SOME OF THE UNIVERSE'S BIGGEST MYSTERIES

Here are some of the most puzzling questions overwhelming my mind at the moment. If anyone is able to enlighten me on some of these mysteries, please send an e-mail to me at will.obrien@orange.net

1 Can the electron be split or is a discrete entity?

 2 What is the value of Hubble's constant, if indeed it is a constant?

 3 Does the Higgs Boson exist?

 4 We know that the Universe is at its critical density, but what is the main constituent of dark matter?

 5 Will proton decay ever be observed?

 6 What is the mass of the neutrino?

 7 How many neutrinos are there in the Universe?

8 How many holey, unparntered socks are there in my house?

Something of similar order of  again!

9 How many Brussell sprouts are uneaten each year in Britain on Christmas Day?

Once again, a large number.

10 Why does buttered toast always land buttered-side down when you drop a piece on the kitchen floor?

Yes, I know that experiments have been done to work out whether there is any statistical bias, and maybe it has something to do with the additional moment of inertia due to the added butter. But I think it only works if you drop the toast accidentally.

 11 Why do so many ancient Greek statues have fractured noses?

12 Will we ever fully understand how the human brain works?

Probably.

13 Will we ever fully understand how Michael Jackson's brain works?

Almost certainly not! 

14 Will we ever fully understand how David Icke's brain works?
Lets not even try!

15 Why do so many builders wear trousers that are too loose for them, without a belt, and no underwear? Some means of cooling off perhaps.

16 Why are all thin people named William usually known as Will, and all fat people called William usually known as Bill? At the moment I'm almost universally known as Will; lets hope it stays that way!

17  Why is that when there is a handball in a football match, all the supporters are able to shout 'handball' in such perfect unision? I myself don't usually spot it, and neither do the referees.

 18 Why do the peanut sellers outside football stadia, or Highbury at least, all talk completely incomprehensibly?

 19 How did Arsenal's knickname, 'The Gunners', turn into 'The Gooners'?

 20 Why are all football comentators all obsessed with the word "adjugded"?

 21 Why is that the spacing of the holes in the optical mounts never matches the hole spacing in the optical table to which you are trying to bolt them? Everything thus has to be bolted at funny angles. Anyone who's done any photonics experiments will know exactly what I'm talking about. You'd think there'd be some kind of standard hole spacing?

 22 Why are there so many different units of pressure that everyone is expected to know, in my kind of business anyway. There's the pascal, the millibar, the torr, the atmosphere, the mmHg and the psi (pound per square inch). They're all different!

 23 When is the world finally going to be free from imperial measurements? That would make my job easier as some companies manufacture parts in millimetres, others in inches.

It probably won't happen until nearly everyone who's older than me is dead (circa 2060?), such is older people's obstinacy to learn new units.

 24 Why do the chains on bath plugs invariably become detached within a couple of months of purchase, or weeks even. Surely the calculation to decide what strength of chain to use to withstand the pressure difference in pulliing the plug out repeatedly is not a difficult one.

 25 Bogus biological principles such as

"A human only uses 10% of his or her brain"
"Eating chips gives you spots"
"Eating the crusts on bread makes your hair curl"
or "You can't get pregnant if you do it standing up"

are often called old Wives' tales. But you does one have to be old, female and married to come up with these things?

26 Why do so many public school teachers have nasal hair?

27 They say that women cannot park, and yet whenever I see a long line cars parked on the edge of a high street,  they are usually all immacualatly parked, sometimes almost bumper to bumper.  Surely some of those cars belong to women?

28 There seems to be a notion that if that if a man owns a Porsche or a Ferrari, women will be impressed. Yet a lot of women I know don't like driving on fast roads, so why should they be impressed? Maybe they don't mind travelling on fast roads if someone else is driving.

29 Why do skint students' budgeting plans go completely awry the moment they walk into a pub? Their studying schedule often goes wrong as well.

30 There is a geological feature called a "Roche Moutonée", meaning "Rock of Sheep", which has a lot to do with glaciation and nothing to do with sheep. It certainly doesn't look like a sheep. So why the ridiculous name?

31  Why are there so many young Australians living in London at the moment? The jobs? Is it the climate? (unlikely) The museums? The Tower of London? Buckingham Palace? The traffic? The Labour Government? The low inflation? The West End Shows? The Church?

32 Why is it that nearly all the women I know called Sarah have fair hair, or fairish?

"A knew a girl called Sarah,
Her hair was fairer,
than that of most girls is not Sarah"

That's a poem I could write about several people.

33 A long time ago, when I was at school, all the different teachers gave us excerise books. There'd be one for each subject and each was a different colour (e.g. red for English, blue for maths , green for science etc.). But then the form teacher would tell us to cover them in brown paper so that they all looked the same. What's the point in that?

34 Do inexperienced fishermen really catch discarded shoes instead of fish as children's make us believe?

35 No man wants to be bald, but how many men with no hair loss problems go to the barbers and ask for a grade 1 all over?

36 How is that with London buses, even if you're only 4 stops away from the terminus and there's little traffic, buses supposedly separated by 10 minutes frequently end up folowwing each other back-to-back? Apparently there are plans to help rectify this.

37 Why is the inside lane on the outer side of the road, and vice versa? I'm sure a few driving accidents must have occurred as a result of a driving instructor saying "Move into the inside lane, please."

38 Why is it that whenever I'm in a cast, the first woman to drop out is always the one I fancy the most, before I get the chance to ask for her phone number, at least?

I expect that some of my friends might have some ideas.........

39 How can it be that every post-production party (that's PPP for short) that I don't go to turns into an orgy and lasts a full 24 hours? That's what people imply, at least.

40 Why did comedian Jack Dee's stand up TV show suddenly become less funny when  it was moved from Channel4 to ITV (circa 1997)?

"I'm sorry Mr. Dee, now that more people will be watching you you'll have to omit your best jokes."

He's become a bit funnier again recently.

41 Why is it that when I was at school, people who deliberately played hookey were suspended, thus the punishment was the same as the offence?

42 Why is that Microsoft's maintenance programs (e.g. scandisk or disk defragmentation) are te programs most likely to cause the computer to crash?

43 Why are people who like brown sauce so proud of the fact that they like it (for example, the character Jim Royle in the comedy seris 'The Royle family')? I can imagine this happening in a hotel restaurant.
WAITER: Your breakfast sir, two slices of bacon, scrambled eggs, two pork sausages, tomato, mushrooms and a slice of fried.
BROWN SAUCE LIKER: May I have some brown sauce?
WAITER: i'm sorry, sir, we've run out.
BROWN SAUCE LIKER You don't, this hotel is a disgrace, I'm leaving at once I refuse to pay the bill!

44 Why do Japanese suits of armour that are found in museums usually have big bushy moustaches attached? Japanese man son't usually have moustaches, it seems.

45 Do farmers really say "Ooh-ahh"?

46  Do pirates really say "Wa-hahh" and "Shiver me timbers!"?

47 Does Ali G (a.k.a. Sacha Baron Cohen) really have a large private part?

48 Why do idiotic drivers who feel it necessary to open their car windows, and shout out 'Oi! W**ker' for no good reason always have cockney accents? If there is a reaon it will probably because they are late and think that everyone else should faster to compensate. There have recently beensome accent versus attitude studies, but I don't think that subject was studied.

49  Has anyone ever stepped and slipped on a banana skin on a street pavement?

50 If you dine in a restaurant and forget to bring your wallet, would you really be asked to wash the dishes or is that another TV falacy? I must try it sometime.

51  It seems that just about every actor has appeared in the TV polica drama, The Bill, as is obvious when I read the programs when I go to the theatre. Are there that many parts in it?

I even have some friends who have appeared in it. Perhaps i should audition myself.

52 Who was it who decided that swiss cheese and pineapple go well together and decided that cubes of each should be served together on cocktail sticks?

53 Was the A1/A406 junction Henly's Corner designed by someone called Henly? I hope he's lost his job as he made a right mess of it.

54 Why is that some devoted football supporters complain when their team has a large number of different strips on sale? Surely that's a good thing, you can choose the one you like the most and forget about the others. Nobody says you have to buy them all and get ripped off. It's not like a buying a record and not knowing whether you're going to like all the songs.

55 Why are there holes in biscuits, NOT the large holes in the Jammy Dodger, the small holes in the Rich Tea, the disgestive, the Bourbon and the Bourbon's albino cousin, the custard cream?

This question was first posed by TV comedian Harrry Hill, and has a point. I think that maybe somebody was trying to design a tea-strainer out of biscuit. He (or she) found that it a bit too soggy, but if you gently dip it into a made cup of tea, it doesn't break up and is quite edible. He decided to leave the holes in the design for aesthetic reasons and were later included in other biscuit designs.

56 Why is that most young men are incapable of organising any social acticivity that involves anything other than merely going to a pub and drinking? Some men aren't even very good at doing that.

57 Why is a custard pie called what it is? Custard is a yellow hot viscous fluid with a skin. It goes well with school dinner puddings (if you like it at all that is) but not with kippers. A custard pie is light, foamy, cold, creamy-coloured object that is more usually smothered over other people's faces as a joke than eaten. It is blatantly not made with custard!

58 Whenever I meet an Irish person outside of Irelnd, that person always seems to come from either Dublin or Cork. There are lots of other counties in Ireland, do the people who live there all stay at home?

59 Why is that when, as a student, I ever studied in the library, a lot of the women felt it necessary to wiggle their bums while they walked, and thus distract me from my studying? How very inconsiderate of them! This problem was particularly bad in Manchester University's John Rylands Library.

60  I am sure everyone who reads this will know at least one person who is totally disorganised and totally forgetful. They say they'll do you a favour, you know that they're going to forget, and they do. You phone them and write them letters e-mails, and they don't reply. You arrange socials with them, and don't turn up and don't phone to apologise.

I think know the sort of person I mean. Some of them are, or used to be, my friends!
But why is it, when you write them a cheque, for whatever reason, they magically become organised people and pay it in within 24 hours?

61  In the story of Hansel and Gretel, why does the witch give Hansel lots of sweets before eating him so that he gets fat and becomes a larger meal, when she could just eat the sweets as well.

BACK to homepage.