Everything you touch on - except the Heisenberg uncertainty (which is due to fundamental property of any finite signal, shown through a Fourier transform) - is

Everything you touch on - except the Heisenberg uncertainty (which is due to fundamental property of any finite signal, shown through a Fourier transform) - is a big (really mind-boggling) anomaly of current contemporary physics/cosmology. Just the other day right here on HN was a link posted about dark energy, and how maybe it's just measurement calibration error. Poof, solved. Or not, we shall see. Reading about the statistics and epistemology behind the experiments (Andrew Gelman's blog) and models (eg why preferably hierarchical Bayesian models) will help a lot to cut through the problem of understanding and satisfaction. (Rarely we can have both for complex issues.) Oh, and everything is a field. Fields are coupled (coupling constants, running couplings). Some fields' have non-null base energy state. (So vacuum energy is non-zero. Maybe. It depends how many and which fields your model deals with.) Some kind of energy wiggle in some fields translates to one/two/a-lot of wiggles in other/the-same fields. (See the Feynman diagrams, how there are infinite number of possible but decreasingly probable interactions between "particles".) What is a force? It's just one well separated aspect of the whole model. Ultimately we think all of them are coupled into one big interaction that involves every field. See the electro-weak unification. Why gravity doesn't seem to be able to attract? Because maybe it's not a field, it's just the shape of spacetime warped by energy and we haven't found negative energy. (Einstein's General Relativity) Or it's just based on entropy and thus it's a very strange emergent property of our universe. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity - bonus, it explains dark matter too, so maybe it's simpler - but it's just the ugly MOND (modified Newtonian) in disguise, noooo!) Okay, so maybe back to higher dimensions and branes and loops and strings? But nobody understands that! So we wait. Why three? Because so far we found three and thus our models reproduce exactly that many.