Virtual Reality
The picture of Nature that physics can paint will always be a dubious sketch. The incompleteness begins with when the cosmos came into being.
According to the conventional modern cosmogony story, a singularity – with all the energy that the universe would ever have – mushroomed into untold lumps of matter and detectable energies (notably light), eventuating with life to make the multimedia presentation worthwhile. How the singularity transformed into a vast diversity of ordered energies has not been addressed, as deducing the source of this multitudinous coherence is beyond empirical examination.
It is impossible for anything to come to be from what is not. ~ Greek philosopher Empedocles in the 5th century BCE
The current cosmos had to have come from somewhere. Following an ancient idea of cyclic cosmology, some think the extant universe is a reincarnation of an earlier one (and so on, for an unknowable eternity).
Electromagnetism is the force of everyday existence. A telling sign that our experience of Nature is minuscule comes from the electromagnetic spectrum, which ranges far astray from the tiny bandwidth we observe as visible light. The electromagnetic spectrum is even broader and stranger than can be measured by the most advanced devices. Wavelength (as shown) is just a coarse measure. Energy seems infinite in its extent and variety: energetic expressions beyond conception.
Then there is an even more fundamental conundrum: the proverbial soil from which phenomena blooms. The foundation upon which Nature is built was long thought energetically barren. It is anything but.
