Not a physicist, so this may be a dumb question… but do we even know for sure it’s a problem with a solution?

Not a physicist either but my understanding is that is that if you believe that we can discover all the laws of physics that explain how the world operates then it needs to have a solution.

Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"

We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.

I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.

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lmm 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, the universe does something with extremely small but extremely heavy objects, unless you think that merely creating that situation will cause the universe to cease to exist.

	▲	ninkendo a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	hunterpayne 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Now consider that the density of an atomic nucleus is oddly similar to the density of a black hole. And this was the path Einstein was following. Too bad you need computers to study it because of all the differential equations.

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31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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ktallett 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So we do know that all the tiny interactions like charge of particles etc must work side by side with all the big interactions like gravity as otherwise how would anything as we know it work. However it could as easily be neither are the right way to interpret the world and there is something we are missing, or we are right and we can find a method to combine the theory of the big and the small interactions but we are missing a section. At the end of the day we can't interact in any meaningful way with more than half the matter in the universe (it's proven to exist due to a gravitational pull), so it's clear we can't experience a lot of the universe and we definitely can't explain a lot.

So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.