• Question: if you could answer one unanswerable question, which question would it be?

    Asked by notsoamazinggrace to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Vicky Bayliss

      Vicky Bayliss answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      This isn’t really a physics answer but I guess if someone could prove, without doubt, that god either did or didn’t exist – that would be fairly fundamental. I mean, there are lots of people in the world fighting about what god does or doesn’t want us to do, that if we could just all agree that he doesn’t exist, or that he does and he can tell us what he wants, then I think there would be a lot less suffering in the world.

    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      For me I would ask just how big is our universe?! What is past the observable universe and what exactly happened 13.8 billion years ago to kick it all off? I’d also love to know if there are higher dimensions which we can’t see – that’d be pretty cool 🙂 If I could just choose one question… hmmmmm… I guess I would want to know how big the entire universe is.

    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      So mine also isn’t in Physics, but is related — it’s a bit complicated I’m afraid!

      Theoretical computer scientists study the question of what problems can and can’t be efficiently solved by a computer. One of the ways they do this is to divide problems up in to different classes. There’s a class called ‘P’, which contains all the problems that can be solved efficiently by a computer, and there’s a class called ‘NP’, which contains all the problems that can’t be solved efficiently, but if you have an answer, you can check that it’s the right one efficiently.

      Now, the (so far!) unanswerable question is: are these two classes actually different? The problem is we haven’t yet proven that a problem really is *impossible* to solve efficiently — it could be we just don’t know the right way to solve it!

      Who cares, right? Well one thing is that the way that we secure all digital information ASSUMES that P and NP are different, even though it’s not proven to be true! So a firm answer either way would have consequences for information security worldwide.

      The reason it relates to what I do, is that I used to work on quantum computing, and quantum computers are able to solve a whole lot of problems efficiently, that classical ones can’t.

      The problem is called ‘P versus NP’ and is considered so important that in 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute put up a $1, 000, 000 prize for anyone who could solve it. No-one’s claimed it yet, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was me (or you)?

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Probably something existential question such as why am I here, what is the purpose of my life and how this relate with the rest of the Universe.
      I would be also curious about the origin of the Universe, its final destiny and other “big” questions like these.

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