• Question: why is there are reason for everything

    Asked by jimbob to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hey Jimbob,

      there isn’t always a reason for everything. In science many things can be subject to randomness or chance!
      For example, genetic mutations which have greatly contributed to the evolution of species can be entirely random and without any reason behind them!

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      It depends on how closely you’re looking at the universe too. If you smack a snooker ball off another one, you can predict what angles they’ll hit and what direction they’ll both move afterwards, because they obey certain rules of trigonometry and such. It’s not actually completely certain (you might never predict the angles exactly), but it’s close enough that in every day life the tiny errors don’t really matter.

      But the smaller you get the less certain things become. Electrons, the tiny particles that orbit protons/neutrons which all together make an atom, are very strange and not at all certain. They’re not even moving particles some of the time, they’re a combination of moving particle and waveform, and while they still obey certain rules, those rules are all based on chance, and you can never be certain of the answer. If you get smaller, the answers become less certain and more fuzzy. Quantum physics involves a lot of not being certain at all!

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