@Karl Sorry, but you are wrong. But thats not your fault, you are more or less expressing popular missinterpretations of physics, Einstein and quantum mechanics.

First, Einstein did understand much more about physics and the world than you think. There are many stupid people in the world and sad enough, there no less doing Physics (and Steven Hawking is famous but not on the same level as Einstein, Schrödinger,... - not even close). And after a long argument between Einstein and Schrödinger/Heisenberg which was way beyond what most physicists understood, those idiots claimed that Heisenberg "won" - and thats what you learn at university until today. The problem Einstein was arguing is still not solved but got mixed up with another "problem" with quantum mechanics, which let to quite some confusion. (You might want to read about the "Bell inequality").

Second, Einstein said "god does not roll dice" (Gott würfelt nicht) and was more right than most Scientists might know. There is a very interesting theorie that produces the EXACT same results as "orthodox" quantum mechanics, but with much more insight about how nature might work. Its called bohmian mechanics or de Broglie–Bohm theory. The only problem is: there is no relatevistic bohmian theory until now. But don't be fooled, there is NO consistens relativistic quantum theory at all - quantum field theory was proofen to be mathematical inconsistent. With bohmian mechanics its just not so easy to mask the littel inconsistencies. (The main problem here leads back to the Bell inequality.)

And Einstein never believed in a supernatural being that "rules" our universe - or at least his work was never influenced by his religious believes.

@all Physicists are looking for the rules that are underlying our universe, but they didn't find it yet. So, they make models and theories and are trying to get closer to the core of all things. Nobody knows if or when that journey will end.

The really stupid thing that happens at the moment is, that nobody has the balls to call a theorie falsified when its proofen to be wrong. The theory just gets modified till its absolutely absurd (e.g. dark matter, higgs particle,...). The reason behind this is...money and/or ego - they get money and reputation for working on that theory and calling it wrong from the beginning would cost them there jobs (or at least a lot of funding). Theoretical physics is stuck in stupidity since the development of quantum physics because of money and ego.

@Karl Well if the rules and laws that physicists develop are not rules, then all the text books and scientists that lecture on the subject should stop referring to them as such. Einstein sure didn't agree with you about a unified field theory.

Sorry, but your posts reallys comes off as "Karl's world".

@brianluce & svart: There are neither "rules" that "govern the Universe", nor are there any "laws" that reality would follow. The wording is an important part of a common misunderstaning, here, as those words imply the existence of conscious decisions, both to set forth and to follow them.

But in reality, cause and effect are not like this: Physicists create models that make aspects of reality understandable and allow valuable predictions, as in "Which direction will an apple take when separated from the tree?". Newton's model, for example, even though today known to be woefully incomplete, allows to make a very good prediction for such a scenario ("Apple and earth will move towards their common barycenter"), but neither Newton nor any other conscious entity or book of science caused the apple and the earth to behave like that.

It is not a quality of a physical model to be "true", because very different models can allow to explain and predict real scenarios equally well. The quality of a model lies in its ability to allow precise and useful predictions - with as little effort as possible.

Even a very sophisticated model - like quantum mechanics - can be very useless when applied to a scenario that it cannot be evaluated for with reasonable effort. Imagine, for example, that you wanted to model a car crash in a computer, appling quantum mechanics to each particle the car consists of. Alas, the computer you'd need to run your simulation using such a model would today not be feasible to build, and even if it was, one simulation run would still consume energy worth more money than a real car would cost you to build and crash for real.

The idea that one day there will be a "big unified theory" that allows to create "a model of everything" is very over-rated - even if such a theory can be found, the model would likely be of little to no use for any real world task.

One aptitude I would love to see more on this forum would be that of the scientist's ability to be comfortable with uncertainty, as opposed to the layperson's drive for quick answers.

With Stephen Hawkins, we had our hero, our explanation of the universe proven. Yet recently Hawkins himself was the first to point out he may have been wrong.That's not humility, It's just science.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/hawking_prog_summary.shtml

Interesting. I'm always amazed at science in general, mainly at with the scientist's ability to bend the laws to fit their theories instead of actually making a theory that fits the facts. The universe doesn't seem to fit into your theory? Make it multidimensional! That doesn't work either? Make dark matter! That doesn't work either?? Add quantum mechanics! FORCE those models to fit! But yet they don't, because people aren't observing, they are too busy trying to make a name for themselves or get grants. Get over it folks, everything has already been discovered. What we find now are just combinations of what has already been seen. Oh, the universe is oscillating? Everything else does, so why would we think the universe as a whole doesn't want to do the same thing?