The Big Bang & What's Not: 2016 Edge Essays

[Keith_McClary]

The 2016 question:
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?
Includes some interesting physics related essays. A couple of them are on the theme that the big news is what was not found:
Paul J. Steinhardt
The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was

The new claim from the team, published in recent months, is that there is no sign of the cosmic polarization they had been seeking despite an extensive search with extraordinarily sensitive detectors.

The retraction received considerable attention but the full import of the news has not been appreciated: we now know that the Big Bang cannot be what we thought it was.

Antony Garrett Lisi
The News That Wasn’t There

However, despite the well-deserved attention accorded to the discovery of the Higgs, this was not the biggest news. The biggest recent news in fundamental physics is what has NOT been discovered: superparticles.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

tagging @garrett

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Not necessarily physics-related, but there a few nice essays in the collection regarding https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/dont-fear-https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/dont-fear-crispr-new-gene-editing-technologies-wont-lead-designer-babies/-new-gene-editing-technologies-wont-lead-designer-babies/, the gene editing tool recently developed by biologists to easily make genetic modifications.

Self-Driving Genes Are Coming by Stewart Brand describes gene drive technologies that could allow large-scale genetic engineering of organisms in the wild to eliminate diseases such as malaria or lyme disease.

The new biotech tool called “gene drive” changes our relation to wild species profoundly. Any gene (or set of genes) can be forced to “drive” through an entire wild population. It doesn’t matter if the trait the genes control is deleterious to the organism. With one genetic tweak to its germline, a species can even be compelled to go extinct.

The technology to do this is basically here, so society will need to decide soon whether we want to employ such technology.

The 6 Billion Letters Of Our Genome by Eric Topol describes what is likely the most important application of CRISPR gene editing technology — basic research into genetics:

But the biggest contribution of genome editing, and specifically with CRISPR, is to catapult the field of functional genomics forward. Not understanding the biology of the DNA letters is the biggest limitation of our knowledge base in the field. So many interesting DNA sequence variant “hits” have been discovered but overshadowed by uncertainty. Determining functional effects of the VUS—variants of unknown significance—has moved as a very sluggish pace, with too much of our understanding of genomics based on population studies rather than on pinpointing the biology and potential change in function due to an altered (compared with the reference genome) DNA letter.