The world's unsolved problems
993 open questions across 14 fields, gathered from Wikipedia. Pick one and start thinking.
110 results in Physics · clear · surprise me
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Post-quantum cryptography
Can we prove that some cryptographic protocols are safe against quantum computers?
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Quantum capacity
The capacity of a quantum channel is in general not known.
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Plasma physics and fusion power
Fusion energy may potentially provide power from an abundant resource (e.g. hydrogen) without the type of radioactive waste that fission energy currently produces. However, can ionized gases (plasma) be confined long enough and at a high enough temperature...
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The injection problem
Fermi acceleration is thought to be the primary mechanism that accelerates astrophysical particles to high energy. However, it is unclear what mechanism causes those particles to initially have energies high enough for Fermi acceleration to work on them.
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Alfvénic turbulence
In the solar wind and the turbulence in solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and magnetospheric substorms are major unsolved problems in space plasma physics.
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Ball lightning
the exact physical nature of this mystery in atmospheric electricity.
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Langmuir's paradox
In low-pressure plasmas, observed electron velocity distributions are often Maxwellian despite electron–electron collisions being too infrequent for thermalization.
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Abiogenesis
can life be created from physical processes alone?
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Stochasticity and robustness to noise in gene expression
How do genes govern our body, withstanding different external pressures and internal stochasticity? Certain models exist for genetic processes, but we are far from understanding the whole picture, in particular in development where gene expression must be...
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Quantitative study of the immune system
What are the quantitative properties of immune responses? What are the basic building blocks of immune system networks?
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Homochirality
What is the origin of the preponderance of specific enantiomers in biochemical systems?
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Magnetoreception
How do animals (e.g. migratory birds) sense the Earth's magnetic field?
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Protein structure prediction
How is the three-dimensional structure of proteins determined by the one-dimensional amino acid sequence? How can proteins fold on microsecond to second timescales when the number of possible conformations is astronomical and conformational transitions...
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Quantum biology
Can coherence be maintained in biological systems at timeframes long enough to be functionally important? Are there non-trivial aspects of biology or biochemistry that can only be explained by the persistence of coherence as a mechanism?
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Physical understanding of biology
can biology be written in terms of fundamental laws? Can fundamental action principles and symmetries be used to understand biological concepts like robustness, modularity, evolvability and variability? Quantum and statistical field theory have been useful...
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Interpretation of quantum mechanics
How does the quantum description of reality, which includes elements such as the superposition of states and wavefunction collapse or quantum decoherence, give rise to the reality we perceive? Another way of stating this question regards the measurement...
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Arrow of time (e.g. entropy's arrow of time)
Why does time have a direction? Why did the universe have such low entropy in the past, and time correlates with the universal (but not local) increase in entropy, from the past and to the future, according to the second law of thermodynamics? Why are CP...
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Locality
Are there non-local phenomena in quantum physics? If they exist, are non-local phenomena limited to the entanglement revealed in the violations of the Bell inequalities, or can information and conserved quantities also move in a non-local way? Under what...
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Quantum mind
Do quantum mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition, play an important part in the brain's function and can it explain critical aspects of consciousness?
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Geometric Langlands and physics
can the Langlands program related to representation theory explain the symmetries of physics, and viceversa?
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Data last refreshed 2026-10-20 03:01 UTC.