Worse still, some of the candidates for the unification seem to be taking a bit of a knock in recent times. The James Webb Space Telescope's vast, superb and surprising data is making it very difficult!
I don't quite know how this is going to be resolved. Einstein was nearly unique, and managed to produce SR an GR more or less on brain power alone (though he was building on the work of Maxwell, Faraday, and everyone else. Quantum mechanics involved a lot of brain power too from only a few people such as Bohr. Nowadays, we have so, so much more data, and one could argue that it's simply underlining how little we actually understand.
And it's been this way for a long time. I remember Richard Feynmann being asked by the BBC about why magnets attract. He basically pointed out that, despite everything we know about what they do (field lines, attraction / repulsion, the Curie effect, etc), we don't actually know why, and the only answer he could reasonably give to "why?" was "because they just do". That's a pretty deep thing, from a Nobel prize winner. RF was always pretty keen to point out that everything we have is just theories that fit observable events, rather than explanations as to why those events happen in the first place.
And now I'm begining to think that we're not going to get very far with the "how" of some of the things we know are going on (thanks to things like JWST), unless we start understanding some of the "why", especially for gravity.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
