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Ask most people what scientists think about the Big Bang, or dark matter, or how the universe will end, and you will get a confident answer. Scientists agree, surely. It is settled. It was in a documentary.
So a group of physicists decided to actually ask. The result is the largest survey of physicists ever taken on the biggest open questions in the universe, and it did not come back the way the documentaries suggest.
Out of ten big questions, only two answers won the support of more than half the people asked. On everything else, the field split.
That sounds like bad news for science. It is actually one of the most hopeful things a scientist has said in a while.
What the largest survey of physicists actually asked
It is called the Big Mysteries Survey. It was led by Niayesh Afshordi, a physicist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute in Canada, with co-authors Phil Halper, Matteo Rini and Michael Schirber, and run with Physics Magazine, which is published by the American Physical Society.
The survey ran online from 28 July to 9 September 2025, and was open to the magazine’s readers and the society’s members. In total, 1,675 people answered. The full paper was posted in May 2026.
There were ten questions, the kind physicists argue about over coffee for decades. Between them, they asked:
- What does “the Big Bang” actually mean?
- What is the best explanation for the puzzles of the very early universe?
- What is behind the extra gravity we see in galaxies, the thing usually called dark matter?
- What is making the universe’s expansion speed up?
- Why do two ways of measuring that expansion give different answers?
- Why do the basic numbers of physics seem so finely set for a universe with life in it?
- Which way of understanding quantum mechanics is right?
- What happens inside a black hole, and to the information that falls in?
- What is the best theory of quantum gravity?
Every question also had an honest escape hatch: “no opinion”. Plenty of physicists used it.
If you like the feeling of standing at the edge of something bigger than you can fully explain, we made a free short video guide and companion PDF about finding something deeper in the ordinary moments of real life. It is yours if you would like it.
Only two answers won a majority
The first was about the Big Bang itself. About 68% of physicists said the phrase describes the universe evolving from a hot, dense state. Only about 24% said it means an absolute beginning, whether with a single starting point or without one.
The second was inflation, the idea that the very young universe went through a sudden burst of growth. It got 50.8%. That is a majority, but only just.
Everything else split into camps:
- Dark matter. The most popular answer, at about 21%, was “some combination” of explanations. About 17% picked low-mass particles, and about 12% said gravity itself needs changing.
- Dark energy. Physicists were almost evenly divided between a fixed “cosmological constant” (24.0%) and dark energy that changes over time (25.9%), with others picking different explanations or none.
- Quantum mechanics. The classic Copenhagen view was the most popular, at 35.7%. Nearly two in three chose something else.
- Quantum gravity. String theory led with about 19%. Loop quantum gravity got about 12%. And about 18% said gravity may not be quantised at all.
The dark energy result is the one to watch. Big telescope surveys, including DESI, have recently hinted that dark energy may not be constant after all. We looked at what that could mean in a piece on whether the universe is slowing down. The survey suggests physicists are taking that hint seriously: “changing” now slightly edges out “constant”.
The headline versus the paper
Here is the detail worth slowing down for, because it is not quite what you will read in most write-ups.
The news coverage said the “standard model of cosmology” failed to win majority support. That standard model is called ΛCDM. It says the universe is mostly a cosmological constant (the Λ) plus cold dark matter (the CDM).
But nobody was asked, “Do you believe in ΛCDM?” The paper is careful about this. It says two of the questions address “key components” of that model: the dark matter question and the dark energy question. Neither component won a majority. That is a real and interesting finding. It is also narrower than “physicists reject the standard model”, which is not what the survey shows.
The same care applies to the Big Bang number. Coverage rounded it into a claim that 68% of physicists think the Big Bang was not the beginning of time. What those physicists actually chose was a description: the evolution of a hot, dense state. Many physicists use “Big Bang” that way simply because it is what the evidence describes directly. Whether time itself had a start is a further question, and plenty of them would tell you it is still open.
The authors add one more caveat about their own work. This was an open online survey, not a random sample of every physicist on Earth, so they call the results “a large-scale snapshot”. They also ran a smaller version at a black hole conference in Copenhagen in 2024, with 85 people. There, inflation got only 44%. A different room gave a noticeably different number.
That is not a weakness in the survey. It is the survey being honest about what it can and cannot tell you.
Popular is not the same as agreed
The paper’s authors draw one lesson above the rest. When people explain physics to the public, they say, it matters to separate what is most popular from what is actually a consensus.
Those are easy to blur. If 26% of physicists pick one answer and every other answer gets less, it is tempting to report that answer as “what scientists think”. But about three in four chose something else.
Afshordi was not gloomy about any of this. His take on the results was simple: “the frontier is genuinely alive.”
Think about what that means. Real scientists, with years of training, looked at the deepest questions about where everything came from, and a great many of them said, in effect, “we are still working on it”. Some of the most hopeful research of the last few years has come from exactly that kind of gap, like the moment when a dark matter detector caught one event it could not explain.
If you have ever wondered just how deep that history goes, our free How Old Is the Universe? explorer walks through it one step at a time.
Why the open questions are the good part
There is a quiet assumption many of us carry: that the point of science is to close questions, and that every unanswered one is a small failure.
But nobody becomes a physicist because everything is already known. They become physicists because something is hidden and they want to find it. The hiddenness is the invitation. A universe you could fully explain in one lifetime would be a smaller place to live.
There is a line in one of the oldest collections of wisdom in the world that says it this way: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.”
Read that slowly and it does something surprising. It does not treat the hidden thing as a problem, or the searching as a lack of faith. It treats both as good. The concealing is glorious. The search is an honour. The 1,675 people who answered this survey, disagreeing about dark energy and black holes, are doing something that ancient writers thought was worthy of kings.
What to do with a universe this unfinished
You do not need a physics degree to take something from this survey.
The next time you hear “scientists agree”, it is fair to ask: agree on what, and how many? Sometimes the answer really is nearly everyone. Sometimes it is a quarter of them, and the rest are still arguing, which is its own kind of good news.
And the next time you look up on a clear night, it is worth remembering that some of the smartest people alive are looking at the same sky and saying, honestly, that they do not know yet. Not knowing yet is where every discovery starts.
Questions people ask about the survey of physicists
What is the Big Mysteries Survey of physicists?
The Big Mysteries Survey is the largest survey of physicists on open questions in cosmology, black holes, quantum mechanics and quantum gravity. It was led by physicist Niayesh Afshordi with Phil Halper and Physics Magazine, published by the American Physical Society. It ran online from 28 July to 9 September 2025, collected answers from 1,675 people, and its results were posted as a paper in May 2026.
Do most physicists agree on the Big Bang?
In the 2025 Big Mysteries Survey, about 68% of 1,675 respondents said “the Big Bang” describes the evolution of the universe from a hot, dense state, while about 24% said it means an absolute beginning. Most physicists accept that the universe was once hot and dense and has been expanding since. Whether time itself had a beginning is a separate question that remains open.
Do physicists agree on what dark matter and dark energy are?
No clear majority exists. In the 2025 Big Mysteries Survey, the most popular dark matter answer was a combination of explanations, at about 21%. On dark energy, physicists split almost evenly between a constant cosmological constant (24.0%) and dark energy that changes over time (25.9%). These are the two main ingredients of the standard cosmological model, known as ΛCDM.
Did physicists reject the standard model of cosmology?
Not exactly. The Big Mysteries Survey did not ask physicists directly whether they accept the standard cosmological model, ΛCDM. It asked separate questions about dark matter and dark energy, the model’s two key components, and neither answer won majority support. That shows real disagreement about the details, not a rejection of the model as a working description of the universe.
How reliable is the largest survey of physicists?
The Big Mysteries Survey is large, with 1,675 respondents, but it was an open online survey of Physics Magazine readers and American Physical Society members rather than a random sample of all physicists. Its authors describe the results as a large-scale snapshot. A smaller 2024 version at a black hole conference in Copenhagen, with 85 respondents, produced some noticeably different numbers.
What do you think?
Only two of the big answers in this survey won a majority of physicists. Do you find it exciting that so much about the universe is still unsettled, or would you rather science had firmer answers by now? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
If this left you with a little more wonder than you started with, our free video guide and PDF are about exactly that: noticing something deeper in the everyday.
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The largest survey of physicists ever asked 1,675 of them about the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy. Only two answers got a majority. The universe is still wide open. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/largest-survey-of-physicists/
“Most popular” and “consensus” are not the same thing. This physics survey is a great reminder to ask: agree on what, and how many? Read it here
Physicists split on dark energy, dark matter and quantum gravity, and the lead researcher’s verdict was that “the frontier is genuinely alive”. Loved the ancient line at the end of this one about the honour of searching things out: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/largest-survey-of-physicists/
