Interstate Highways...in Hawaii?

Jack Armstrong (0:00)

Mine would be, How Are There Interstate Highways in Hawaii? It's One More Thing. Oh, wow.

Armstrong & Getty.

Joe Getty (0:07)

One More Thing.

Jack Armstrong (0:09)

That was intentionally stupid.

We started talking about this on the Armstrong & Getty Radio Show, which is available via podcast, but you know that. It was a list of 100 answers to the question, What is the greatest unsolved problem in your field? They asked this of scientists, The New York Times did.

Joe Getty (0:30)

And I said, in our field of radio, how is blank still on the air? Is the most unsolved question in our field, and I can't fill in the blank.

Jack Armstrong (0:40)

Meow.

And just in case you didn't get that segment, this will just take seconds. I'll plow through the ones we already did, although we won't stop to consider them. Did time have a beginning when our universe was very small? What preceded the Big Bang? How many dimensions does it take to describe the formation and evolution of our universe? I suppose I should pause for at least a second so people hearing this can kind of learn.

Joe Getty (1:06)

V, what was before the Big Bang? I've thought about many times, and then I get a cramp in my head.

Jack Armstrong (1:13)

Right. And as you pointed out on the show, if the universe is expanding, what's beyond the edge of that expansion?

Farmland? I don't know.

When and where did the cognitive capacities that made language, mathematics, and complex societies possible first emerge? Why and how did the human brain expand so quickly during the ice age? A biologist? You know what? Go back and listen to the segment. I'm tired of this. Let's move on to the new ones. Let's see. We did that one. We did that one. Although, that stuff is really...

Joe Getty (1:50)

I think it's really interesting that we actually don't... We don't know why life started. We don't know what consciousness... We don't really have a good definition for all that sort of stuff or why we have it. There's lots of things that it's amazing that it's still unknown.

Jack Armstrong (2:01)

And look, if you're a religious person, because inevitably we get to emails about the creation, blah, blah, blah. All right, look, look, use your imagination. By what mechanism did God create life on earth? Okay?

Just look at it that way.

Joe Getty (2:16)

All right.

Jack Armstrong (2:17)

So they asked a bunch of scientists, here's a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution at the University of California, San Diego. How many undiscovered animal species live in the deep sea?

Joe Getty (2:29)

And do they matter? Right. My son would be into that one.

Jack Armstrong (2:33)

Here's a marine biologist wants to know, why does so many marine organisms glow, including some that live in burrows? They get scared in the dark. How did some animals evolve to be strictly nocturnal? One entomologist wants to know.

This is a good, simple one. Biochemist, University of Pennsylvania. Why do we sleep?

Joe Getty (2:53)

Yeah, they don't know why we sleep. They know benefits we get from sleeping.

Jack Armstrong (2:58)

Because I'm friggin tired.

Joe Getty (2:59)

That's why I sleep.

Jack Armstrong (3:01)

What kind of question is that?

Here's a neuroscientist, Boston University. Which other animals dream? And how similar are their dreams to ours?

Joe Getty (3:15)

You think cats have a dream that they're late for work?

Jack Armstrong (3:18)

I don't know. Or they, you know, it's the final exam, and they've never been to their class. Yeah, I don't know.

Joe Getty (3:24)

There's the biggest, biggest, juiciest, tastiest mouse ever. And it's like I'm running in quicksand trying to catch it.

Jack Armstrong (3:30)

Oh, I want to eat it so bad. This is interesting. A vertebrate geneticist wants to know why do animals that fly live longer? I didn't know they did.

There's a physician scientist at Scripps. Can the human aging process be safely reversed? I mean, that's kind of a universal one, right?

Joe Getty (3:51)

Some of these, I feel like if you figured it out today, it would have no effect on anything.

Maybe I'm unimaginative. Like, I think it's be pretty damn interesting. What was before the Big Bang? I feel like that's a mind vendor that would be. But if it turns out, hey, birds live longer because, I don't know, they're corpuscles or something, I'm not sure that has much effect on me.

Jack Armstrong (4:16)

Well, you lack curiosity, apparently.

Yeah, I mean, like this one from the Swiss scientist, can we make the wildlife trade sustainable? Maybe, probably.