Things Science Doesn’t Understand When we talk about science many of us never give a thought to the fact there may be many things we don’t understand but nevertheless they are detectable in some way. Someday science may be able to solve a lot more of these riddles but as we progress, we get deeper into science and learn things we never know and this could lead to finding out there are a lot more things we don’t understand. By now you’re probably wondering exactly what I’m talking about so let me tell you. When trials are given for medical drugs the testers will usually give some people the drug and others some sort of sugar pill or something like that which is called a placebo. The placebo has nothing in it that would change anyone’s condition and yet, there are always some people who get various degrees of help from it. This help ranges from feeling somewhat better to being cured. Science has wrestled with these results and yet they can’t figure this out which makes them think since it is what is known as a blind test, which means nobody in the test knows if they have the real pill or the placebo, it must be related to our minds curing us. They think if we believe strongly enough we are going to be helped, the human mind might do the repairs in various degrees. Some say this effect has never been studied carefully enough because the drug companies wouldn’t want people to be able to cure themselves since it would hurt their bottom line. Others say this isn’t true. Scientists have a problem with why some cosmic rays exist. Some cosmic rays travel here from far outside of our galaxy. As far as we know, they are made up of protons and sometimes heavy atomic nuclei. The part of this we don’t understand is how do they come from so far away. According to Einstein they should lose energy from collisions they have with low energy photons, which are elementary particles associated with light. Einstein formed a theory giving them a maximum amount of energy which he believed could not be exceeded after all of the collisions on the way here. Japan’s detector at the University of Tokyo has disproven this theory and has actually captured cosmic rays which are traveling above the speed limit or should I say energy limit. There may be a theory about this which states cosmic rays may find it easier to move in some directions rather than others and that would mean the universe may not be uniform in all directions. One thing which has puzzled scientists since we have gotten into space has to do with speed. When we launch a probe into space, we can calculate how fast it should go any given time and yet some mysterious force is speeding up the probes. It is not a big increase in speed and as a matter of fact it is tiny, but it does exist. Scientists take this speed into account but they are yet to find out why it happens and over a large distance it can have a great effect on the location of the probe. Another strange thing has to do with our solar system. There is something called the Kuiper Cliff. When you go past Pluto and you pass through the Kuiper Belt suddenly you reach an area where there is hardly anything. Scientists have been trying to figure out why this is so for decades. Different theories exist, but one seems to have existed longer than all the others. That theory suggests there is a planet out there which has swept all the debris away. Recently some scientists have said there is no planet there, so you can take this for what it’s worth. One of our biggest mysteries in space concerns the expansion of space. For quite a while now, scientists have felt there are unseen forces pulling the objects in space to them at an ever accelerating speed. Scientists have no idea what this could be and there are various theories concerning this. There are two that I would like to mention. The first theory states there are gigantic black holes beyond the edge of the visible universe which are either so huge or so vast they are pulling everything towards them. The second theory states there is a rip in space and more space is pouring in and expanding the amount of space we have in our universe and objects are traveling with it. So far there is still no answer to the expanding speed of objects moving away from each other. In 1997 something very strange was heard in the ocean. It had never been heard before. While we were monitoring a very strange series of sounds were heard which became known as The Bloop. They were far louder than any noise any see creature could make. The sounds continued for several months and after that were never heard again. The sounds were located in the deep South Pacific near Antarctica. Scientists know there is matter and antimatter. They believe the Big Bang created the universe and when this took place there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter and if that was the case why didn’t they annihilate each other, because that is what happens when antimatter and matter come into contact? Believe it or not science knows the answer to this question because they found that for every 10,000,000,000 antiprotons that are created there were 10,000,000,001 protons and after the collisions of 10,000,000,000 particles of matter and antimatter there was one unit of matter left and this is what built our universe according to theory. What science doesn’t know is why there was an extra unit of matter. There is a theory about this, but it is only a theory and it states there were equal amounts made of matter and antimatter but for some reason out of every 10,000,000,001 units of antimatter, one unit was pushed away and these units are waiting somewhere in our universe. There have been some very strange medical cases that can’t be explained and one of them has to do with misdiagnosis. There have been some cases where people were misdiagnosed and yet died from the disease they had been diagnosed with. A man was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer. He was told he was going to die in about three months. As a matter of fact, he just about lasted those three months and died. An autopsy was performed on his body and it was found he had no cancer. It looks like this kind of thing can be related to the placebo effect in a way. As a matter of fact, it is being called the nocebo effect. It is also been found some people who were told the medicine they are taking will have certain side effects, get these effects even though there is no reason for it.
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