Mostly, there are a number of unresolved questions which seem to defy measurement and experimentation, and so instead of getting elbow deep in real world experi

Mostly, there are a number of unresolved questions which seem to defy measurement and experimentation, and so instead of getting elbow deep in real world experiments, in an effort to reliably re-create outcomes (experiments that predict what will happen next, when carrying out certain steps), many practitioners of physics have had to spend entire careers "at the drawing board", concocting mathematical theories, on paper, that "add up" to the unexpected, unreliable, confusing things that happen in the real world, even when vacuums, clean rooms, and massive radiation shielding (in the form of miles-deep mine shafts beneath entire mountain ranges sometimes) fail to exert control over. Things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality (aka: spooky interactions at a distance) Quantum Non-locality seems (seems) to produce scenarios where two particles are stimulated using ostensibly unrelated mechanisms, but then also seem to exhibit cause-and-effect behavior where influencing one particle inexplicably influences the other particle, even though they may be (presumptively) incapable of influencing each other at the point in time and space when the correlating behavior is observed. How did particle A affect particle B? Did you touch it? What happened? No one touched it?! Also unexplained is the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment This kind of interference pattern holds up, even at atomic scales, when diffracting x-rays through barriers of crystalline samples. Recently, there has been an experiment developed which may finally explain this behavior: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/quantum-mechanics-1020.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/quantum-mechanics-1020.ht... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave ...but this would suggest that there are unseen, unmeasuable forces (from parallel dimensions?) influencing our particles in this universe, at all times, and in unexpected ways. If this is true, what does it all mean? Is the sky falling?! Who knows?! These sorts of unexplained behaviors, made physicists very nervous in the early half of the 20th century, since maybe attempts to build city destroying weapons might have horrible, unpredictable triggers or uncontrollable, world-destroying, runaway chain-reaction outcomes, never to be understood (not unlike the black hole fear mongering surrounding the LHC's publicity). Keep in mind that these ideas were kicking around before an atom bomb was anything other than science fiction. The fears and impatience often strike a chord like Dr. Emmett L. Brown's fear of a universe-destroying temporal paradox in Back to the Future.