Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 100 unsolved problems in science.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this is obviously a very important milestone in the history of the Science of Everything podcast, 100 episodes.

And I wanted to use this opportunity to announce some very exciting and important changes and new

developments in the podcast, which I hope will really get you guys excited and basically be a way

to help produce more content and ensure the future of the podcast.

But before we get to that, I'll talk a bit more about that at the end of the show. I wanted to make this a special episode for you guys, something a little bit different and hopefully exciting. After a lot of thought, I decided that in basically all of my other episodes, I talk about things that we know, things that we can say on the basis of scientific findings. And to spice things up a bit, I would instead use this episode to talk about some things that we don't know,

or specifically unsolved problems in science, outstanding questions, or ongoing debates that haven't yet been resolved.

So these are, if you like, some of the mysteries of science.

But of course, it's more than just an issue of saying, well, here's something we don't know, isn't that mysterious,

but there's a lot to unpack about the nature of the problem, what can be said about it,

what the existing theories are, and how scientists have tried to go about solving it.

Because really that's the key characteristic of science

is that it's not a set of facts that you memorize.

It's a process for learning and understanding and discovering new knowledge and improving

our understanding of how the world works.

So that's what I want to showcase in this episode, and I'll do that in the guise of talking about six important unsolved problems in science, and I've picked one from some of the main disciplines in science.

So we've got, first, from computer science, the problem of p versus np, second from physics, dark matter, from chemistry, the island of stability.

Fourth, from Earthsides, the Snowball Earth hypothesis. Fifth, from biochemistry, the protein

folding problem, and sixth from biology, the Cambrian explosion. But you may have heard of

...