Why another blog?

It's a strange paradox that the more you read about a complex topic, the more you realize that you won't ever be able to grasp it all. This paradox certainly applies to physics, and I therefore feel that it's a miracle that humanity has been able to adequately describe the universe at all, and that it was possible using only two theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Unfortunately they don't mix well, and yet our universe is predictable and consistent.

I would like to recommend the book that made me first realize just how incompatible those two theories are: 'The Emperor's Mind' by Roger Penrose. It tantalizingly gives a few of those ideas that demonstrate rather painfully how incomplete physics actually is.

Optimists are convinced that a grand unifying theory of everything ('GUT') is just within our reach, but I doubt that their knowledge is sufficiently broad to discover such a theory. And the more involved they get into the subject, the more insufficient it'll get too. With plenty of potential ideas that could attribute to GUT, it becomes exponentially harder to choose the right ones. We seem to be in need of a new "Homo Universalis", someone like Leonardo da Vinci, someone who's proficient in every branch of physics, with a sound philosophical background, to see the entire picture, and know what is to be done. But my hopes are slim. Who knows, maybe the efforts of a curious layman just to organize the current mess of hypotheses will help a bit. It'll surely be useful to myself, and that's frankly the main reason for me to start this blog.

So what are our candidate ideas exactly? What mysteries are still left unsolved? What clues did history leave behind for us? It's time for a journey.