Where are the lists of unsolved science questions?

December 12, 2023 6:23 AM

Where can I find lists of unsolved problems or unanswered questions for any and every branch of science? That might be physics, archaeology, botany, linguistics, any branch of engineering, oceanography, psychology, you name it.

I'm NOT looking for "unexplained mysteries" like what happened to the Mary Celeste or what the Voynich Manuscript is all about or who Jack the Ripper really was, interesting though that sort of question is.

I'm looking for lists of questions we can't answer or facts we don't know (yet) about the world around us. That could be things like Hilbert's 23 problems of mathematics, or a list of every type of beetle about which we know nothing except that it is a separate species of beetle, or a list of untranslated languages like Linear A, or anything at all which highlights a gap in human knowledge.

I'm not looking for anything which moves into spirituality, religion, morality, literature, aesthetics, or anything else subjective, just straight up gaps in our understanding of the world around us, no matter how mundane ("why do different moths have a different number of spots on their wings?") or massive ("will the universe contract into a big crunch or go on expanding for ever?").

You might know one such question, you might be able to point to a list with a thousand such questions. Both types of answer are good so please don't hesitate to throw down what you (don't) know.

posted by underclocked to Science & Nature (12 answers total)

Best answer: Wikipedia has a good set of lists that cover most of the sciences.
posted by vacapinta at 6:29 AM on December 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I don’t know if there is a list somewhere, but in my personal experience the answer to so many questions about female medicine and fertility ends up being “Well we don’t really know…”

Ex. Why do 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage? 🤷🏻‍♀️
Why do some women have shorter period durations than others? 🤷🏻‍♀️
Why do women get more migraines than men? 🤷🏻‍♀️
posted by donut_princess at 6:32 AM on December 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

Best answer: The Map of Physics video has a section on the "chasm of ignorance" which briefly outlines the major things we don't know yet. (But not particular unanswered questions, exactly.)
posted by snarfois at 8:00 AM on December 12, 2023

Best answer: I can't answer your prompt directly, but building on donut_princess's list based on my past medical history with fallopian tube problems:

How do the fallopian tubes work? 🤷🏻‍♀️ (Several theories but nothing proven)
posted by samthemander at 9:17 AM on December 12, 2023

Best answer: The podcast Unexplainable discusses a new scientific mystery weekly--and does so in a very accessible way.
posted by carrienation at 9:24 AM on December 12, 2023

Any idiopathic disease or condition, precisely because idiopathic means "we don't freaking know".

SO comforting to get a diagnosis with that horrid word.
posted by stormyteal at 9:45 AM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

This makes me think of the Drake Equation, which aims to estimate the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way with which communication might be possible. To get to that number, the equation posits that we need to know:

1. the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy
2. the fraction of those stars that have planets
3. the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
4. the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
5. the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
6. the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
7. the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

Item 1 is well-established, and item 2 is pretty well-supported by theoretical and observational data. The rest are basically guesses, and plugging in various best-estimates produces results in the range of <1 to 100,000,000.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 9:57 AM on December 12, 2023

I would hesitate to say that Linguistics has solved problems.
posted by one for the books at 10:26 AM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

or anything at all which highlights a gap in human knowledge.

I'm having a hard time answering this question, these gaps are infinite and uncountable, all research attempts to fill these gaps.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:28 AM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: For maths you could look at the Clay Institute Millennium Prize problems
posted by crocomancer at 10:34 AM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: MisantropicPainforest, perhaps in trying not to exclude answers I've been too broad. I'm looking for examples of things we know we don't understand. The Wikipedia lists that vacapinta pointed to would be excellent examples of (generally) broad and often "big" questions, as would the very specific questions about female medicine which donut_princess and samthemander suggested.

Made up examples I'm looking for might be "there are 173 species of plant x, but botanists have only ever conducted detailed research on 18 of those; the rest are largely unknown to science other than that they exist" or "ants do this sort of behaviour, but we have no idea why".

Hence, big lists of things we know we don't understand are welcome, and so are specific examples of things we know we don't understand.
posted by underclocked at 11:27 AM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There are thousands of human genes whose function is completely unknown. Then there's the 98% of the human genome outside of genes, some of which probably does something and a small portion of which we understand. Scientists assembled the sequence of one full copy of the human genome for the first time just last year, filling in tricky regions that we didn't even know the sequence of previously, much less what they do. Outside of humans, it would be easier to list the species that have had their genomes sequenced than those that haven't. It's truly wild how much we don't understand - the more you learn about a field, the more you realize how little we know.
posted by omnie at 6:30 PM on December 13, 2023 [1 favorite]