This is the one major reason I lost most of my desire to continue grad school (I was studying astrophysics). I chose physics specifically because I wanted to u

This is the one major reason I lost most of my desire to continue grad school (I was studying astrophysics). I chose physics specifically because I wanted to understand the universe. The way I thought of it was that I wanted to lift the hood of reality and see how things "really" worked. As a kid, I'd read a number of books on science and had heard of a quest for a Theory of Everything. I'd decided this was a quest I wanted to go on. I thought of it as the most worthy singular hidden treasure and I was willing to devote my life to digging for it. But over the course of my undergrad, and hours debating with friends, and reading even more, I started to get an uneasy feeling. I decided to go to grad school, partly, because I still held on to the belief that there really was treasure at the end of that rainbow, and that we really could, if we were clever enough, "figure out" how things "really" worked. But, in grad school, it just continued to dawn on me how impossible it was for there to be only One True Theory. One way I thought about it was to regard physics as a program. Even if there were separate theories for different scales, or domains, it didn't matter, you could still regard the whole knowledge base as a single program and the scale and domain, along with physical observables, as inputs to the Physics Program. The output would be predictions for the state of the universe (or some subset, it didn't matter) at some later time, i.e., it would predict later observables' values. The thing was, I had a hard time finding any logical justification for why there had to be only one program that could take in the known inputs and produce the known outputs. That is, there was no way to logically prove that there could not be multiple equivalent programs that could produce the same output given the same input. I.e., there was no way to logically justify the notion that there could only be One True Physics. That is, the treasure I believed I'd be digging for, didn't not exist, it was just that there was more than one treasure, and anyone could find their own. This thought diminished some of the romance, so to speak, of the Quest for Truth, so I lost interest, for a time. Enough to stop taking grad school classes and just start working (coding). Maybe one day I'll create a program of my own.