There’s no question quantum mechanics is weird.
So weird that sometimes you can’t even tell that something is even local.
Imagine searching for a nearby restaurant on your device of choice because you’re
really hungry and it’s time for dinner, and the answer you get is quantum mechanical.
The world’s best pizza is somewhere between Earth and the most distant galaxy in the universe,
but you can’t ever know the exact location.
But even then, it may not be that great of a pizza because until you observe it, it exists
in all possible states a pizza can exist in.
Thankfully pizzas are part of our world of the very big and are not subject to many quantum
effects.
But our familiar world that we understand, exist in, and indeed depend on, falls to the
wayside at the smallest scales of the universe.
On the scale of the small, objects aren’t really solid, locality is a matter of probability,
and the mysteries of what awaits in quantum physics are nothing close to solved.
Indeed, there may be entire sections of physics that await discovery for which we have no
indicator for as of yet.
But we have gotten clues, and there have been discoveries.
So here are ten unsolved mysteries of the quantum realm for which we have hints of what
might await.
Number 10.
The Dangerous Higgs Boson
In this context, inertial mass simply means how much an object resists when you try to
accelerate it.
When you try to push a bowling ball, the resistance of it not wanting to move is what you feel.
For a very long time in physics, it wasn’t certain just why this is.
It was simply known that it was the case, that’s how the universe behaves.
Push a bowling ball up a hill and you’re going to have some issues.
But that changed decades ago with a proposition named after physicist Peter Higgs og which
he was a part in formulation.
It’s that of a really mysterious something that pervades the universe.
It’s the Higgs field, and it was expected by most physicists to exist, it made that
much sense, but it needed proof.
But fields are difficult to measure if they don’t manifest as a particle, you’re in
a magnetic field right now, actually many from different directions but if you don’t
have a way to detect that at the most fundamental basis you wouldn’t know you were in one.
Early humans did not know they existed in magnetic fields.
In regards to the Higgs field, even though the Higgs field appears uniform across the
entire universe, very few places have enough energy for it to appear as a particle.
The particle accelerator is one such environment, and the existence of the Higgs particle, and
thereby the implication of the predicted field have been confirmed.
But what this field does with some other particles is bog them down, like a spoon moving through
honey.
Otherwise they’d be massless and propagate at the speed of light, hence its long standing
prediction before it was found.
Something was creating an effect.
But the discovery of the Higgs boson opened up a can of unsolved mysteries.
One would be are there more than one type of Higgs boson?
We don’t know, but if there are, they are candidates for dark matter.
Can the Higgs boson interact with itself?
No one knows.
But there’s a really sticky mystery here to be sure.
So the Higgs has a certain value.
Make it just a little bit more massive, which it’s already hefty, that would be it for
atomic nuclei other than hydrogen.
Nothing else would be stable.
Yet, it’s not, it’s just about exactly where it needs to be for matter to exist,
in fact, it can also be said that it’s fine tuned, exactly where it needs to be for life
to exist.
Odd, but it also happens to be one of the more dangerous particles.
The reason for this is that it’s thought that it actually might not be that stable,
and could tunnel to a more stable state at any time, completely randomly, which would
change the very nature of matter in the universe.
The odds of it doing it at any given time are low, 10 to the 100th years, but it is
possible, and it would destroy the universe as we know it right now.
Number 9.
The Incomprehensible Inflaton
The universe we observe is a strange place on many counts, but specific oddity is in
that it’s actually a very uniform place for the most part.
If you point a telescope in any direction, you more or less see the same patterns of
stars and galaxies.
But, special relativity, a very well proven theory, says on its face, this should not
be so because at some point it would have required information to move at faster than
light speeds, something the universe just does not do, at least in our period of the
universe’s history.
So either there’s some unknown physics that allows faster than light transfer of information,
or the universe we see as the observable universe is just one particularly uniform part, and
the possibly massive or infinite part we can’t see is not uniform, or the rules were different
for a certain period of time during the early universe.
This is termed cosmic inflation, where things expanded at a much faster rate than what we
see.
Inflation goes a long way in solving a number of problems in cosmology.
Not only would it explain why everything appears so uniform, but also would extend out to why
the cosmic microwave background radiation also seems so uniform.
Not exactly, but pretty uniform.
It also explains why the geometry of the universe appears to be flat, and why we haven’t ever
seen a magnetic monopole.
Inflation is very helpful as far as understanding exactly what happened.
The problem is, what caused it.
One idea is that a particle called an inflaton existed that drove inflation.
This is interesting, because the predicted behavior of this particle in some ways looks
like the Higgs boson, almost to the point that some have suggested that it was the Higgs
boson, but somehow since then its behavior changed.
Why that would be, no one yet knows,
Number 8.
Weakly Interacting Particles
Dark matter is often invoked as once of the most mysterious substances in the universe,
some argue that it doesn’t exist and our ideas about gravity at large scales is wrong,
some argue that it must exist for the universe to work right.
And it’s often characterized as magical material that doesn’t interact with anything,
can pass through walls, and make up alternative worlds occupying the same space as our own,
but on a grander scale as dark matter appears to account for most of the matter in the universe..
But it may be far simpler than that.
It may just be that we aren’t aware of all of the particles nature has to offer.
In a way, we already know about one form of dark matter.
It’s the neutrino, and like dark matter, almost never interacts with anything.
The vast majority just pass through the mostly empty space that makes up the atom unphased.
Every so often by chance however, there is an interaction, which is how we detect them.
So if we know about one kind of weakly interacting particle, are there others?
And could the key to dark matter lie within this class of particle?
One other thing we know is that whatever the particle is, it must be truly massive.
Known as WIMPS or weakly interacting massive particles, this explanation for dark matter
works well.
Trouble is, unlike the neutrino, we’ve never detected a single one.
Number 7.
The Undetectable Graviton
While at our level, Gravity is perhaps the easiest of the fundamental forces of the universe
to detect, it’s holding you to your chair, it’s also ridiculously weak in comparison
to the other three, if it is indeed a fundamental force.
Why this is remains a total mystery, so it’s existence remains hypothetical, and some physicists
have argued that it’s not needed and relativity’s description of gravity as a warp in space-time
may be sufficient and it has no particle nature.
This ultimately means that the graviton is almost impossible to detect in a practical
sense.
It’s not something that’s very likely to ever be doable in our solar system.
Essentially you need a giant detector the size of a gas giant sitting around a neutron
star just right, and even then you can only expect to detect a small handful of gravitons
per year, at best.
That’s such a tall order, and so unbelievably difficult that unless there’s some unforeseen
shortcut that no one’s thought of, the graviton may be among the last attributes of particle
physics we could ever detect, and only then in a far future full human colonized milky
way.
Interestingly however, something like this in orbit of a neutron star, essentially a
graviton detector built by aliens, might actually be more visible as a technosignature than
the actual particle itself.
Trouble is, if we ever saw something like, we might deduce what the aliens were doing,
but not the answer to the question unless the aliens put up a huge radio beacon somehow
announcing to all civilizations in the milky way that they either did, or did not find
the particle.
So far, no such technosignature has been seen.
And if we ever did, how do we tell the difference between an alien yes, or a no?
Number 6.
Even Weaker than Gravity
If detecting the graviton seems bad enough, it’s actually possible for there to be a
fifth force that’s even weaker, and thus it’s corresponding particle would be even
harder to detect, perhaps even to the point that no one in the universe can do it, even
a Kardashev Type 3 civilization.
And to make matters worse, there may even be more forces than that, one of which was
hinted at in 2021 by Fermilab.
In this case, it has to do with dark energy.
Different from inflation, at some point the universe’s expansion seems to have started
accelerating again, though much, much slower than inflation did.
This acceleration must be driven by something, and that something is dark energy, which we
know almost nothing about.
No one knows how this works, but one idea is a fifth force known as quintessence, and
if it has a particle, it’s totally unknown.
The thing is, for quintessence to exist, it has to be weaker than gravity.
As a result, ever proving its existence seems unlikely and may be a permanent mystery of
the universe.
Number 5.
The Sterile Neutrino
WIMPs are an interesting idea, but it might just be that the WIMPs are actually just a
whole lot of neutrinos and we’ve failed to recognize some unfamiliar types.
This is a pretty simple idea, a neutrino type that doesn’t do anything in the universe
except boost the gravitational field of galaxies.
In other words, it's only interaction is gravity.
This is an interesting idea because it potentially solves the unanswered question of why there’s
so much more normal matter in the universe and hardly any anti-matter.
In this case sterile neutrinos decaying would actually produce more matter than anti-matter,
explaining the disparity.
And it’s not too far of a theoretical stretch.
A neutrino is a fermion, and the other fermions are known to have right or left handed chirality,
in other two types.
The neutrino is now know for this, it’s only know to have only the left type.
Unless the sterile neutrino is the right handed counterpart, though there would need to be
different subtypes of that.
Interestingly, if sterile neutrinos exist, they may explain something else.
We often hear about dark matter and dark energy, but there’s more than that.
There is also dark radiation, which is a hypothesized type of invisible radiation that governs the
interaction of dark matter.
There are some indications from the study of the cosmic microwave background that something
like this might be at work in the universe.
If it is, a candidate for it is the sterile neutrino.
Number 4.
Dark Photons
One of the big questions about dark matter is its complexity.
In the search for a simple answer, scientists have hypothesized a single dark matter particle.
Rarely however has anything turned out to be simple in physics, and the universe is
under no obligation to make anything easy to figure out.
As a result it may easily be that the dark matter world is every bit, or more, complex
and situational as the visible universe is.
There isn’t the slightest bit of evidence for any of this, but you could speculate that
maybe dark planets, dark aliens, dark stars, and so on might exist.
And that even includes another force of nature, this one termed the dark force, and it’s
carrier the dark photon.
Essentially, this force in principle would be how dark matter particles interact with
each other.
If the dark photon shares similarities with the normal photon, or the normal forces of
nature, then you move into territory of dark atoms and dark chemistry.
We have not even begun to imagine the possibilities there, and won’t start getting hints of
whether its valid until we actually understand just what dark matter fundamentally is beyond
the effects of its gravity.
But that it does gravitationally interact may hold keys in explaining just what gravity
is, but also shows that there is are shared attributes, at least one, between the dark
universe and it’s smaller cousin, the visible universe.
Number 3.
Axions
Another way to look at the potential nature of dark matter is imagine it not as a regular
particle, but a bunch of force carrier particles.
The story of the axion starts with a problem.
In fact it was named after a washing detergent due to it cleaning up a mess.
That’s if it actually exists.
The problem was that the strong force shouldn’t affect quarks and anti-quarks in the same
way, yet it does.
Based on the best theories, it shouldn’t, and indeed neutrons should not be symmetrical
when they are.
An axion field however would force the issue and create an equilibrium, which is what we
see.
We don’t actually see the axion, just an effect that may potentially be due to its
presence.
Interestingly, there is some thinking that the axion might be a strong candidate for
dark matter as well, further adding to its cleaning power.
Granted, sometimes physicists can seem too eager to try to find simple solutions to what
appear to be extraordinarily complex situations; there are some mounting experimental results
pointing towards the axion actually existing.
If that can be proven, it might amount to a Eureka moment in physics where a large chunk
of the formerly mysterious becomes understandable and predictable.
Or, it may simply reveal a new generation of mysteries.
Number 2.
The Leptoquark
Particles generally belong to two families, the quarks which make up protons and neutrons,
and the leptons which are electrons, neutrinos and so on.
At least in the standard model.
But there have also been theories that stretch things a bit further in search of a grand
unified theory whether the forces of the universe merge and ultimately stem from the same thing.
In this, there is the prediction that leptons and quarks merge at very high energies and
become leptoquarks, thus working into a framework of unifying the strong, weak and electromagnetic
forces.
There are plenty of reasons to chew over the unification of the forces.
Electricity and magnetism were unified in the 19th century, for example.
If leptoquarks can be formed however they would bear attributes of both types of particle,
but also allow quarks to become leptons and vice versa.
Interestingly, some experimental evidence hints that this occurs, though are very short
lived in the particle accelerator.
The one oddity here is that if certain interpretations are correct, and the right things happen with
leptoquarks, then it could provide a route for the proton to decay, which is an open
question in physics.
If it does decay, then some day in the unbelievably far future, this universe will essentially
dissolve.
Number 1.
The Quantum Mind
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the universe itself isn’t that it can behave in two very
different appearing ways, the world of general relativity and the big, and the sometimes
counterintuitive world of the small in the quantum realm, but that there is a third oddity
within it, embedded perhaps that may affect both.
It’s consciousness, and there are two very different, very disagreeing sides on its importance.
On the one hand, it’s not important.
It’s just a product of evolution and biology and doesn’t really mean anything other than
it’s effects on its local surroundings.
But this view of consciousness must concede that at this level, it can interact with and
change the universe, at least very locally.
We can dig a hole, drop a feather from the tower of Pisa, build a nuclear reactor, and
so on.
We can affect the behavior of the matter around us through physical interaction.
The other side however will point out to such weird things as the observer problem in quantum
mechanics, collapsing superpositions through observation and so on may indicate some kind
of quantum function of the mind.
Here there is always a danger of digging into quantum mysticism, you can only take it as
far as the evidence, but it is an interesting idea that classical mechanics alone might
not account for the abilities of consciousness.
If that’s the case however clearly we have a lot to learn about the universe.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier and be sure to check out my
books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular,
in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we live.
Just kidding.
Liiiiiiiiiiiive.