Why are we, the physicists of the modern world, not able to find the theory of everything?

Our knowledge of the universe started thousands of years ago when philosophers were the scientists of their day. Over the ages we advanced our knowledge in science and mathematics, established the scientific method, and institutionalized almost all our research. And for the most part, this organizational approach has served us very well in bringing us to the sophisticated theories and extraordinary experiments at the cutting edge of our current physics knowledge.

But it’s been over 100 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics and general relativity and after all this time, we are still no closer to finding a theory that unites these two well verified theories into one theory of everything.

Perhaps it’s time to take a step back and reflect upon our methods. The machinery of physics academia has become a world unto itself. It determines who becomes a physicist, how we educate our physicists, and sets the cultural environment within our academic establishments.

In this paper, we point out possible obstacles that are preventing our ability to get beyond our current impasse in fundamental physics and offer other approaches in the hopes of finding how everything fits together under one big, beautiful model.