Big Mysteries: Survey Reveals Physicists' Disagreements express
Physics often resembles the construction of a giant ship — the Universe. The physicist-engineers have yet to agree on the basic blueprints. The large-scale 'Big Mysteries' survey exposed this: even the nature of black holes (about which Stephen Hawking argued for decades) and the Big Bang remains controversial. Dark matter and dark energy — the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos — are accepted by many, but Vera Rubin, who discovered anomalous galaxy rotation, sparked a discussion that hasn't subsided in half a century. Even spacetime curvature — a kind of structural beam of the edifice — still provokes heated debate.
The survey's biggest surprise: less than half of scientists consider quantum mechanics a complete theory. And yet every transistor in your smartphone is an indisputable miracle of it. So it goes: the ship sails, but the builders doubt the properties of water. Science is not a museum of answers but a living argument, where precisely disagreement promises breakthroughs.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2605.11058v1
We present results from the Big Mysteries Survey, a large-scale survey conducted through the American Physical Society's Physics Magazine on foundational and controversial topics in contemporary physics. The survey provides a snapshot of physicists' views on issues in cosmology, black-hole physics, quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and anthropic coincidences. A central finding is that several positions often described publicly as field-wide ``consensus'' views are, in practice, supported by much narrower majorities or by pluralities rather than majorities.
According to the survey, less than half of physicists are confident that quantum mechanics is a complete theory, even though all modern electronics is based on it.