On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:43:30 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

On 07/10/2018 14:58, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Sun, 07 Oct 2018 06:58:35 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote:

I see it as shallow. Very shallow. The Universe is simple and easy
to
understand.

If so, please present your Grand Unified Theory of the universe. If
the universe is so easy to understand, you should be able to do so
quite quickly.

Why? That's a fallacy. GR is easy to understand. QM is easy to
understand. That doesn't make either of them obvious. We can puzzle

The snag comes when you try to unify these two excellent theories which
work perfectly well in their own domains of the very large and very
small respectively. So far no theorist has come up with the one grand
unified theory that contains both of them as a limiting case.

Indeed. That is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle, no doubt.

It is generally said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics
then you probably do not. Even Einstein struggled with it - hence his
famous quote about God not playing dice with the universe.

That depends on what you mean by "understand". The theory is simple
enough. The intellectual hurdle- as is true with all that we
understand about nature- is seeing the implications.

for a long time over a tricky problem that ends up having an extremely
simple and easy to understand solution. Simple != obvious.

The rules may be simple but the resulting behaviour is not.

Certainly true. And we see that in science today. Because our theory
is nearly complete, there is little new emerging in that area. Science
today centers around models and simulations, not theories. Science
today is about combining theories and studying their interactions.
Cosmology, biology, climate and Earth science- most of the big
questions in these are now explored by complex models, not simple
theories.

Experiment is always the ultimate arbiter of scientific theories and
science is always going to be an approximate mathematical model of
reality which gets ever closer to the ideal with time.

That's a philosophical question, and I don't necessarily come to the
same conclusion as you.