10 Of The World's Most Fascinating Unsolved Problems
The Sunrise Problem
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What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow? Philosophers and statisticians have been asking this question for millennia, trying to ascribe an irrefutable formula for the daily event. The question is meant to demonstrate the limitations of probability theory and, to some extent, is the mathematical equivalent of “you know what they say about the word ‘assume’ — makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.”
The difficulty arises when we consider that there is a lot of variance between a single person’s prior knowledge, humanity’s prior knowledge, and the universe’s prior knowledge, of the sun rising.
If p is the long-run frequency of sunrises and the uniform probability distribution is applied to p, then the value of p increases with each day that the sun actually does rise and we (the individual, humanity, the universe) see it happen.
The 137th Element
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Named for Richard Feynman, the proposed final element of the Periodic Table, Feynmanium, is a theoretical element that marks the last possible element that could exist; to go beyond #137 would require electrons to travel faster than the speed of light. It’s been proposed that elements above 124 would lack the stability to exist for more than a few nanoseconds, meaning that an element as high up as Feynmanium would be destroyed by spontaneous fission before it could ever be properly studied.
What’s even more interesting is that the number 137 was not chosen arbitrarily by Feynman as the cutoff point; he believed that it possessed great numerological significance, since “1/137 = almost precisely the value of the so-called fine-structure constant (), the dimensionless quantity that defines the strength of the electromagnetic interaction”.
The big question is, will an element ever exist above those set points where they become theoretical, and will it happen in the course of human life as we know it?
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