Modern physics has been driven into an increasingly extremist position with focus on extremely small or large spatial or temporal scales or extremely large energies. When problems were met on a certain (extreme) scale, the study was directed to yet more extreme scales and energies, as in a steadily increasing bet in a game of poker with little on hand to never get called. When LHC does not deliver, then the bet is raised to a new bigger more powerful LHC...
When Einstein was pressed about the meaning of his special theory of relativity, he increased the bet to general relativity and when pressed about the meaning of general relativity he jumped the bet to cosmology...
When physicists after the introduction of quantum mechanics faced questions about the electronic structure of atoms and molecules, they turned to the three orders of magnitude smaller proton and neutron forming atomic kernels, and then to the quarks forming the proton and neutron and then ultimately to string theory on scales 15 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton in an ulitmate attempt to find the origin of gravitation acting on cosmological scales. In each case the problems met on one scale were met by resort to smaller or larger scales, steadily increasing the bet and preventing a call.
Today cosmology is directed to multiversa and inflation after Big Bang as the next step after Einstein's cosmology of general relativity supposedly all originating from string theory. But this may be the last possible bet and a call is approaching anticipated as a crisis in physics.
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