That presumes the universe can be comprehended by us. I suspect that the ultimate reality is buried beneath increasingly bewildering layers far beyond our comprehension.
We made it past Newtonian physics to Einsteinian relativity and are still wandering around in Quantum. Who says it ends there. With the colliders, every time we think we are at the base of things, entirely new classes of “fundamental’ particles are found. They are now looking for the building blocks of quarks. We’ve made it to Planck scale and declared it to be the finish line. Yeah?
I remember the quote but not where it came from. A maybe fictional religion hypothesized that the world was on the back of a turtle. A priestess (I think) was questioned as to what the turtle was standing on. Her reply was something like, “I see where you’re going with this young man but it’s turtles all the way down.”
Now there is talk that we are 3 dimensional shadows on a 5 dimensional brane. (as in membrane, not brain). Or maybe the universe is an infinite computer running a program. Or maybe every point in spacetime exists simultaneously and forever like a slide in an infinite stack illuminated occasionally by consciousness.
I think that not only do we not have a clue but aren’t capable of having a clue. So shut up and have a beer.
Tom,
When I think about some of the things that quantum theory asserts (e.g., particles going through two separate slits simultaneously) I come to the conclusion that either our smart boys aren’t so smart or that our model of the universe is so horribly off in the wrong direction that we don’t even know which questions to ask to start making it better.