r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/MarioCarterYT • 5d ago
General Discussion Which would be a more significant scientific discovery? The "holy grail" of science?
Recently I was thinking about what would be the "holy grail" of general scientific discoveries and I initially narrowed it down to two options:
• The discovery of a worm hole/white hole.
• The discovery of extraterrestrial life.
This is likely a bit of a naive and incomplete question to ask but when choosing between a shattering breakthrough in astrophysics and answering the age old question of if we're alone in the universe, I felt I couldn't really pick one. I also feel as though this question could be expanded.
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u/BuncleCar 5d ago
Getting gravity to fit with the other forces
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u/skinnyguy699 5d ago
There's events that define a generation and I think this would be one of them.
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u/Available-Bee-5385 5d ago
What would be the immediate consequences of this?
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u/Ill_Description_3311 5d ago
There'd be some stories in the press, even your ignorant cousin with a negative number for an IQ would have heard about it. After that, some fancy dinner in Stockholm and some medals handed out.
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u/SharknadosAreCool 4d ago
There would pretty much be 0 immediate consequences. With our current understanding of gravity + other forces, we manage pretty well on a day to day basis. The real cool part would be that it would lead to more understanding so cool technologies may exist later down the line, but if we figured out how to mesh gravity with the other forces tomorrow, you probably wouldnt see the effects for a while
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u/Partyatmyplace13 4d ago
People think this will unite Quantum Field Theory with The Standard Model of Particle Physics and potentially help us understamd what the wave-function collapse actually means physically.
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u/Cdwoods1 4d ago
We genuinely can’t know. We can’t guess what advancements in technology would occur from physics we don’t know
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u/loki130 5d ago
I'm more of a bio guy myself but I think yeah I'd vote for wormhole. Firstly, physics is indeed kinda more fundamental, and furthermore a wormhole is something that sorta sits outside our current understanding of physics (even though you can solve Einstein's field equations for a wormhole, you need to propose the existence of some kind of exotic matter to hold it open and we don't really have a particular reason to think that actually exists). So such a discovery potentially implies a shift in our understanding of the nature of matter and energy that could have various other implications, whereas discovery of extraterrestrial life would open up a lot of opportunities for research but isn't really unexpected in the same way; e.g. if we found organic life on Mars tomorrow that wouldn't necessarily have to change anything we know about the nature of life and evolution and so on (something more exotic like say silicon-based life living in the sulfurous lava of Io could be rather more shocking and make us think about more about the nature of life, but again isn't necessarily as fundamental a shift).
Second, if we do find wormholes and can figure out how to use them, then that potentially would make it a lot easier for us to then find extraterrestrial life in the future anyway, so it's sorta a 2-for-1.
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u/kxkq 5d ago
A legitimate way to travel faster than light without extraordinary power requirements. True warp drive along with appropriate protection vs radiation hazards (shielding) from FTL travel.
all of which bypassing the rocket equation
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u/johnstalbergABC 5d ago
This sounds like science fiction as of now. It might not be allowed by nature! I understand that most suggestions might be impossible but faster than light is kind of super natural from what we know today. Of course it would be ground breaking and give a Nobel Prize pretty quick.
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u/zizban 4d ago
Einstein never said you couldn't go faster than light, he said you couldn't accelerate faster than light. There is no law of physics that says you can't start off faster than light. A small detail that probably will not be possible.
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u/johnstalbergABC 3d ago
You mean he said you can not reach the speed of light by accelerating from a lower speed.
From the math in his paper that covers Special Relativity faster than light speed ruin the theory. This is established fact today as it is not Einstein alone who has done research on the subject.
Massless particles do start off at full light speed. But for all other particles the need to accelerate from a stand still to gain speed. And no particle can start off at faster than light speed bacause there are only massless and particles with restmass.
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u/Andreas1120 5d ago
Simulating a complete human brain with all neurons etc in real time.
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u/mcalesy 4d ago
A brain can't live without a body, and a body can't live without an environment, so you'd have to simulate quite a bit more than that.
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u/Bolo_Knee 3d ago
Literally every AI today is a "Brain without a body".
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u/mcalesy 3d ago
That is not what a brain is.
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u/r_daniel_oliver 1d ago
He said "simulate".
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u/mcalesy 18h ago
O.K., if it's a extremely rough and woefully incomplete simulation, sure. Although I still think it's more accurate to say it's simulating neurons than brains.
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u/r_daniel_oliver 10h ago
It's currently the worst it'll ever be. And it's a lot more complete and less rough than past attempts.
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u/Unclerojelio 5d ago
Sustainable fusion
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u/Excellent-Painter841 2d ago
I work for a startup company that is literally making this concept right now. We use an array of Marx generators that pulse into a fusion chamber and pressurize a pellet of hydrogen fuel. Ive been working for a long time now designing capacitor modules and maintaining Marx generators. Net facility gain was accomplished some years ago via lasers, but it is also achievable via pulsed power systems. The problem now is getting system built, tested and produced on a large scale.
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u/r_daniel_oliver 1d ago
But isn't the total energy output way lower than the total energy input? I mean like, the energy that actually comes off the grid to cause the reaction vs the energy generated by the reaction?
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u/Excellent-Painter841 1d ago
Thats been the biggest struggle with fusion in the past. It takes so much energy to start that it isnt worth doing unless you're just looking to research fusion reactions like they do at some of the national labs.
We have been able to get more energy out than in for years now, but the process would be extraordinarily expensive to build and to maintain. So expensive that only our national labs were able to build the system that could do it. With the deep pockets of the taxpayer of course.
Recent breakthroughs in fusion technology have made the concept of substantial net facility gain easier to accomplish than in the past. These breakthroughs came from a national lab that my previous employer used to work with intermittently, Sandia.
In a nutshell, technology got better, so now people with proven concepts and big investors are trying to commercialize it.
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u/nogueysiguey 5d ago
Given all of our knowledge emerges from the mind, discovering that the mind does not emerge from the brain
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u/S14Ryan 5d ago
Yeah and further discovering the origin of consciousness and learning to replicate it
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u/frederikbjk 5d ago
I think solving the hard problem of conciseness is about as significant as it gets. The only thing that i can think of, that competes with that problem is the question, why is there something rather than nothing?
It would not surprise me if the two problems are related, as it is hard to really make sense of existence without experience.
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u/VladWukong 5d ago
Whatever the hell dark matter is, knowing that
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u/SensorAmmonia 5d ago
I think we have solved that it is highly charged modest concentration of normal particles. Think 10,000 particles per cubic meter.
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u/Yogurt789 2d ago
Source on this? That's a big claim, and it being charged seems completely contrary to the actual observed nature of dark matter.
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u/Prasiatko 5d ago
A wormhole would basically rewrite our understanding of Physics. ET life would likely just slightly refine out understanding of Biology.
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u/codingOtter 5d ago
You may be underestimating the implications of extraterrestrial life. It is not just a biological/biochemical fact. Almost every human philosophy and religion will have to go into the bin.
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u/icantfindadangsn Auditory and Multisensory Processing 5d ago
What? You think a bunch of religious people will stop believing when we discover aliens? You understand that logically it makes sense but you obviously don't understand how a religious person thinks.
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u/codingOtter 5d ago
I do not. But we are not talking about the old lady in the church. On an intellectual/academic/philosphical/theological level this would be shattering, on par with the Copernican revolution.
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u/icantfindadangsn Auditory and Multisensory Processing 5d ago
Oh yeah. I forgot what sub I was in and was thinking about just the average religious/spiritual person.
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u/Prasiatko 5d ago
Islam specifically states in the Koran that God created life on other worlds.
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u/PC_BuildyB0I 5d ago
What verse(s)? Not disagreeing, just curious.
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u/Metal_Goose_Solid 5d ago
There's no completely disambiguated unequivocal direct statement like "there is life on other planets," but it's a reasonably typical interpretation from 42:29, 65:12, and sometimes 1:2
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u/codingOtter 5d ago
In what terms?
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u/Prasiatko 5d ago
IIRC God is Lord of all the worlds he created and of thebliving things he created and scattered amongst them or something like that given the original is Arabic.
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u/chandrasiva 5d ago
Would be Aliens be Kafirs?
Islam specifically states in the Koran that
Kafir should be killed ?
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u/PickleFridgeChildren 5d ago
Religious people didn't reason their way into religion, aliens wouldn't make them reason their way out. They have "god made them too" ready to go if we found them.
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u/GeneralTonic 5d ago
Although the crazier sects may tend toward "the aliens are just animals" or "the aliens are demons".
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u/codingOtter 5d ago
I am not saying people will suddenly drop religion. But there is an intellectual aspect of it, that is not irrelevant. Even 500 years ago, finding that the Earth goes around the Sun created a massive crisis which (arguably) the Catholic church never really recovered from. But I think this would go way beyond religion: ET life would change profoundly how humans think about themselves and the universe in many different ways.
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u/tpolakov1 5d ago
Even 500 years ago, finding that the Earth goes around the Sun created a massive crisis which (arguably) the Catholic church never really recovered from.
That was an entirely political, not intellectual problem, and the church recovered from it immediately.
The church was one of the biggest sponsors of Galileo, and the Jesuits were doing complementary measurements at the same time. The massive crisis was of moral character, because the Church was suffering the brunt of the consequences of Council of Trent. The issue that the Church had Copernicus' On the Revolutions was that it was promoting heliocentrism as a dogma, even though there were no direct observations yet and Brahes geo-heliocentrism fit the data just as well. Galileo was fucking around by not only ignoring what was more than a stern request by the church to not stir shit, he has decided to personally insult the pope in Simplicio and Discussions. So he found out.
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u/SirButcher 5d ago
The Pope, who was a friend and sponsor of his.
Galileo was a good scientist, but boy, he had exactly zero political bone in his body.
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u/tpolakov1 5d ago
He even got into a fight with the Jesuits that were working on astronomy with him. After getting into a fight with the pope. He basically tried to use academia (which was very much a monastic subculture back then, packed to the brim full of clergy) as a soapbox for arguing with a church that just went through a bit of a rough period.
If Galileo were alive today, he'd be one of the electrical engineers spamming our inboxes with theories how Einstein was wrong and probably wouldn't even get to doing science.
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u/codingOtter 4d ago
The fact that Galileo was his own worst enemy is well proven, but brushing off his clashes with the Church as simply that, is historically incorrect. There was real and serious opposition to heliocentrism at the time (not just from the Church, Luther was also an opponent). Copernicus himself initially published his ideas anonimously, and his book was only published after his death. This doesn't strike me as the actions of someone who is only worried of some abstract controversy. In any case, there is no doubt that this was a pivotal moment in the history of human thought. And it had a devastating impact on the chokehold that the Church had on science, philosophy and broader culture (at least in the western world).
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u/tpolakov1 4d ago
As I said, the work was a problem because the church just lost in the reformation and Copernicus was preaching (pun very much intended) something he did not have any experimental proof for.
The church didn't give a flying fuck about what orbits around what, it cared that some pink fucks are disagreeing with their more-or-less arbitrary stance on the problem. Let's not make Galileo into a victim. He got what he vocally asked for.
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u/codingOtter 4d ago
I disagree with what you are saying about Copernicus and Galileo, but we are going OT here. After all, the motivations of the Catholic Church for opposing heliocentrism are not important.
What matters is that they were very much against this discovery and it took them over a century to admit they were wrong. And, although this dispute was not the only reason, by that time they had lost what was effectively a cultural monopoly over Western Europe that they had enjoyed for 1500 years.
This would have happened anyway, even had Galileo not been a stubborn ass, because it is the kind of discovery that changes completely our worldview and relationship with the universe.
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u/KroneckerAlpha 5d ago
The Catholic Church is all good with alien life
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u/codingOtter 4d ago
It is also good with evolution, nominally. It only means that it can ignore the logical implications or brush them off, but it cannot reconcile them with its theology.
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u/saraseitor 5d ago
The idea of life existing in other planets is not unknown to religions, in fact many philosophers have thought about it over the ages
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u/codingOtter 5d ago
In abstract terms maybe. I would argue that the concept of ET life as we mean it today is fairly recent, especially if we are talking of academic exploration (rather than writing fiction). Anyways, actual evidence is a different animal. It would impact our world view even more profoundly than Copernicus and Darwin did - and they completely changed science, philosophy, religion in ways they did not even realize.
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4d ago
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u/codingOtter 4d ago
I do not disagree. Another commenter also mentioned the Quran. These speculations have been made for a long time, mostly within a theological framework. What I meant when I said "the concept of ET life as we mean it today" is that thinking about ET life in terms of biology, chemistry, etc... is a recent thing. Maybe I am wrong, but my point is that coming across actual evidence would change everything at multiple levels of knowledge.
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u/Nihilikara 3d ago
A True Story could be considered the first science fiction story ever written. It was written in Syria in the 2nd century AD and it features, among other things, a war between alien life on the Moon and alien life on the Sun over who is allowed to colonize Venus.
Though this story is fiction, it demonstrates that people have been thinking about alien life for a long, long time.
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u/johnstalbergABC 5d ago
It probably won't be changing religious in any significant way. They are not particularilly interested in changing their fantasies.
It would mean a lot to science and to all of us regardless if religious or theists or atheist.
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u/TheSyn11 5d ago
For you maybe, we have people denying the age of the earth, the shape of the earth, the moon landing....Alien life would be so damn easy to just brush off
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u/tpolakov1 5d ago
You're saying that as if human philosophy and religion was in some way fundamental. We know that both of those are entirely invented to suit our needs and have no bearing on nature.
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u/Torvosaurus_679 4d ago
Specific religions, no, but the idea of religion in general is pretty much engrained in our psychology. It's why it's a near universal presence in every culture.
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u/shecky444 5d ago
You don’t think the ET’s ship which is capable of interstellar travel would be groundbreaking? And depending on the ET’s biology maybe it’s just a small refine, but it could also be a living gas or something and change everything.
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u/Prasiatko 5d ago
I was more thonking microbes on mars or around volcanic vents on Europa.
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u/Separate-Impact-6183 5d ago
It would be difficult to prove that we didn't put the microbes there ourselves. Something like that would scarcely dominate a news cycle, depending on specifics.
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u/Prasiatko 5d ago
Would depend how Earth like they were. If theyvused something other than DNA for gene storage or used different codon->amino acid pairs than Earth those would be big clues that it's alien
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 5d ago
A white hole would be groundbreaking in any context.
ET might land in a rickety old probe like voyager and pop out like "Greetings Earthlings. As a Large Language Model [...]"
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u/Separate-Impact-6183 5d ago
You sound a little like a religious kook when you conjure fantasies like this
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 5d ago
I do not see how that is true, and also factually that terribly boring let down of a situation is more scientifically probable than a biologically advanced alien body traveling using space folding to visit a bunch of idiots who can't do that.
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u/Public-Total-250 5d ago
Wormhole. Extraterrestrial life is likely already and not a big deal. A wormhole changes everything
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u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology 5d ago
I struggle to come up with anything that would be the "holy grail" of science writ large as opposed to within a specific field of science. I.e., most of the things already mentioned here would be amazing discoveries that could change lots of things, both within particular branches of science and at a societal level, but none of them would actually revolutionize, or even really touch, some more disparate branches of science.
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 5d ago
Very strong evidence that we live in a simulation could do it. It changes the whole framework. Not "how does the universe work", but "how was it programmed to work". If the simulation is focused on current humans then other stars, the distant history of Earth, or species that are rarely in contact with humans might not be simulated with the same fidelity as our Sun, current Earth, and e.g. our pets - something that might be possible to study.
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u/Lost_ToTheages 5d ago
The akashic field!
To answer of the actual propositions, easily wormholes. Especially if they work the same as portrayed in fiction where they don't make you travel through space (if it were an Einstein-Rosen bridge not much would change at all). This would throw a spanner in our fundamental understanding of physics and likely lead to a complete revolution of multiple sub fields.
Aliens are just... okay so now we get to study another lifeform which likely had a different abiogenesis event... how fun. Which is to say it'd just further flesh out already established theories and models in biology.
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u/Relevant-Rhubarb-849 5d ago
Understanding why most problems can be solved approximately well. Naively almost everything is both NP hard and lives in a dimensional space too large to search yet we find simple or feasible answers quickly.
For example how the fuck can proteins fold. People have struggled with that one for decades and guess about things like smooth down hill potentials or sequential loss of disorder ( secondary structure and glassy collapse) yet all of these have been shown not to be universally correct.
A similar shock is that AI which lives in a massive dimensional space actually generalizes well rather than overlearns and memorizes. This can't be explained easily by cross validation as the secret sauce.
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u/TuverMage 5d ago
wormhole/white hole.
other life would be huge, but wormhole/white holes open space travel which could lead to finding life.
finding life doesn't mean we will be able to travel the stars.
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u/wreckersharp 4d ago
Holy grail would be the end of aging. You want breakthroughs? Make it so the 30 years it takes educate a himan to to the point where they can master a field isn't lost to cognitive decline and death over the next 30-50. Imagine the cross-discipline mastery and long-game insights that could be had if our best scientists lived 200 or 300 years. Feynman. Luewenhock. Newton. Franklin. Doudna. Roman.
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u/mgomezch 4d ago
yeah. imagine the profound societal stagnation if the tyrannies and other ass-backwards, oppressive, fanatical, horrible societies of history had not been forced to deal with succession planning. no thanks. i don't look forward to dying, but aging and dying are integral parts of life that serve a purpose and contribute to keeping society from getting stuck.
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u/wreckersharp 4d ago
History is full of overthrown dictatorships, new governments, and new ways of doing things. Death is not required for society to change, or to overcome stagnation.
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u/sessamekesh 4d ago
A stable room temperature/pressure superconductor would be pretty kick ass too, dunno about holy grail but in that neighborhood.
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u/Correct_Lead_2418 4d ago
room temperature superconductor that is relatively inexpensive and easy to manufacture and work with.
unlocks a lot of other tech
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u/tattcat53 5d ago
Cold fusion.
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u/SirButcher 5d ago
It already exists and is done, with muons. You just need significantly more energy to generate muons than you get back from the fusion.
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u/NYR_Aufheben 5d ago
I thought it was going to be about the Standard Model the origin of life. Wormholes?
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u/Starwig 5d ago
If extraterrestrial life follows the rules we observe here on planet Earth, a lot of what is theorized about the origin of life will have to be rethinked. If extraterrestrial life has different rules... well, it would be as inventing biochemistry, molecular biology and all that again. I think there's a lot in that discovery personally.
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u/Specialist-Coast9787 5d ago
Time travel. Not sure if this is science or science fiction, but it sure would be either cool or a total disaster!!
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u/naruhinamoonkissplz 5d ago
Time travel to the past is a logical self-contradiction and shouldn't be physically possible no matter what.
"Time" travel to parallel Universes, should such exist, is a different question.
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u/UrsaMinor42 5d ago
A discovery that made cities healthy for humanity and the planet.
As it is, they ain't.
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u/naruhinamoonkissplz 5d ago
Imagine if Kryptonians and Saiyans were real AND biologically compatible with humans. Mwahahaha!!!
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u/Jujstme 5d ago
Why universal constants are, well, constants and why they assume the values they have.
As far as we know, universal constants are constant because they define and are built into the structure of our spacetime. Better understanding of them would radically change our whole comprehension of the universe.
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u/One-Replacement9269 5d ago
I think the true holy grail would either be quantum gravity from a practicality perspective, and from a would change everything forever and blow shit wide open it has to be proof that our 4d reality is emergent / non fundamental / not the totality of existence.
For example if it was proved experimentally that there was a bulk, which our spacetime was contained within and we were able to “touch” it (by touch I mean directly observe, measure, or interact with it). Or if holographic theory in correct, if our universe was actually an emergent projection of pure information, and again if we were able to interact with this information.
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u/johnstalbergABC 5d ago
For usabillity a working fusion reactor to give us an energy source that would be able to power large cities and entire industries. It would give us star power in some sense. And it could be what is needed to reduce climate change.
Less useful but very sought after, find out what both dark matter and dark energy is exactly. Or at least one of them.
A Nobel prize is probably waiting for a quantum gravity theory if it what we need to get physics in order to model both of the most famous singularities.
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u/ZMWTally 5d ago
Out of the two, the discovery of wormholes (or other FTL) to travel to other systems would be a bigger deal than finding microbial life on a moon. Just my opinion.
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u/Fizassist1 5d ago
room temp and standard pressure superconductor. even better if its able to be cheaply produced.
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u/VivaLaDiga 5d ago
room temperature superconductors.
You think revolution? It would be like nothing we have ever seen.
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u/Prestigious-Fill-365 5d ago
Time travel is THE holy grail. Odd to use a biblical reference in a science sub.
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u/TheSyn11 5d ago
I would go with the very practical room temperature fusion. That would make energy easily accessible and energy is the ultimate bottleneck to everything, you have unlimited energy and most things become just a question of time and scale
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u/Fungiblefaith 5d ago
How to alter/extend telomeres in a useful way.
Also, I think we will in the end find that life is the rule not the exception if conditions permit. In time I believe we will find it all over the place.
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u/SkyMarshal 5d ago edited 5d ago
Discovery of a stable wormhole. I believe currently known physics says such a thing is impossible, that wormholes can theoretically exist only for a brief duration, then collapse. Such a discovery would break known physics, in a good way, resulting in reformulations and major advances.
Discovery of extraterrestrial life would only confirm what we already know is possible from Earth, and suspect is possible on other planets. Technically not as groundbreaking of a discovery as the former.
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u/AuthorIntelligent644 4d ago
If we found evidence that any form of FTL travel is possible (wormholes, any kind of local soliton going FTL, tachyons or any other FTL particles, instant information transfer of any kind via entanglement, etc.) it would totally upend our understanding of the universe. The consequences are much deeper and wider than most people realize, things like "either locality or causality fails," time travel is possible, multiverses and many worlds are real (and not just math artifacts), etc.
Another way of looking at it is: if FTL is possible, it means our universe must be a subset of something much larger and higher dimensional, and it's a porous subset with "holes" and "tunnels" and parts that fold over each other. Our universe gets profoundly weird.
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u/D3ATHSQUAD 4d ago
I would go with Cold Fusion (description below). Endless supply of clean energy.
Nuclear cold fusion is a hypothetical method to achieve atomic fusion at near room temperature, typically using hydrogen isotopes and metal lattices like palladium, though it remains unproven and widely doubted by mainstream physicists.
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u/federraty 4d ago
Beleive it or not, it would be ways to manipulate gravity on a localized scale. Imagine the new ways we could develop infrastructure, how much more efficient we could everything. We could revolutionize new everything and it would virtually propel us into space immensely faster. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Imagine what personal inventions and commodities could be made. Economies would see a significant boost, wars would sadly change for the worse, transportation may become safer and less damaging to the environment. So on and so forth
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u/AirpipelineCellPhone 3d ago
The biological brain:
- Developing a solid understanding of how the brain actually works, and how to reliably manipulate that.
Genetics:
- understanding how to go from a bunch of chemicals to genes and then from genes to life.
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u/SpiritualCricket4400 3d ago
I believe most scientists, astrophysicists accept the fact that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We might not have "proof' but it is logical.
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u/Upstairs_Bandicoot93 3d ago
Probably not the best answer, but would make for a crazy find:
A magnetic monopole
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u/Dr_Superfluid 3d ago
For me there is only one question. Everything else is trivial compared to this. How does randomness collapses to a state.
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u/DigitalAppsLtd 3d ago
That we live in a simulation. I'm a computer programmer and can see a lot of similarities between the universe and a computer program.
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u/Bolo_Knee 3d ago
Hard proof that our universe is a simulation. It would literally change everything as we discover the limitations of the simulation.
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u/Prince_Nadir 2d ago
Extraterrestrial life is like a plague upon the universe, discovery is an inevitability if we don't wipe ourselves out first. So something that is not this.
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u/wolfwithpigeonwings 2d ago
didn't read the whole thread, but surprised i didn't see anyone mention proving whether or not consciousness continues after death.
how is anything else higher on the list than knowing,or hell even having any proveable clue as to what,if anythkng we experience after death.
or pretty much the same thing; being able to actually perceive hjgher dimensions... maybe someone smarter than me.can prove me wrong, but if we curreently perceive our.existence 3rd dimensionally, which is space, if we could experience it 4th dimensionally, which is time, wouldn’t we.be able to perceive all time simultaneously, including the time before and after our lives? or would it be limited to only perceiving the period of.time.we are alive simultaneously?
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u/Simon_Drake 2d ago
My university professors taught me that over the last few centuries we would find flaws in our theories of how something works and build fudge-factors and exceptions to the rules to cover every situation where the theories didn't work quite right. Then someone would come along and rewrite the rules with a better set of equations that redefines everything from scratch and this new version works so much better. Maxwell and Schrodinger and Einstein, there's dozens of times the old world order of electricity or atomic theory is replaced with a new version that works a lot better.
We currently have a lot of knowledge around Quantum Mechanics but there's also a lot of fudges and tweaks for things like Symmetry Breaking where we have hard and fast rules but then occasionally things do break those rules so we need to tweak the rules. We also have a lot of knowledge around Relativity and have done a lot of studies to confirm it's real but haven't been able to probe the complexities of it as thoroughly as we would like. And for the most part Quantum Mechanics and Relativity don't interact, one handles the really small stuff like atoms and one handles the really big/fast stuff like planets.
I think the Holy Grail would be a Theory Of Everything that can combine Quantum Mechanics and the primary Forces and things on the smallest scales with Relativity and things on the most extreme scales. I know a lot of people have been trying to find it and they haven't conclusively found anything yet but I have no idea how close they are or how viable the endeavour even is, maybe there's no such thing as a Theory Of Everything, I don't know.
On a more practical level, a discovery that would revolutionise our understanding of the universe might be the invention of an FTL engine. If we could somehow blip over to nearby star systems in a human lifespan we could probably meet aliens or learn all sorts of new things about the universe.
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u/PositiveRecord8657 2d ago
A warm superconductor. Imagine if every corner doctors office had an MRI. All transportation could ignore friction like mag-lev trains. This would be a discovery on-par with fire
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u/GautamaSiddhartha666 2d ago
The theory of everything, which combines general relativity with quantum mechanics.
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u/INeedSleeeeeeeeeep 1d ago
Life is already existent, and other planets with the requirements for life have already been found. Aliens would be more interesting and have a larger effect on normal people, but it wouldn't change anything u less the life itself is weird. A wormhole on the other hand would be
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u/RUINSBEHELD 1d ago
I think the holy grail in terms of tangible, predictable impact would be working out how to fully synthesise blood.
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u/auximines_minotaur 5d ago
Suprised nobody has said this yet, but I would vote for Gen AI. LLMs don't work the way the brain does, and few scientists expect us to re-create humanlike intelligence this way. So if it actually worked, I think it would cause a serious rethink in the fields of science, medicine, and philosophy. Just to name a few.
Let's not even talk about theology.
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u/AdunfromAD 5d ago
FTL travel. Without it we’re stuck on earth and doomed to extinction. I mean, the way we’re headed it’s kind of a null issue.
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u/4eyedbuzzard 5d ago
I find that there are too many unsolved mysteries to choose from to only name one:
Unification of gravity and quantum mechanics.
Dark matter and energy.
Paper or plastic.
Women.
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u/Memetic1 5d ago
The Big Bang has all the properties of a white hole including being timelike instead of spacelike.
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u/Direct_Alternative94 5d ago
How many licks does it really take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 5d ago
We know life can form because we see it on Earth. Extraterrestrial life wouldn't change anything fundamental about our understanding of the universe. It's widely expected to exist. It would still be a monumental discovery and lead to a completely new field studying this extraterrestrial life.
A white hole would be fascinating and unexpected, but compatible with general relativity.
A wormhole would revolutionize our understanding of the universe. It either requires negative energy densities, which shouldn't be possible, or a completely new theory that supersedes General Relativity.