• Question: What is the weirdest thing in science?

    Asked by anon-267549 on 11 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      Here’s one weird thing: why does maths work? If I use maths I can figure out how many sheep there are in a field, how strong a bridge is or how long ago the Big Bang was. But why does it have to work? Maybe it’s because a universe without consistent rules would make life impossible, but it is convenient for figuring out how the universe works when it obeys consistent rules.

    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      I think there’s a few, but one is my favourite: The concept of more than 3 spatial dimensions. It is said that Einstein could visualise 4 dimensions but I don’t really understand how that could be possible. One idea is that a 4D object has a 3D shadow, just like a 3D object has a 2D shadow.
      —
      Honourable mentions:
      Quantum mechanics, as a famous physicist (Richard Feynman) once said, ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics’.
      And also, why do we yawn?

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      On a more conceptual level, just knowing how much there is still that we don’t know (and won’t know any time soon) is really weird 🙂 Like, there are probably aliens out there! What are they like? And yet we make such amazing progress studying things that happened literally billions of years ago just by sitting on our space rock and looking up at the sky with a metal tube.

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