“Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better,” claimed Albert Einstein. And we naturally expect scientific investigation into nature to reveal a comprehensible universe. Yet the more modern physics develops, the less it seems to make sense. Relativity tells us that the passing of time is an illusion; quantum mechanics that observation creates reality and effects can precede causes. While string theorists claim we inhabit a universe of 26 hidden dimensions. Physicists admit they can ''calculate but not visualise'' with little agreement on what their own theories mean.
Is our inability to make our physical theories intelligible a challenge to our everyday understanding of the world, or a challenge to contemporary physics? Should we treat the theories as mathematical models and give up on them as descriptions of reality? Or could it be that theoretical physics can capture in mathematics a truth about the universe that is beyond our understanding?
