The 5 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

As technology advances, scientific knowledge also reaches new dimensions. In recent years we have discovered and rediscovered the wonders of our Universe with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope. From sand-raining exoplanets to confirmation of the expansion rate of the universe, many mysteries of astronomy and physics are beginning to be unraveled by humans.

But physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli believes that as we discover more about the world, “we also realize that there is much more to what we do not know than what we already understand.” Below we show a list The five most important problems not yet solved by physics.

Mysteries of physics ‘still’ unsolved

What is dark matter?

It makes sense that in order to see the universe, there must be matter and light to reflect it, even in spectrums imperceptible to the human eye, such as ultraviolet and infrared. What about matter that takes up space in space, contains mass, but does not reflect, absorb or emit light? This is dark matter.

Dark matter, confirmed by American astronomer Vera Rubin in the 1970s, is still a great mystery to scientists. Some suggest that it consists of “weakly interacting massive particles,” or WIMPs for short. But everyone is literally left in the dark and so far no WIMPs have been found.

What about dark energy? Why?

If a type of matter that takes up space, has mass, but does not emit light is already a big mystery, imagine something that makes up 68% of the Universe but does not take up space, has no mass (at least how we understand this concept). This is, or could be, dark energy, a possible property of space that uniformly permeates the entire Universe.

This concept likens dark energy to Einstein’s famous cosmological constant; The function of this constant would be to balance gravity if the Universe were static. However, when Hubble (astronomer) discovered that the Universe was expanding, the physicist himself gave up his theory. And this may be due precisely to the anti-gravity effect of dark energy.

3. Are there really parallel universes?

We’re not dealing with the Marvel Universe here, but our own Universe, or could there be multiverses? The current standard cosmological model, known as CDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter), assumes that space-time is flat (not warped due to the presence of mass and energy) and As we see above, the accelerating expansion of the universe is driven by dark energy (saw?).

Russian-American physicist Andrei Linde of Stanford University in the US therefore suggests that the Universe may be only what we can see, but that other unconnected regions of space-time, “multiverses”, may also exist. In the theory of eternal chaotic inflation, It represents infinite universes in the form of compressed bubbles, each with its own universe.

4. Why is there more matter than antimatter?

There are no secrets when it comes to antimatter: It exists, it has been detected (by American physicist Carl Anderson in 1932), produced, captured, and studied in laboratories around the world. The question is why the number of these antiparticles is less than the corresponding subatomic particles of opposite charge and spin.

It turns out that this asymmetry, which means that there is one antimatter particle in a billion left over from the Big Bang today, is a coincidence. If we had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, these particles and antiparticles could annihilate each other, leaving behind only a faint glow of photons.

5. Why does time only move from the past to the future?

The term “arrow of time” or “direction of time” is easy to understand: This dimension has a one-way flow and always moves from the past to the future. It is not difficult to understand the reason: In complex systems the level of entropy (disorder) only increases and so there is no way to reverse this later..

However, the mystery that is still unanswered today is: Why was the entropy of the Universe so low at the time of the Big Bang? And most importantly, why was everything so orderly in a chaotic period when all the energy of the Universe was concentrated in a tiny area? This will continue to be a challenge for cosmologists in the future.

Which of these mysteries do you believe physics will be able to solve first? Tell us about social media! Also take the opportunity to discover how many stellar black holes there are in the Milky Way.