The New York Times has published a list of the 25 ‘most provocative’ questions facing science, and as a public service, I’m going to try to answer them:<\/p>\n
\n(1) Does Science Matter?<\/p>\n
For lack of a more elegant alternative, yes. I actually prefer to use common sense and intuition whenever I can get away with it, but they’re notoriously unreliable. Different jobs require different tools, and you can’t really press a sledgehammer into service when what you need is a logic probe.<\/p>\n
\n(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?<\/p>\n
No. War is our biological legacy<\/em>, not our destiny.<\/p>\n \n(3) Will Humans Ever Visit Mars?<\/p>\n Yes. It’s inordinately expensive, extremely foolhardy, and completely unnecessary, but we won’t let that stop us!<\/p>\n \n(4) How Does the Brain Work?<\/p>\n In my case, not very well. Seriously, though, the brain is a terabit wetware multi-tasking multi-threading parallel processing supercomputer that maps heuristically a transform from our sensory inputs to a 4-D model of the universe that it stores holographically in a revisionist refresh process that attempts to minimize power usage and maintain internal consistency. (Duh.)<\/p>\n \n(5) What Is Gravity, Really?<\/p>\n I don’t know, but it still sucks.<\/p>\n \n(6) Will We Ever Find Atlantis?<\/p>\n No. She’s long since dropped the two t’s from her name and founded a hugely successful music career on songs like Ironic<\/i>.<\/p>\n \n(7) How Much of the Body is Replaceable?<\/p>\n All of it, as long as you do it a little bit at a time. As a matter of fact, human beings replace every molecule in their body about every 7 years, on average. <\/p>\n \n(8) What Should We Eat?<\/p>\n Things that taste good and aren’t too hard to chew.<\/p>\n \n(9) When Will the Next Ice Age Begin?<\/p>\n When it gets cold enough.<\/p>\n \n(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?<\/p>\n Nothing. Everything. (OK, that’s a bit facetious, but basically, this question is really asking if the 4-dimensional object of our universe, where everything is always happening everywhere all at once all the time has a boundary, and if so, what lies outside that boundary, so I stand by my first answer.)<\/p>\n \n(11) Could We Live Forever?<\/p>\n Yes, but I’m only 41 and I’m already getting bored.<\/p>\n \n(12) Are Men Necessary? …<\/p>\n At least this one.<\/p>\n \n… Are Women Necessary?<\/p>\n Survey says… Yup. Uh huh. You betcha.<\/p>\n \n(13) What Is the Next Plague?<\/p>\n Hard to say, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with spoiled white mama’s boys doing bad rap. I actually like the Eminem song they’ve been playing to death, but I don’t care how much he slurs his words, “cold water” and “Cole Porter” do not<\/em> rhyme.<\/p>\n \n(14) Can Robots Become Conscious?<\/p>\n Probably, but the jury is still out on whether people<\/em> can.<\/p>\n \n(15) Why Do We Sleep?<\/p>\n Because bed would get pretty boring if you just laid there in the dark for 8 hours. Actually, sleeps serves two main purposes, to conserve energy while there’s not enough light to do anything productive, and to give the brain-computer time to revise its holographic world-model so it works better the next day than it did today.<\/p>\n