When you don’t have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
Is all of modern theoretical physics pointless? If you listen to any one of a number of disillusioned high-energy physicists (or wannabe physicists), you might conclude that it is. After all, the 20th century was a century of theoretical triumphs: we were able, on both subatomic and cosmic scales, to at last make sense of the Universe that surrounded and comprised us. We figured out what the fundamental forces and interactions governing physics were, what the fundamental constituents of matter were, how they assembled to form the world we observe and inhabit, and how to predict what the results of any experiment performed with those quanta would be.
Combined, the Standard Model of elementary particles and the standard model of cosmology represent the culmination of 20th century physics. While experiments and observations have revealed a number of hitherto unsolved puzzles — puzzles like dark matter, dark energy, cosmic inflation, baryogenesis, massive neutrinos, the strong CP problem, and numerous others — theorists have failed to make significant progress on all of these issues over the past…
