Complex Numbers

Known Unknowns

Comedy meets science in another Cracked article.

    Questions It Looks Like Science Is Never Gonna Be Able to Answer  
Those eggheads aren’t so smart after all, are they?

Right, because not knowing everything is the same as knowing nothing.

Science isn’t a discipline known for moving fast, breaking things or shooting first and asking questions later.

Well... kind of. For various definitions of "fast."

4. The Riemann Hypothesis

It’s ridiculously complicated, but let’s just say that according to the hypothesis, proposed by Bernard Riemann, there’s a pattern to the distribution of prime numbers along the number line.

Oh, come on, that's not science; that's math, a separate discipline that will never know everything.

3. Goldbach’s Conjecture

If 160 years seems like a long time, try 282. That’s how long ago Russian mathematician Christian Goldbach theorized that “every even positive integer greater than 3 is the sum of two (not necessarily distinct) primes.”

I invented the principle "never let facts get in the way of a joke," but again... math, not science.

2. The Clarendon Dry Piles

It sounds like a sex act that only exists on Urban Dictionary, but it may be even weirder. It’s two brass bells connected by a pair of batteries called dry piles powered by electrostatic forces. The amount of charge carried between the bells is so small that it appears to be a perpetual motion machine, but the truth is, the batteries are just draining extremely slowly.

So science has, in fact, answered a question: extremely slow drain. At least this one is actually science, not math.

It’s anyone’s guess when the batteries might die, but we’ll probably never know because the hardware will probably break first.

Seems to me that question will eventually be answered, so this section still doesn't meet the promise of the headline.

1. The 500-Year Microbiology Experiment

Also science.

It’s a stunning act of futility and optimism to bet on society surviving another 500 years, but that’s what scientists at the University of Edinburgh did in 2014 when they endeavored to find out if certain strains of dried bacteria can survive five centuries.

This headline sucked. That's another question that will eventually be answered.

That is, if, as the article notes, science is still around in 490 years.