14-11-2019, 07:25 AM
Many physics discoveries are serendipitous. Like Penzias and Wilson. They were trying to increase the sensitivity of an instrument for radio astronomy with cryogenic detectors in the early 60's. They got a mysterious background noise, that they thought was either coming from New York (it wasn't) or from bat and pigeon dropping in the entrance of the detector horn (they removed them), and the white noise was still there. They had actually detected the cosmic microwave background, which decided the debate between continuous evolution on the one hand and big bang on the other as the mechanism behind the universe. Nobel Prizes.
And black hole mergers were thought to be rare to impossible until LIGO found they were actually quite common in the observable universe. Nobel Prizes
The two big unanswered questions are the mechanism behind dark matter, and dark energy. No one has any idea what these are. The observation that the universe is accelerating (So called Dark Energy) has already had Nobel Prizes. And there will be a bunch more coming out of these topics. Most of the universe is missing - watch this space.
And black hole mergers were thought to be rare to impossible until LIGO found they were actually quite common in the observable universe. Nobel Prizes
The two big unanswered questions are the mechanism behind dark matter, and dark energy. No one has any idea what these are. The observation that the universe is accelerating (So called Dark Energy) has already had Nobel Prizes. And there will be a bunch more coming out of these topics. Most of the universe is missing - watch this space.
