This is my list of 10 most important scientific questions.
- What is consciousness? How does it "emerge"?
- What is the fate of universe? If universe collapses in big crunch what will happen after that? Endless void? What does it even mean? BTW, what was "before" big bang? I know time started in big bang. But suddenly why some 14 Billion years ago, universe had to start? And it started out of what? I placed consciousness before this question as answer to 1) may have implications for this, although it is probably even deeper question.
- Are there other intelligent creatures in the universe? [I am pretty sure there are organisms outside earth, at least single celled ones like bacteria]
- How exactly quantum wave function collapse to an eigen value occurs upon observation? Is it a "real" feature or an artifact of our current incomplete quantum theory?
- How to build physical theories based on discrete space-time? It is obvious, that real numbers are anything but real [talk about infinite precision!]. Time can only be measured through some periodic activity and there is definitely a limit to fine grained granularity we can go into. Since time and space are interchangeable it implies there should be a limit to space measurements as well. That said why is our calculus [continuity] based theories working at all?
- Are there any near earth objects which has high probability of collision with earth and wipe out humanity, in say next 1000 years? On a related note, are there any other 'planets' outside solar system within 10-15 rocket speed year distance we can live in?[in 1000 years we definitely would have colonised whole of solar system - Jupiter, Mars etc.]
