Science, in its effort to unravel the rules governing the workings of nature, is all about asking the right questions. These questions, whose answers may be forever elusive, nevertheless frame the direction of scientific research, sometimes for decades or longer. In the process, new unexpected discoveries are made that refine or even change what the questions are. The process has continued successfully for over 400 years, and shows no signs of abating.
At the same time, it is important to distinguish between those questions that are answerable in principle and those that are not, and also between those questions whose answers can be practically obtained in the near or medium term. Graduate students in physics, for example, often enter graduate school with grand goals of discovering the Theory of Everything. But, as my friend and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek likes to say, what we really need is a Theory of Something!
With these issues as a guide, at the invitation of the editors of The Huffington Post, I list below a few of the burning questions that are driving the fields of cosmology and particle physics. The first two are being addressed by ongoing experiments that might shed significant light within the next decade. The last two are foundational questions whose resolution may be around the corner, but only if we are extremely lucky, or may take centuries if at all, depending on the kindness of nature as we probe it experimentally. Good ideas are much harder to come by than good experiments, so if a new good idea is required to resolve these foundational issues, all bets are off. It took a long time between Newton and Einstein to refine the theory of gravity after all.
To read more, click here.