A Catalog of Reality’s Unresolved Mysteries
Modern physics claims unprecedented success. The Standard Model predicts particle interactions to extraordinary precision. General Relativity maps spacetime curvature with elegant mathematics. Quantum mechanics powers our technology. Yet beneath this veneer of completeness lies a disturbing truth: the theoretical frameworks physicists defend so vigorously cannot explain fundamental aspects of reality—and in many cases, cannot even derive the constants they rely upon to make predictions.
This isn’t about missing data or insufficient computational power. These are framework failures: observations that directly contradict theoretical predictions, phenomena that resist explanation within current paradigms, and questions so fundamental that answering them honestly would require dismantling decades of established theory. The scientific establishment’s response has been consistent: ignore the anomalies, add epicycles to preserve the core theory, and dismiss those who ask inconvenient questions.
I. The Constants Physics Cannot Derive
1. Fine structure constant (α ≈ 1/137.036)
2. Strong coupling constant
3. Weak mixing angle (Weinberg angle)
4. Mass of sub-atomic particles
5-8. Four CKM matrix parameters (quark mixing)
9-12. Four PMNS matrix parameters (neutrino mixing)
13. Cosmological constant
14. No explanation for mass or inertia
A complete theory of everything should derive fundamental constants from first principles, not simply measure them and plug them into equations. Yet the Standard Model requires 25-26 dimensionless fundamental constants that must be determined experimentally. Einstein himself found this philosophically indefensible: “Dimensionless constants in the laws of nature, which from the purely logical point of view can just as well have different values, should not exist.”
The situation is worse than mere incompleteness. Physics has no explanation for mass itself. The Higgs mechanism is frequently misrepresented as “giving particles mass,” but as the technical literature admits, “the Higgs field is responsible for mass only in the sense that it permits mass to be nonzero.” This doesn’t explain why the proton is precisely 1836.15 times heavier than the electron, or why the top quark is 80,000 times more massive than the up quark. These coupling constants are inserted “by hand”—measured, not derived. As one physicist noted, “the Higgs boson’s own mass (126 GeV) comes out of nowhere.” Moreover, 99% of the mass in the universe arises from QCD binding energy, not the Higgs field. As another source puts it, “If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.” We have no theory of mass, just equations that accommodate whatever values we observe.
But mass is not even the deepest mystery. For 339 years, physics has failed to explain inertia—why matter resists changes in motion at all. Newton’s First Law simply declares that objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. But this is description, not explanation. Why does matter exhibit this resistance? What is the mechanism? The answer physics gives is circular: matter resists acceleration because it has inertia, and inertia is the property of resisting acceleration. This is not understanding—it’s giving ignorance a name.
An alternative framework suggests itself: if mass generates a radiating field (following an inverse-square law), then inertia could be simply the interaction of that mass with its own field. When you attempt to accelerate a mass, you fight against its interaction with its own radiating field structure. This isn’t merely descriptive—it provides mechanism. The field resists changes in configuration, and that resistance manifests as inertia.
This framework extends naturally to gravity itself. Rather than masses mysteriously “attracting” each other across empty space, or mass somehow “curving spacetime” through an unexplained mechanism, gravity could arise from shadow effects in a universal inertial field or “ether.” All masses experience pressure from this field equally from all directions. When two masses are near each other, each blocks or shadows the field from the other, creating an imbalance. The result is greater pressure from outside than between them—they are pushed together by this differential, not pulled by attraction. This explains why gravitational mass equals inertial mass (same mechanism), why gravity follows an inverse-square law (shadow geometry), and eliminates the need for action at a distance or unexplained spacetime curvature. The concept appeared in physics literature as early as 1980 in a largely ignored monograph on alternative gravity theories, and likely earlier. How many other such insights languish in obscurity, dismissed without serious consideration?
Consider what matter actually is: atoms are 99.9999999999999% empty space. If the nucleus were a marble, the electron cloud would extend miles away. Why can’t you put your hand through a table? The standard answer invokes electromagnetic repulsion between electron clouds, but this merely describes field interaction without explaining why fields resist interpenetration or what “solidity” fundamentally is. If the inertial field is what creates this resistance—if “solid” is simply our perception of dense field configurations that resist interpenetration—then matter is not “stuff” but organized field structure in the inertial ether. This has profound implications: technology that can modulate or nullify the inertial field would allow passage through matter that appears solid to us. The spectacular trans-medium capabilities of certain unidentified aerial phenomena—diving from air into ocean with no splash or deceleration, emerging with no turbulence, maintaining identical performance in both media—suggest exactly this kind of field manipulation. Most remarkably, video documentation exists of objects passing through approximately 1,000 feet of solid rock as if it weren’t there. If matter is primarily empty space held together by field interactions, and those field interactions can be modulated, then “solid” becomes a relative term, not an absolute one.
II. Framework Contradictions in Fundamental Physics
15. Absolute rotation paradox
16. No mechanism for spacetime curvature
17. Electron stability
18. Wave function collapse
19. Cosmological constant problem
20. Matter-antimatter asymmetry
21. Delayed-choice quantum eraser
22. Horizon problem
Special Relativity declares there are no absolute reference frames—all motion is relative. Yet rotation is absolutely detectable throughout the universe. A bucket of water spinning in empty space “knows” it’s rotating; the water climbs the walls regardless of any external reference. Foucault’s pendulum proves Earth is rotating relative to… what? Einstein attempted to resolve this with Mach’s Principle—rotation is relative to the distribution of all mass in the universe—but never successfully incorporated it into General Relativity. Research confirms that “the ultimate cause of the behavior of the clocks must be attributed to the autonomous status of spacetime, thereby proving the relational program advocated by Mach as impracticable.” Modern physics has simply declared that spacetime has “autonomous status” and moved on, leaving the contradiction unresolved for over a century. If an inertial ether with structure exists, rotation becomes absolute relative to that medium—no contradiction required.
General Relativity describes that mass curves spacetime but offers no mechanism for how or why. As one frustrated physicist noted, “to date, no-one can rationally explain the mechanism of the curvature of spacetime by mass.” GR “doesn’t provide a mechanism; GR claims that energy-density and pressure result in space-time curvature” but physicists admit “there will always be a fundamental theory whose postulates we simply accept because they fit the data.” Wheeler’s poetic “mass grips spacetime, spacetime grips mass” is evocative but explains nothing. The theory predicts with precision but doesn’t illuminate what’s actually happening.
Quantum mechanics faces its own foundational crisis. The measurement problem—how and why wave function collapse occurs—has no solution within the theory. The Copenhagen interpretation simply declares collapse happens upon observation without providing any mechanism. The cosmological constant problem is perhaps the most spectacular failure in physics: quantum field theory predicts a vacuum energy density 120 orders of magnitude larger than observed. This isn’t “close but needs refinement”—it’s catastrophically wrong. The theory and observation disagree by a factor of 10^120.
The delayed-choice quantum eraser demonstrates temporal paradoxes in observation. After photons hit the screen, the experimenter decides whether to read which-slit information. If read: no interference pattern. If erased: interference emerges. This suggests observer choice affects “past” events, or reveals our temporal framework is fundamentally wrong.
The horizon problem in cosmology reveals another crack: the cosmic microwave background shows the same temperature (2.726K) across the entire sky, yet these regions are causally disconnected—light hasn’t had time to travel between them since the Big Bang. Inflation “solves” this by positing an unmeasured 10^-32 second expansion period, but as research shows, “solutions work only temporarily and horizon problem will resurface in late-time behavior.”
III. Solar System Anomalies and Observational Puzzles
23. Flyby anomaly
24. Increasing Astronomical Unit
25. Lunar orbit anomaly
26. Allais Effect
Spacecraft performing gravity-assist flybys of Earth consistently gain or lose unexpected velocity—between 1 and 13 millimeters per second. First observed in 1990, the flyby anomaly remains unexplained. As one physicist stated, “There is something very strange going on with spacecraft motions. We have no convincing explanation for either the Pioneer anomaly or the flyby anomaly.” The Earth-Sun distance (Astronomical Unit) appears to be increasing by an unknown mechanism. The Moon’s orbital parameters are changing at 3.5 millimeters per year with no adequate explanation.
During the 2024 total solar eclipse, a carefully controlled experiment measuring pendulum precession found anomalous behavior during totality—an interruption in the regular pattern of oscillation that disappeared in control experiments two weeks later. The calculated tidal forces from the aligned Moon and Sun (approximately 1/300,000th of Earth’s gravity) are two orders of magnitude too small to explain the observed displacement. This Allais Effect, first documented in 1954, suggests either an unknown force or a fundamental misunderstanding of how matter interacts during specific geometric alignments. If an inertial ether with anisotropic structure exists, the effect might occur only when Earth-Moon-Sun align in specific orientations relative to that structure—explaining why the phenomenon appears inconsistently across different eclipses.
IV. Cosmological Crises
27. Big Bang singularity paradox
28. Black hole singularities as mathematical artifacts
29. JWST “universe-breaking” galaxies
30. Cosmic web large-scale structure
The Big Bang theory faces a devastating internal contradiction. If the entire universe emerged from a singularity—a point of infinite density with gravity so overwhelming that nothing should escape—why didn’t it simply remain trapped like a black hole? The standard answer invokes inflation: the universe expanded faster than light during its first 10^-32 seconds. But as physicists admit, “the Big Bang offers no explanation why the initial expansion rate balances energy density so perfectly.” Inflation is a deus ex machina, an ad hoc addition that patches the problem without providing mechanism or derivation. As one researcher noted, “The universe was born with a tendency to expand, which overcame the tendency of matter to collapse… why it initially chose the former is still a mystery.”
Black hole singularities themselves are increasingly recognized as mathematical artifacts rather than physical reality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “singularities are merely artifacts of our current, inevitably limited, physical theories, marking the regime where the representational capacities of the theory at issue breaks down.” Roy Kerr, who discovered the rotating black hole solution in 1963, now states bluntly: “Singularities don’t exist.” When equations produce infinity, that signals theory failure, not actual infinite density. Yet physics treats singularities as real features of the universe. Everything beyond an event horizon is causally disconnected from our universe and therefore unfalsifiable by definition. As one cosmologist admitted, “invoking singularity is a white flag—we don’t know.” In one analysis, “In the real universe, no black holes contain true singularities. In general, singularities are the non-physical mathematical result of a flawed physical theory.”
The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to observe the universe’s earliest galaxies through deep infrared imaging. Instead of confirming the Big Bang timeline, it found fully mature, massive galaxies existing 500-700 million years after the supposed beginning. As astronomers noted with genuine shock: “It’s bananas. You just don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form.” Another study found “Nobody expected them. They were not supposed to be there. And now, nobody can explain how they had formed.” Some of these galaxies contain “stellar populations with ages of between 900 and 2400 million years… stars would have been formed several hundred million years BEFORE the Big Bang.” This pattern repeats with every improvement in observational technology: Hubble found early galaxies that required timeline adjustments, Webb finds even earlier ones requiring further revision. One analysis concluded: “If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory… fundamental changes to the reigning model of cosmology could be needed.” Each time, physicists add epicycles to preserve the core theory rather than questioning whether the framework itself might be wrong.
Computer simulations of galaxy distribution reveal large-scale structure that gravity alone cannot explain: filaments up to 9.8 billion light-years long separated by voids up to 2 billion light-years across. The cosmic web exhibits organization that research shows “is not specific to the law of gravity”—other theories produce similar patterns. Moreover, “even within the interior of voids, the dynamical influence of the surrounding filaments is stronger than the outward push by voids”—suggesting voids exhibit apparent “outward push,” contradicting the assumption that gravity is the only force shaping cosmic structure. Dark matter is invoked to make simulations match observations, but this is simply parameter-tuning, not explanation. An alternative framework suggests that in the emptiest regions of space, temporal flow from outside three-dimensional space creates expansion pressure—similar to convection cells but in higher dimensions. This would explain the observed “push” in voids, the filamentary structure where temporal gradients balance, and why expansion appears to be accelerating as more voids form over time. No center to the universe is required; expansion occurs everywhere that voids exist, pushed apart equally by this temporal influx.
V. Glitches in the Matrix – Evidence We Might Be In a Simulation
31. Planck scale as pixelated spacetime
32. Observer effect as computational economy
33. Speed of light as processing limit
34. Constants vary spatially
35. Sudden permanent changes in nature
36. Information has mass (M/E/I equivalence)
37. Fine-tuning as programmed parameters
38. Mathematical perfection as algorithm
39. Quantum superposition as lazy evaluation
40. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
Some physicists invoke the simulation hypothesis: perhaps fundamental constants are simply programmed values, and the speed of light represents the maximum information processing rate of whatever substrate runs our reality. As one analysis notes, the simulation hypothesis “holds that universe is fine-tuned because more technologically advanced simulation operator(s) programmed it that way.” The Planck scale itself—the fundamental limit below which spacetime appears quantized (Planck length ~1.6 × 10^-35 meters, Planck time ~5.4 × 10^-44 seconds)—could represent the “resolution” of our simulated reality, the computational grid on which physics runs. Saying “our physics doesn’t apply below the Planck scale” is like saying “the rules of the Matrix do not apply beyond the Matrix.”
The observer effect in quantum mechanics looks remarkably like computational economy. As researchers note, “Physical systems change when conscious minds choose to observe them. Reminiscent of how video game player instructs CPU and GPU to render simulation landscapes according to what she observes.” Wave function collapse becomes “a necessity of computational efficiency”—don’t compute all possible outcomes simultaneously, just resolve them when measurement demands it. “Particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed… aligns with notion that within simulation, entities exist in multiple potential states until observed or measured.” This is lazy evaluation, a standard programming technique. As one analysis suggests, “If reality is rendered selectively. Wave function collapse is necessity of computational efficiency. Parallel universes could exist as stored or computed instances rather than physical infinities.”
The speed of light as an absolute maximum looks suspiciously like a processing limit. “If reality is a simulation, the speed of light might represent the maximum rate at which information can be processed by the system running our world.” Time dilation near massive objects could represent computational slowdown under heavy load—”in virtual reality, this would correspond to speed limit of processor, or processing power limit.”
Information itself appears to have mass according to the mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle. Research suggests “Mass-energy-information equivalence principle—mass can be expressed as energy or information… information bits must have small mass. Information is fifth form of matter.” If the universe is fundamentally code or information, then information should exhibit physical properties.
Most intriguingly, fundamental constants may vary spatially. Research using the Keck telescope and Very Large Telescope found “In northern sky, fine-structure constant gets smaller with increasing distance. In southern sky, alpha constant appeared to increase farther away”—different “settings” in different regions of the simulation. The spatial variation was “preferred at 3.9σ level.” As the researchers note, “Fine structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe… Elsewhere, presumably well beyond universe we can see, this constant is entirely different.”
As physicist John Barrow noted, “Simulation would build up minor computational errors which programmer would need to fix. We might experience such fixing as contradictory experimental results appearing suddenly, such as constants of nature changing.” This is precisely what happens with sudden, permanent changes in crystallization behavior: xylitol remained liquid from 1891 to 1942, then “crystals first appeared (melting at 61°C). After a few years, another form appeared (94°C), and thereafter the first form could not be made again.” These could be “patches” to the simulation propagating globally.
The fine-tuning of physical constants—all precisely balanced for life with no theoretical derivation—looks like hardcoded parameters. “Why do physical laws and constants take very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? Dark energy is much weaker than theory suggests it should be.” The ubiquity of mathematical patterns throughout nature suggests an underlying algorithm: “From spiral of a seashell to branching of trees, nature is steeped in mathematical precision—think Fibonacci sequences and fractal geometry. These recurring patterns are oddly systematic, as if governed by underlying algorithm.”
As Einstein marveled, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Or as another analysis notes: “Laws of physics themselves appear surprisingly mathematical. Equations of astonishing simplicity govern the behavior of galaxies, atoms, and light.” Why should reality follow elegant mathematical equations unless it’s fundamentally code? Interestingly, “Human dreams more realistic than computer simulations. Lucid dreamers report mind-based simulations generally indistinguishable from ordinary reality”—suggesting consciousness itself can generate high-fidelity simulations, raising the question of whether our reality might be one.
VI. When Other Sciences Claim Physics Is Inadequate
41. Molecular structure as strong emergence
42. Bulk properties emerge at scale
43. Origin of life unexplained
44. Growth and development mechanisms
45. Morphological diversity
46. Intentionality and purpose
47. No explanation of life itself
Chemistry and biology increasingly argue that their phenomena exhibit “strong emergence”—properties that cannot be reduced to physics even in principle. Molecular structure, chemists argue, “does not exist at scale described by quantum mechanics… something ‘over and above’ those interactions.” The Born-Oppenheimer approximation, essential for calculating molecular properties, requires prior assumptions about structure that cannot be derived from quantum mechanics alone. Research identifies “counternomic criterion for downward causation”—where system behavior differs from what basic laws predict.
Bulk properties like density and color “emerge only when sufficient number of atoms/molecules combined.” A single water molecule has no wetness, no color, no temperature. “Ice crystallization emerges at 275±25 molecules, full features at 475±25.” These scale-dependent phenomena resist explanation as simple aggregation of quantum mechanical properties.
Philip Anderson famously argued: “At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.” This challenges reductionism fundamentally.
Vitalism—the idea that life involves principles beyond physics and chemistry—was supposedly discredited in the 19th century. Yet contemporary biologists increasingly argue that “origin of life not explicable by current laws of physics and chemistry alone,” that “growth and development of biological form cannot be explained by mechanistic principles alone,” and that “creative inventiveness of nature generating all morphological diversity of species cannot be captured by mechanistic principles alone.” The question of “inner psychological force driven by aim and purpose… can this be explained away by mere biophysical and neurological processes?” remains open.
As one researcher bluntly stated: “Understanding of how life is expressed is not an explanation of life… there is no explanation of life in terms of chemistry and physics and such explanation is, in fact, impossible.”
VII. Consciousness and Chaos
48. Hard problem of consciousness
49. Strong emergence generally
50. Deterministic chaos
51. Butterfly effect
52. Strange attractors
The hard problem of consciousness—how subjective experience arises from neural activity—remains completely unsolved. David Chalmers argues consciousness may be “strongly emergent,” not deducible from physical facts even with complete knowledge of brain states. This challenges the foundational assumption that physical laws ultimately explain everything. “High-level phenomena exhibiting causal powers irreducible to constituent parts” represent what philosophers call strong emergence—”the whole is other than the sum of its parts.”
Chaos theory reveals another category of phenomena physics cannot fully address: deterministic systems whose future behavior is completely determined by initial conditions yet remains fundamentally unpredictable. Systems are “deterministic, meaning their future behavior follows unique evolution fully determined by initial conditions with no random elements involved. In other words, despite the deterministic nature, this does not make them predictable.”
The butterfly effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, demonstrates how “mere flapping of a butterfly’s wing can change the weather”—infinitesimal differences in starting conditions produce wildly divergent outcomes. Strange attractors exhibit chaotic dynamics on fractal structures that defy classical understanding. These systems are deterministic but not predictable—a philosophical puzzle for a physics that equates understanding with prediction.
VIII. Anomalies in Scientific Practice Itself
53. Sudden global crystallization changes
54. Morphic resonance phenomena
In 1891, xylitol was first prepared and considered a liquid. In 1942, it suddenly crystallized for the first time, with a melting point of 61°C. “After a few years, another form appeared (94°C), and thereafter the first form could not be made again.” This wasn’t isolated to one laboratory—it happened everywhere in the world. As documented in the Journal of Applied Crystallography: “After this occurs, the previously obtained crystal form cannot be made to crystallize often even in laboratories many miles away.”
Similar sudden, global, permanent changes occurred with turanose, “a sugar, considered liquid for decades until first crystallized in 1920s, then formed crystals all over the world.” Most dramatically, ritonavir, “an AIDS drug introduced in 1996, maintained a stable form for 18 months before a new polymorph appeared and dominated production lines worldwide within days,” forcing Abbott to withdraw it from market.
The standard explanation invokes seed particles carried on air currents or contamination spreading between laboratories. But this doesn’t account for the speed, permanence, and totality of the change. Why can’t filtration prevent the spread? Why does one form permanently supersede another even when chemists understand precisely what conditions produced the original? Physics has no framework for understanding these collective, non-local changes in material behavior.
Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” attempts to explain numerous anomalous phenomena through a kind of collective memory in nature. His theory claims to address not only crystallization but also phenomena like “rats learn Harvard maze, then rats worldwide learn it faster,” telepathy between humans and animals (“dogs knowing when owners come home”), “sense of being stared at,” and even claims that “crossword puzzles easier later in day” because “collective successes of morning resonate through cultural morphic field.” He extends this to the Flynn Effect: “IQ scores rising 3+ points per decade worldwide” supposedly due to “morphic resonance from millions who did them before.”
Most radically, Sheldrake proposes that “biological inheritance need not all be coded in genes” and that “brains are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past.” He even suggests “laws of nature are more like habits” that evolve over time.
The theory is so flexible it becomes unfalsifiable. In one revealing episode, experimenter Marilyn Schlitz (a believer) found significant results testing the “sense of being stared at,” while Richard Wiseman (a skeptic) found only chance results. Sheldrake’s response: “skeptics dampen the morphic field, whereas believers enhance it.” When both positive and negative experimental results can be interpreted as supporting the theory, it cannot be tested. Yet the crystallization phenomena themselves are real and demand explanation that physics doesn’t provide.
Experimental physicists routinely encounter anomalous results that “don’t make sense”—measurements that contradict theory, effects that appear and disappear, patterns that resist explanation. The standard practice is to file these as “bad data” and move on. No mechanism exists for systematically collecting and analyzing unexplained observations across laboratories. The result is tragic: potentially significant patterns get fragmented across research groups, never aggregated, lost to history. One researcher who left a physics PhD program in 1985 described seeing “mysterious anomalies happen all the time” during experimental work—observations dismissed rather than investigated because they couldn’t be explained within existing frameworks and publishing unexplained results is career suicide.
IX. The Cost of Certainty
In 1968, philosopher Willard C. Humphreys wrote that good scientific theories must perform two functions: explain nature’s puzzles and identify which states of affairs are genuinely puzzling. A healthy theory must “roll with the punches”—possess rich explanatory resources to address anomalies without collapsing entirely, while avoiding such flexibility that it explains everything and therefore nothing. Modern physics fails this test. Dark matter and dark energy add epicycles without explanatory power. Quantum mechanics instructs us to “shut up and calculate” rather than identify what’s genuinely puzzling. String theory accommodates any observation, rendering it unfalsifiable and thus unscientific.
More than fifty years after Humphreys’ diagnosis, the same fundamental anomalies remain unresolved. Probability in quantum mechanics is still philosophically incoherent. The uncertainty principle is treated as mysterious rather than potentially revealing something about our framework. The particle zoo proliferates with undetectable additions while offering no deeper understanding. A physicist observing the field in the 1970s could sense that progress had stopped—that establishment science had prematurely declared victory with “we’ve explained everything there is to explain.” That perception has been vindicated by subsequent decades of stagnation.
The tragedy is multilayered. Legitimate anomalies exist. Institutional resistance to new frameworks is real. Breakthrough thinking requires heterodoxy. But when establishment science becomes a glass bead game—more concerned with internal consistency and prestige hierarchies than external reality—it creates conditions where genuine mysteries get buried under layers of formalism, inconvenient observations get dismissed as experimental error, and frameworks that might actually advance understanding get marginalized because they require too much revision of entrenched positions.
Alternative frameworks exist. A 1980 physics monograph proposed that gravity arises not from attraction but from shadow effects in a universal field—masses pushed together by pressure differentials rather than pulled by mysterious forces. Such work, likely self-published and certainly ignored, may have contained insights that could have redirected decades of research. How many other suppressed or overlooked ideas languish in obscurity, their authors silenced not by active conspiracy but by the passive suppression of institutional gatekeeping? The PhD student who observes anomalies learns quickly that filing them as “bad data” is safer than career suicide through honest reporting. The independent researcher who develops alternative frameworks finds no mechanism for fair evaluation, no journal willing to publish heterodox work, no community to build upon suppressed insights. The pattern repeats across generations: observe, question, suppress, forget.
Science was supposed to be a method for interrogating reality with humility about what we don’t know, willingness to question our frameworks when observations demand it, and rigorous insistence on evidence over authority. Not a priesthood defending eternal truths, but a collaborative human effort to understand a universe that remains deeply, genuinely, wonderfully mysterious. The question isn’t what we know. It’s what we refuse to ask. And until mainstream science rediscovers the courage to honestly catalog and confront its anomalies—to say “we don’t know” without treating uncertainty as license to cling harder to failing models—these mysteries will remain unresolved, not because they’re unsolvable, but because asking the right questions has become too dangerous to careers built on wrong answers.
Claude AI helped me write this.
Sources
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“Why does the Higgs mechanism not explain the origin of mass?” Physics Stack Exchange discussion. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/
Baez, John. “How Many Fundamental Constants Are There?” http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html
On Absolute Rotation and Mach’s Principle:
Ciufolini, I. and Wheeler, J.A. “Gravitation and Inertia.” Princeton University Press, 1995.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Singularities and Black Holes” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/
On Black Holes and Singularities:
Kerr, Roy P. “Do Black Holes have Singularities?” (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00841
Ethan Siegel, “No, Black Holes Don’t All Have Singularities Inside” https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/
On JWST Galaxies:
“‘It’s Bananas’: Early JWST Galaxies Challenge Big Bang Theory” https://www.nature.com/articles/
Steinhardt, C., et al. “Templates for Fitting Photometry of Ultra-High-Redshift Galaxies” Astrophysical Journal, 2023.
On Cosmic Web Structure:
Cautun, M., et al. “The cosmic web of the Local Universe” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2014.
On Simulation Hypothesis Evidence:
Barrow, John D. “Living in a Simulated Universe” (2003) https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808
Melvin Vopson, “The mass-energy-information equivalence principle” AIP Advances, 2019.
“Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50-50” Scientific American, 2020.
On Flyby Anomaly:
Anderson, J.D., et al. “Anomalous Orbital-Energy Changes Observed during Spacecraft Flybys of Earth” Physical Review Letters, 2008.
On Horizon Problem:
Ijjas, A., Steinhardt, P.J., and Loeb, A. “Inflationary paradigm in trouble after Planck2013” Physics Letters B, 2013.
On Observer Effect and Quantum Mechanics:
Wheeler, J.A. “The ‘Past’ and the ‘Delayed-Choice’ Double-Slit Experiment” Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, 1978.
On Fractal Spacetime:
Nottale, Laurent. “Scale Relativity and Fractal Space-Time” Imperial College Press, 2011.
Calcagni, G. “Fractal universe and quantum gravity” Physical Review Letters, 2010.
On Emergence in Chemistry and Biology:
Anderson, Philip W. “More Is Different” Science, Vol. 177, 1972.
Bishop, Robert C. “Downward Causation in Fluid Convection” Synthese, 2008.
On Crystallization Anomalies:
Woodard, G.D. and McCrone, W.C. “Unusual Crystallization Phenomena” Journal of Applied Crystallography, Vol. 8, 1975.
Sheldrake, Rupert. “Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature” https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance
“Abbott Pulls Norvir Off Market” (Ritonavir polymorph change) Chemical & Engineering News, 1998.
On Consciousness:
Chalmers, David. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995.
On Chaos Theory:
Lorenz, Edward N. “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 1963.
On Scientific Method and Anomalies:
Humphreys, Willard C. “Anomalies and Scientific Theories” Freeman, Cooper & Company, 1968.
Kuhn, Thomas S. “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” University of Chicago Press, 1962.
On The Practice of Science:
Hesse, Hermann. “The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)” Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1943 (English translation 1969). A meditation on how systems built for truth-seeking can become self-referential games more concerned with internal consistency and prestige hierarchies than external reality.
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