What is a Hoosier? I never realized until last night how long I’ve wondered that, but never bothered to just go and look up the answer. This is an amazingly simple question with, it turns out, no simple answer.
According to the bits on Wikipedia [1], the exact origin of the word is not known. There are historical speculations, but it’s really not clear. The clearest answer is simply this: a Hoosier is a resident of the state of Indiana.
Etymology aside, I think that in general physicists have come to accept that sometimes simple questions don’t have very obvious answers. For instance, if you were to ask the question: why is there a violation of matter/anti-matter symmetry in certain particles can be produced in the laboratory, the answer is “simple”. There is such a violation because there are at least 3 families of quarks in nature, and when you have at least three families the universe quite naturally allows for this to occur. I could then list all the Nobel prize winning work that demonstrates this, and feel quite satisfied with my answer. If you were to ask a follow-on to that – to ask what is, in fact a much simpler question – you would stump me. “Why is there more matter in the universe than anti-matter?”
You’d be greeted with stunned silence. “Well,” you might say, leading the answer, “isn’t it because there are at least three families of quarks, and that’s gives rise to such an asymmetry quite naturally?” “Nope,” would come the ready reply, “because we’ve measured the quarks and we know it’s not enough to explain the universe.”
Fact is, there are a lot of simple questions (where does mass come from, what is the universe made from, why is there more matter than anti-matter, what happens to all my left socks) to which nobody really knows the answer. It’s not for lack of trying; on that “what is the universe made from” question, I think that 20 years ago the confident answer would be, “Quarks and leptons”. Now, you have to throw dark matter and dark energy into the picture, and when confronted with questions about those awkwardly dodge them and mutter something about “ongoing experiments.”
Physics is full of simple questions. They might have simple answers, but we just don’t know. Like the Hoosiers, maybe the universe is just there. On the other hand, maybe we’ve just missed the one clue, the one thing, that breaks all the paradigms and ties everything together.
And which then raises three new questions.
