h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"what is the double pendulum experiment when it is a home"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whvl6CikDxA&feature=player_embedded

One of the simplest practical examples of a chaotic system, made from one pendulum attached to another.

Huh.

They never did that one when I was in school...


That's *definitely* going in...

ive lost it some where

what exactly are you after and why????

Questions science can NEVER answer (for 16 year olds) capable in being described in less than 200 words or less.

who had the biggest penis in history?????

better yet...

hope thats his foot

A question science can never answer is
What is the absolute time?

Why?
Time can only be perceved and measured as a relative thing. You cannnot have an absolute time.

what happens at absolute zero????

Chaotic systems is definitely a good one, but weather prediction is more tricky. We don't know that weather systems are chaotic, although they're presumed to be and many simple models of weather systems are provably so.

That does seem to be a problem I'm butting up against. Most of any idea I've thought of the best you can say of it is that it's knowledge postponed; worse still the reason I know of it at all is because it is a known challenge to present science, all of which rather leaves me reluctant to define something as unknowable in principle.

That was why I was thinking what colour were dinosaurs might work, because the one thing you can say is that 65my old organic pigments don't fossilise.

change the premise

there is no question science cannot answer.........eventually

<>

did the dinosaurs see in colour or black and white????

Well see birds see in colour and birds are descended from dinosaurs so probably yes, some lizards are tetracromats and I imagine if someone wanted to find the mutation rate for the opsin cells in the retina, it would be relatively easy to have an informed guess as to whether colour vision dates from back then.

I know we don't know for sure but that exactly what I meant 'knowledge postponed'. Is that presently 'unknown?' - certainly. But foreevermore and in principle; that I rather doubt.

lizards = reptiles. excuse me.

Science is about the best approximation of an explanation or 'solution' based on the current level of technology or human perception.

I was taught back in the 1980's that electrons 'circle' the nucleus of an atom. Now I see it they are depicted by electron clouds which show the 'probability' of where an electron will be. This has been driven by quantum mechanics.

It is an iteration of the previous model but is more a accurate model...which is ironically less accurate since you only know where it cold be rather than where it actually is! But since you can;t know exactly where it is then the probability nethod means your more likely to be right. (now I'm waffling so ignore the last few sentences.)

Can science answer moral questions? Well, the 'scientific method' can certainly be used to examine why people do certain things from a 'it's in a religious book/some bloke in a frock has deemed that action is moral/immoral' to the minds of some people tend towards doing certain 'bad' things due to chemical (etc) imbalances in the brain, to 'it's an evolutionary throw-back to when we did not have self-awareness and just lived on instinct'.

Religions certainly aren't better placed to answer the moral questions...simply because they thing different things are moral/immoral.

In science we know things do certain things and we try to explain why they do them...i.e. there is a consensus that if you drop a rock it will fall to the ground...the question is what is the mechanism for that.

Creating artificial moral boundaries (though in the great scheme of things balances society) does not look into why people do certain things and hence help to work out why placng certain 'morals' on people can be bad...Catholics and the no sex out of marriage/no contraception etc are not on the whole good for society...having an understanding of the 'sex drive' of people and also of what can be deemed a stable relatoinship is what would be better.

i.e. science will work in shades of grey...but get an approximately correct answer...other methods use black and white and create issues when being on the black side is not the right solution for someone/something htat would be better suited to being on the white side.

Clive - can't be too sure about the dinosaurs thing either. If we found - a la Jurassic Park - some preserved dino DNA, we could in principle either grow dinos or, less dramatically, analyse their DNA sequence to work out what pigments would have been expressed...

If we found some well preserved dinosaur DNA we might be able to find out what colour they were.

>>Clive - can't be too sure about the dinosaurs thing either<<

Noodles!

So this list of stuff Science cannot adjudicate upon ever is looking vanishingly small...

I might well put in a page



"IF YOU CAN THINK OF ANYTHING WRITE TO US A ND LET US KNOW.

WE HAD THE BEST BRAINS AT THE ROYAL SOCIETY* WORKING FLAT OUT FOR MONTHS

AND WE GOT NOTHING."




*The other idea I had was this would the the BS's 'Golden Bunsen Burner' Award for the next scientific revolution. One panel would eb a cut-out-and-post send us your BIG idea, the preceding pages would be the preamble - what science is doing, will do and can't do...