

 

stix wrote:

Excellent.
We can measure the electrochemical reactions in the brain, identify alpha wave activity an so on yet we haven't a clue what a thought actually is.
It's another kind of duality problem, the brain/mind. We can study the brain and learn things about what activities occur where and when yet it tells us next to nothing about the mind.

 

Electromagnetism.

 

chris wrote:

Good. The exact connection between electromagnetism and electromagnetic radiation isn't well understood.
Different manifestations of the same phenomenon or just related in some way? Electricity and light are related in some way it appears but the exact relationship is murky.

 

The co-existance of light as matter and rays at the same time.

Christian

 

Conscious human action.

With a vast and constantly (exponentially) growing record of past and present human actions, and the results thereof, we still cannot fully understand or predict them.

 

chris wrote:

I mentioned that already as the duality of light acting like a particle sometimes and like a wave sometimes.

 

roel wrote:

Good point. Scientifically analyzing human behaviour has never really succeeded. Psychology is really only part science.

 

Sorry, missed that

Christian

 

I was waiting for someone to mention what is perhaps the most ubiquitous and least understood of all the mysteries of the universe that surround us: time. Think of it. We experience it's effect every day of our lifes. We construct complicated schemes that must occur at precise intervals with confidence that it will continue to function in the future just as predictably as it has done in the past. Yet we know virtually nothing about it.
What is it? Some people confuse time with our human conception of what it is or our methods for measuring it yet it is none of these things. It appears to be some thing that is woven into the fabric of the universe around and through matter and energy and is intimately related to motion.
You and I know as much about it's fundamental nature as any physicist or mathematician based on nothing but our intuitive grasp of it's presence.
It is one of the most fascinating and least understood mysteries of the universe.

 

Assuming time exists, of course. I don't know of any proof that actually suggest time as an emperical existance.

Christian

 

christian wrote:

You know it exists intuitively you just cannot get a grasp on it.
Every discrete event in the universe doesn't occur simoltaneously does it?
That seemingly linear ordering of events is time or is it the shadow left by it's passing

 

For a concept of time to exist, however, both the past and the future must exist at the present, or only the present exist, and thus there is no point referring to a scale, when only one point exist.

Christian

 

With a little editing of your words I find a much more interesting question; what is life?
It has been proven that by mixing several chemical elements, heating and cooling them and a little more life can be created.
According to all textbooks, DNA the base of all life, it's expression, replication, mutation can all be described as either a physical or chemical reaction.
Therefor do we truly live? The fact that I'm typing this is caused by several chemical reactions taking place caused by other chemical and/or physical reactions.
By this logic, would it not be theoreticaly possible to calculate the future since almost everything is a predictable, predetermind physical/chemical action and reaction?

 

How about "the weight of the human soul (life energy)?"

If the weight of a person on a death bed (God forbid) decreases after death (no heart beat, nor brain activity) suggests something left the body; therefore, if this can be measured as a constant then the soul has mass?

After Amble

I life is an illusion then I am not overweight, you must have an over active imagination.

 

True enough the details are unknown, but this one can be explained by one of einsteins theories; E=mc2 (energy=mass*speed of light square)
so if the energy leaves from a body (no heart beat, nor brain activity) then by this formula the mass decreases as well, since the speed of light is a constant.
(btw whoohoo promotion )

 

But it is not. Hence my suggestion that we still do not understand conscious human action.