Wikipedia has a pretty awesome list of unsolved problems in physics, which can be read here. A couple of the interesting questions are:
- Is the universe heading towards a Big Freeze, a Big Rip, a Big Crunch or a Big Bounce? Is our universe part of an infinitely recurring cyclic model?
- What is dark matter?
- Can quantum mechanics and general relativity be realized as a fully consistent theory (perhaps as a quantum field theory)?
- Do black holes produce thermal radiation, as expected on theoretical grounds?
- Does nature have more than four spacetime dimensions? If so, what is their size? Are dimensions a fundamental property of the universe or an emergent result of other physical laws? Can we experimentally “see” evidence of higher spatial dimensions?
Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact.