Frontiers
There are too many open problems to list. Some are too broad to pursue, and others are too small to matter much. A few sit near the edge of our understanding, or near the edge of what can be done. We call these frontiers. This site is an attempt to collect them.
Is something missing?
Email meRequests for theories
Phenomena observed in nature or experiment, but not yet understood well enough to reproduce or control.
Why do copper oxides superconduct at high temperatures?
- Some copper oxides, known as cuprates, superconduct at unusually high temperatures (up to roughly 134 K, -139 °C, -219 °F) at ambient pressure.
- Cuprate superconductivity was discovered unexpectedly in 1986.
- BCS theory does not explain the effect, and there is still no consensus explanation for it.
Why can some animals regenerate body parts or entire bodies?
- Some animals can regenerate complex structures after injury. Salamanders can regrow entire limbs, zebrafish can regrow fins and parts of the heart, and planarian flatworms can regenerate whole bodies from small fragments.
- Animal regeneration has been documented since antiquity.
- Existing theories do not fully explain how animals know what is missing, rebuild the right tissues in the right places, and stop once the missing structure has been restored.
Requests for cures
Common conditions with major quality-of-life effects and no general cure.
Tinnitus
- About 14% of adults globally have experienced tinnitus, and almost 10% have experienced chronic tinnitus lasting more than three months. For some people, it persists indefinitely.
- There is no general cure, and causes can vary widely, including hearing damage, loud-noise exposure, jaw or neck tension, and neurological changes.
- Current options are limited and usually focus on coping with the sound rather than eliminating it.
For a broader map of unmet medical needs, including rare conditions, see Convoke's Unmet Needs Index.
Requests for step changes
Technologies that already work, but still have room for order-of-magnitude improvement.
DNA synthesis
Fully homomorphic encryption
- Reduce the overhead of computing on encrypted data compared with ordinary plaintext computation.
- Practical FHE would make it possible to outsource computation without revealing the underlying data. See: 0xPARC.
Geothermal energy
- Improve the cost and reliability of deep high-temperature drilling.
- Better deep drilling could make geothermal power viable in far more places. See: Quaise.
Measurement
- Improve the precision, sensitivity, and cost of clocks, spectrometers, gravimeters, and other instruments.
- Measurement was historically central to scientific progress: better clocks transformed navigation, better lenses opened microscopy and astronomy, and better detectors revealed new physics.
- Though less fashionable today, better instruments still reveal signals previously too weak or subtle to study. See: nuclear clocks.