Things Nobody Knows

'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know' - Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, 12 February 2002 In almost any area of human knowledge, it is often more instructive - and certainly more entertaining - to hear experts talking about what they don't know than what they do know (or what they think they know). Things Nobody Knows explores the limits of human knowledge in the fields of physical science, history, animal behaviour, psychology and numerous other areas of inquiry. The material in the book is classified, à la Rumsfeld, by degrees of not knowing rather than by subject. In that way, very diverse topics serendipitously rub shoulders with one another, making a book that is both intellectually satisfying and more-ishly dip-into-able. Things Nobody Knows comprises the following sections: *Things We May Discover Any Moment (including hopes for the Large Hadron Collider) *Things We May Not Know After All (including the physics of bumblebee flight) *Things We May Know Within Ten Years (including hopes for genetics research) *Things We Hope To Discover One Day, But Have No Idea How (the physics of the human brain and how the genetic code actually works) *Things We May Never Know (including philosophical questions such as 'what it's like to be a bat') *Things We Do Not Know and Do Not Need to Know (101 more bizarre unknowns that have not fitted into anything that has gone previously)