“The laws of physics are the canvas god laid down on which to paint his masterpiece” – Richard P. Feynman.
It’s not that easy to define what physics is, for it embodies a lot more than what a definition can provide. Definitions only simplify what a matter is, and to simplify our understanding of physics we’d define it as the study of the interactions between physical systems, which also involves the study of matter and its motion through time and space; that goes along with other concepts such as energy and force. One cannot sail into the world of physics without coming across Sir Isaac Newton’s contributions to physics and science in general. To be honest if by any chance popped out from a time machine into the world nowadays, he’d be pretty amazed and proud to see how far physics had come. Newton would be utterly stunned to behold some crazy experiments coming to life –such as the Hadron Collider in Switzerland-. No one can deny the crazy yet unbelievable length physics and science have reached, nonetheless, there’s still a vast valley of mysteries that remain unsolved and unanswered to this day.
What fallow is a brief tour of some of the biggest mysteries that remain unsolved in physics:
1. Was there life on Venus?
A hellish landscape would be the appropriate name to describe the surface of Venus. The second planet from the sun is the hottest in our solar system, that’s due to an atmosphere that consists of nothing but carbon dioxide and clouds of highly corrosive sulphuric acid draped over a volcanic landscape of razor-shaped lava flows, hence, the pressure on the surface of Venus is about 92 times the pressure you’d feel at sea level on earth. In spite of all the factors that make Venus inhabitable, yet, there are scientists who suspect that Venus one upon a time was much like earth, with a liquid water ocean, which means that it probably life exist on Venus at some point.
2. How did life begin on earth?
There’s no record of the early steps that led to life on earth. It’s complicated to determine how life began on earth because we just cannot go back in time to observe and study what was going on and how was formed. The origin of life on earth remains one of the biggest mysteries scientists couldn’t answer till now. We know that life began at least 3.5 billion years ago, for, it’s the age of the oldest rocks found with fossil evidence of life on this planet, nonetheless, it’s hard almost impossible to know for sure how it really began.
3. What’s the universe made of?
Humans have observed the universe for almost an eternity and were always amazed by how great and big the universe is. However, everything we can see up in the sky makes up only 5 percent of the universe. The basic components of the entire universe are two components dark ma matter and energy. The ultimate challenge for scientists is to determine first what dark matter is, and due to the fact that all matter is invisible it is a total struggle to put it to study and the source of dark energy is unknown as well which makes it so hard to determine and to know for sure what’s the universe made of unless of course, we know what dark matter is and where’s the source of dark energy that’s holding the universe.
4. What’s dark matter?
Scientists believe that the universe is made up of dark matter and it doesn’t emit light or energy. Although scientists can tell you what dark matter is not, they can’t tell what it is nor what is it composed of.
5- Is there life outside of earth?
The ultimate goal of scientists nowadays is to determine without doubt signs of life outside of earth no matter how small it is, we don’t really know for sure how soon can that happen but the impossible is not science. For that to happen scientists will need two factors in the future: the prevalence of life in the galaxy and how lucky they are as they take those first steps.