What do the big unsolved problems in physics have in common?
They share one hidden assumption, a stage of places and a clock that existed before anything happened on it. Lee Smolin listed five great problems in 2006, and each one asks about that stage: how many dimensions it has, what its constants are, why some events inside it count as measurements, what its empty parts weigh. Build the stage from records that observers compare and repair, and each question changes shape. Measurement becomes a write that cannot be undone. The arrow of time belongs to that write. The cosmological constant becomes a count of what the horizon can hold. The fine-tuned constants become single solutions of equations. Solving a problem leaves an answer somebody can measure. Removing the assumption under a problem leaves the problem impossible to state.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 33: Why Was Every Open Problem the Same Problem?watch a universe make its own particles