Gaps in Science

May 2026

Physics has gaps. They exist now and need to be filled. That’s not a criticism of science — it’s what science is: mapping the unknown, proposing mechanisms, testing them, and being ready to be wrong. Below are seventeen of the field’s biggest open questions. Pressure-Based Theory takes a real stab at some of them. It doesn’t touch others at all, and says so plainly here rather than stretching to cover ground it hasn’t earned.

The seventeen gaps

1. Dark matter — what’s holding galaxies together, given the visible mass isn’t enough? PBT status: partially addressed — narrowed 2026-08-06. Papers 1, 2, and 4 derive galactic rotation curves that flatten without invoking unseen matter, using scale-dependent effective gravity ($G_{eff}(l)$) instead. Two things have to be said alongside that. First, a second and different proposal — that the medium’s own mass density simply is dark matter — has been retracted: bounding the medium’s opacity from Lunar Laser Ranging, and its heat exchange from Earth’s measured surface heat flow, caps its density well below what dark matter requires — by at least ~5×, and by ~60× on the most direct reading of PBT’s own conventions (the multiplier depends linearly on an $O(1)$ geometric factor; the direction does not). See Dark Matter Isn’t Missing, which now carries that retraction in full. Second, the $G_{eff}(l)$ route above is untouched by that result but has its own documented problems — the fit against real SPARC rotation curves gives $\chi^2/\text{dof}\approx82.5$ against MOND/NFW’s 1–5, and Paper 1’s flagship 220 km/s figure is not reproduced by the paper’s own stated parameters (see the Reference Guide’s second corrigendum). “Addressed” here means a mechanism is proposed, not that it fits the data.

2. Dark energy — why is the universe’s expansion accelerating? PBT status: mechanism proposed, fine-tuning unresolved — narrowed 2026-08-06. Paper 9 attributes it to residual pressure density in the medium at the largest scales ($\varepsilon(l\to\infty)$), feeding directly into the Friedmann equation. What has to be said with it: bounding the medium’s momentum flux from the measured value of $G$ and from Lunar Laser Ranging puts its energy density around $10^{47}$ times the cosmological critical density. For the residual to come out at the observed dark-energy value, it must therefore be about 1 part in $10^{47}$ of the total. That is the cosmological constant problem, restated in this theory’s own vocabulary — inherited rather than solved. In fairness both ways: standard quantum field theory’s version of the same problem runs to $\sim10^{120}$, so PBT is not uniquely embarrassed here. But a mechanism carrying an unquantified 47-order fine-tuning is not the same thing as an answer, and this page should not have implied otherwise. Narrowed further 2026-09-04: the $\varepsilon(l\to\infty)$ limit named above is exactly zero for any positive $\gamma$, since the scaling law falls to zero as $l$ grows, so that limit cannot supply the residual this mechanism needs. Evaluated instead at the Hubble length it lands 57 to 160 orders of magnitude below the required density, which is a separate problem from the fine-tuning above and points the opposite way: too much suppression rather than an unexplained amount. See Paper 9’s 2026-09-04 revision note.

3. Quantum gravity — how do general relativity and quantum mechanics fit together? PBT status: partially addressed. Papers 1, 8, and 9 offer a mechanical unification narrative — forces and quantum effects both emerging from the same underlying particle flux — but this is a conceptual framework, not a formal reconciliation of the two mathematical structures the way a graviton theory or loop quantum gravity attempts.

4. Black hole information paradox — does information falling into a black hole get destroyed? PBT status: touches this. The published paper’s Singularity Avoidance Hypothesis proposes collapse stabilizes into a dense, finite core rather than a true singularity or horizon — which would imply information isn’t lost — but this is asserted, not derived in detail.

5. Matter-antimatter asymmetry — why does the universe contain far more matter than antimatter? PBT status: not addressed. None of the papers touch baryogenesis or CP violation.

6. Consciousness — how does subjective experience arise from physical processes? PBT status: not addressed. This is physics, not neuroscience — PBT makes no claims here.

7. Origin of the universe — what, if anything, came before the Big Bang? PBT status: touches this. Paper 9’s infinite-scale cosmology treats the universe as eternal across infinite hierarchies rather than beginning from a singular point, sidestepping the question rather than answering what preceded it. See Two Places Natural Science Still Doesn’t Have an Answer for what mainstream cosmology itself says is still open here.

8. Neutrino masses — why do neutrinos have mass at all, and how much? PBT status: barely touched. Paper 11 cites a seesaw-like estimate ($m_\nu \approx 10^{-3}$ eV) that aligns with existing measurements, but doesn’t derive the mass mechanism independently.

9. How did life begin? — the jump from chemistry to the first living cells. PBT status: not addressed. Outside the scope of the theory entirely. See Two Places Natural Science Still Doesn’t Have an Answer for what the literature itself says is still open here — no accepted mechanism exists yet.

11. Gravitational waves — what are they, mechanically? (added 2026-08-06) PBT status: not addressed. Across all nineteen papers, gravitational waves appear only as constraints — GW170814 for polarization, GW170817 for propagation speed — and nowhere as something PBT explains. The gap is structural rather than incidental: Paper 18’s W8 states the wave sector does not produce gravity, while the shadowing sector (A1–A8) is a flux of particles, not a wave. A directly measured phenomenon therefore has no home in either component. Recording it here because this page is supposed to be a complete ledger, and it had been missing from it.

10. Are we alone? — the Fermi paradox, and the search for other intelligent life. PBT status: not addressed. No astrobiological claims are made anywhere in this work.

12. The quantum measurement problem (added 2026-09-29) — why does a single measurement produce one definite outcome, when the Schrödinger equation alone predicts a smooth superposition of possibilities? PBT status: not addressed. None of the nineteen papers propose a mechanism for wavefunction collapse or derive the Born rule ($P=|\psi|^2$) from anything more fundamental. It’s used here the same way mainstream quantum mechanics treats it, as a postulate rather than a derived result.

13. The hierarchy problem (added 2026-09-29) — gravity is roughly $10^{36}$ times weaker than electromagnetism between two protons, and the Planck mass exceeds the Higgs mass by about $10^{17}$: two related ways of describing why gravity is so much feebler than the other forces at the particle scale. PBT status: not addressed. None of the papers derive either ratio, and the unification narrative in item 3 above doesn’t reach this scale gap either — it offers a conceptual picture, not a number.

14. The strong CP problem (added 2026-09-29) — the equations of quantum chromodynamics allow an arbitrary CP-violating angle, yet no such violation has ever been measured in the strong force; experiments bound it to roughly one part in ten billion. PBT status: not addressed. None of the papers touch QCD’s CP-violating term or offer a reason it should come out near zero.

15. Why three generations of matter? (added 2026-09-29) the Standard Model has three near-identical copies of each fermion, heavier but otherwise the same (the top quark outweighs the electron by a factor of roughly $3.4\times10^5$), and nothing in the theory explains why there are three or predicts the mass ratios between them. PBT status: not addressed. None of the papers offer a mechanism for particle generations or derive fermion mass ratios from first principles.

16. Turbulence (added 2026-09-29) — the Navier-Stokes equations describe how fluids move, but whether their solutions always stay smooth or can blow up in finite time is unproven. It’s one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize problems and remains open. PBT status: not addressed. The site’s own Duct Branch Airflow CFD entry uses these same equations for an HVAC comparison and says plainly it’s standard, already-established fluid mechanics, not a PBT-specific result.

17. The Hubble tension (added 2026-09-29) — two independent ways of measuring the universe’s expansion rate disagree by about 8–9%. The cosmic microwave background implies roughly 67.4 km/s/Mpc; local distance-ladder measurements give roughly 73.0 km/s/Mpc. PBT status: not addressed. Paper 9 inserts an assumed $\rho_\Lambda$ into the vacuum-dominated relation $H_0 = \sqrt{8\pi G \rho_\Lambda/3}$ to get a round $\sim70$ km/s/Mpc — that’s a chosen input, not a derivation, and it uses only the Λ term rather than the full present-day density including matter. The $\rho_\Lambda$ used is also not the $\varepsilon(l\to\infty)$ residual density item 2 above discusses; that residual is separately shown to be exactly zero or 57 to 160 orders of magnitude too small, so it can’t be what’s actually driving this number. Paper 9’s own 2026-07-21 revision note found the stated 70 lands between the two real measurements without matching either. No mechanism is offered for why the two methods disagree.

The tally

(Tally revised 2026-09-29: seventeen questions now — six added (12–17) after checking this page against @LensScientific’s September 2026 physics-outreach summary of open problems; see the item notes above for each. Dark-energy grading corrected 2026-09-30 — it had been lumped in with dark matter’s “real, checkable proposal” despite item 2’s own 2026-09-04 finding that the mechanism comes up short by 57 to 160 orders of magnitude.) Of seventeen major open questions, PBT makes a real, checkable proposal on one (dark matter — mechanism only, and only via the $G_{eff}(l)$ route), proposes a mechanism for another that doesn’t reach the required value when checked quantitatively (dark energy — item 2’s 2026-09-04 narrowing found the residual-pressure route is either exactly zero or 57 to 160 orders of magnitude short), offers a partial or conceptual take on three more (quantum gravity, black hole information, the universe’s origin), touches one lightly (neutrino mass), and doesn’t address the remaining eleven at all (matter-antimatter asymmetry, consciousness, how life began, gravitational waves, whether we’re alone, the quantum measurement problem, the hierarchy problem, the strong CP problem, why three generations of matter, turbulence, and the Hubble tension). That’s not a weakness to hide — it’s the actual shape of one person’s attempt at a few pieces of a much larger puzzle. See the papers for the mechanics, or the published paper for the formally citable version with testable predictions.

These gaps are where progress lives. Closing the universe entirely isn’t the goal — narrowing the unknown, one testable idea at a time, is.