THE HOLE ATLAS
16 versioned entries · artifact 2026-07-27/v2-bridge-k5 · SHA-256 73847f8ff535e7d2…What remains unknown?
A crawlable, shareable index of lacuna's sourced open questions, blocked questions, and declared coverage limits. These entries are kept separate from the computed method that failed validation.
Human-curated questions are not discoveries. Declared blind spots describe limits of the map, including academic coverage it cannot see.
curated open question
curated open questionThe Riemann hypothesisWhether every non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function has real part 1/2. Open since 1859. A proof would sharpen what is known about the…curated open questionP versus NPWhether every problem whose solution can be verified quickly can also be solved quickly. Formalised in 1971. The answer determines whether large…curated open questionNavier–Stokes existence and smoothnessWhether smooth solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations always exist in three dimensions, or whether they can blow up in finite time. The equations…curated open questionThe hard problem of consciousnessWhy physical processing in a brain is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Distinguished by Chalmers from the 'easy' problems of explaining…curated open questionWhat dark matter is made ofRoughly a quarter of the mass-energy of the universe is inferred from gravitational effects but has never been directly detected. Decades of…
curated blocked question
curated blocked questionDirect imaging of an exoplanet's surfaceResolving surface features on a planet around another star is well-posed and uncontroversially desirable. It is blocked by angular resolution:…curated blocked questionA direct sample of the Earth's lower mantleEverything known about the lower mantle is inferred from seismology, xenoliths and high-pressure experiments. The deepest borehole ever drilled, the…curated blocked questionRandomised trials of lifetime dietary exposure in humansMost claims about long-term diet rest on observational cohorts with well-known confounding. The trial that would settle them — randomising people to…curated blocked questionBiological effects of multi-generational spaceflightWhether humans can reproduce and develop normally across generations in partial gravity and elevated radiation. Answering it requires observations…curated blocked questionWhether the proton decaysGrand unified theories predict proton decay; experiments have pushed the lower bound on the lifetime past 10^34 years. Testing further means…
declared coverage blind spot
declared coverage blind spotCraft, practitioner and indigenous knowledgeOpenAlex indexes academic publishing. Knowledge held by practitioners and transmitted by apprenticeship, demonstration or oral tradition is not…declared coverage blind spotHumanities citations are only partly linkedReference linkage in OpenAlex runs near 95% for STEM but around 70% for arts and humanities, where monographs and non-English venues carry much of…declared coverage blind spotLiterature before about 1970 thins out sharplyMeasured on 2026-07-27: OpenAlex holds roughly 1.38M works published in 1980, 1.05M in 1970, but only 305K in 1950 — about a fifth of the 1980…declared coverage blind spotHistorical slices use today's ontology, not the period'sOpenAlex assigns topics with a model trained on the modern corpus and applies it retroactively. Filtering to works published before 1986 therefore…declared coverage blind spotThe computed gap layer failed its own validationThe Swanson-style metric this project was built around does not reproduce the canonical result it was tested against. On pre-1986 data the fish-oil…declared coverage blind spotSome topics are dumping grounds for unclassifiable workOpenAlex assigns a topic to every work, so works with thin metadata land wherever the classifier defaults. 'Military Technology and Strategies'…