Michael Brooks "13 Things That Don't Make Sense"

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It looks at a number of topics in science that can't be explained. He uses the Thomas Kuhn book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to present these are crucial areas whose answers may in fact drive the next big scientific theories. These are the anomalies that will require a paradigm shift because there is no way to accommodate them within existing theories. His list includes:

• The oddity that our visible universe composes only 4% of what science this is there and has labeled as dark matter and dark energy.


• The unexplainable divergence of Pioneer 10 and 11 satellites from their expected trajectory.


• Some data that seems to indicates that 'constants' of nature are in fact not constant.


• Cold fusion, the anomalous generation nuclear by-products and excess heat in a table-top room-temperature experiment.


• The definition of life and the possibility of synthetic life.


• The puzzle of whether we are alone or is there extraterrestrial life? And a signal received in 1977 that seems to be an extraterrestrial signal.


• A giant virus that fuzzes the line between virus and bacteria and appears to be a progenitor of eukaryotic life.


• The contradictory results of investigations over death: is it programmed or is it the result of accumulated defects.


• An inability to account for sex and understand why it evolved.


• The inconsistency of our belief in free will and the fact that the underlying processes appear to happen before we 'decide' to act freely.


• The unexplained efficacy of placebos.


• The oddity of homeopathy: a treatment that can't have any efficacious ingredient but is in fact growing in popularity.

The book explores each of these and provides lots of thoughtful material which I had not seen before.