TFNR - A lot of work to do
This is only the beginning. There is a lot of work to do.
The claims that physics and cosmology are substantially complete and that there is nothing left to explain in Nature, which are sometimes made by some incautious researcher, make me smile. The Universe is so vast and complex that I don't think humanity runs the risk of having nothing more to investigate, to discover, to understand.
More in depth
Many ideas, concepts, hypotheses have only been hinted at. In-depth studies and verifications are necessary both from a theoretical and an observational / experimental point of view.
Even if my intent has always been to provide a unified and coherent vision, some parts appear fragmented and unrelated, also because they were developed in different and successive moments of this long research.
The development of this Knowledge System is only sketchy. It is necessary to deepen all the fundamental themes, such as for example the dynamics of the Elementary Action, so complex, so "alien" to the physics we are used to, so difficult to support with direct observation and experimentation, and many secondary aspects, but certainly important for understanding Physical Reality and the Universe.
Formalization
We need to develop an innovative and solid reference framework for mathematical / quantitative formalization, able to represent the dynamics of the most elementary levels of Reality and, at the same time, of welcoming, integrating and enhancing the formalisms of Special and General Relativity and those of Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model of particles.
In the effort towards integration it will be necessary to give up something.
The relativistic vision will have to renounce its peculiar rigid and restrictive concepts of Reality and Realism, and the irreducible search for a determinism that cannot find evidence in the fundamentally uncertain nature of Physical Reality. Relativity is a theory of gravity, and therefore of mass and space-time (moreover seen as distinct entities and phenomena). It is a non-quantized field theory, very powerful in describing the interaction of massive objects and curved spaces and times, velocities and accelerations, but unable to describe complex and weird objects such as waves and particles (that make up those masses) and the their kinetic, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear interactions and phenomena.
The quantum vision will have to give up its infinite, and often imaginative, not to say absurd, interpretations, but above all it will have to give up a concept considered central, which is so unnatural, as to sound somehow supernatural, belonging to that world of beliefs, magic, superstition, mysticism, which science abhors, regards with suspicion and contempt: the violation of the principle of locality. Even if it is more comfortable, less tiring, to accept that quantum information propagates at instantaneous speed while not violating the principle of causality in its essence, in my opinion physics will have to do something more, work harder, to understand the reason, the fundamental nature of what is observed in phenomena such as quantum entanglement, the two-slit experiment, and other phenomena that determine the "weirdness" of the quantum world.
More generally, the extreme effort to unify what are considered the four fundamental forces of nature, although useful for highlighting their characteristics and associated phenomena, does not seem to lead to what in my opinion should be the main objective of Science: not "only " predict outcomes of observations and experiments, but above all help us understand, explain, describe reality in its non-manifest unity and in the multiplicity of the infinite forms we observe.
Giving up, or at least not considering a priority, this research towards the unification of such different and heterogeneous forces regarding the causal origin, the phenomenological form, spheres of expression, produced effects, range of action would help to shift attention from the spasmodic research of new particles and from an excessively atomistic vision focused on particles and quantum fields that justify their theoretical existence for the existence and interaction of particles, from the unproductive opposition between the relativistic and quantum visions of reality, from the dominant centrality of symmetry /e and beauty in physical research.
It would make it possible to reverse the sense of research and aspiration to knowledge, to combine the ordinary bottom-up approach with a different top-down approach, an attempt to imagine a creative and evolutionary, causal and variational training process that leads from nothing to infinity complexity of Nature, where the most relevant physical entities and quantities (space, time, mass, movement, charge, spin) find explanation in the various manifestations of the dynamics of the Elementary Action, direct expression of a primary source, far beyond the waves and particles that we observe and that represent a (small) part of what seems to exist and give structure and shape to the Universe.
It is both a search for knowledge and a search for meaning, ontological, phenomenological and dynamic knowledge to understand the Fundamental Nature of Reality and how the world works, and at the same time a search for meaning, a sense of Existence, and a sense of Essence, of the Form of the Reality of which we are part.
This search for knowledge and meaning must be reflected in the development of an adequate formal reference framework, where math must adapt to the multilevel structure of Reality, the right and best mathematical tool for each level, renouncing the utopian aspiration to a single equation able to represent everything, everything that happens and can happen, everything that exists and can exist, and all the infinite forms of the evolving universe.
Observations and experiments
I think that a decisive change is needed on these issues. As for the theoretical side, also for observations and experiments a decisive defocusing from the world of particles is needed, to make room and direct attention and resources towards other research areas, above all investigations on the fundamental forces and fields that create the dynamics of the most elementary levels of Reality, and on the structure of the universe and cosmic dynamics.
The cognitive domain of Nature
Links to the tables of contents of TFNR Paper
