Our universe has rules.  Apples fall towards the Earth, a system can’t power itself forever, and something is never truly lost until your mom can’t find it.  These rules (with the exception of the last one) are practical applications of the laws of physics - the law of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics to be specific.  Everything is controlled by these physical constraints.  There’s one issue, however: not all of the laws work in unison.

My relationship with the quest for consistency goes back to when I was five years old. My little brother and I loved to play games: board games, card games, make believe games, anything you could think of. One of the most frustrating things to me, though, was when Ben was the one choosing the rules. You see, when little three-year-old Ben was in charge of the rules, they changed so often that it was almost as if they didn't exist. One minute I was winning the game, then I was losing, and finally the game had ended and another one begun without me even realizing it.

“Not fair! Your rules don't make any sense!"

And they didn't, at least not to me. But there was a logic behind all of them, even though I couldn't see it. All of the rules Ben came up with served the same purpose as any other game: to make everything more entertaining.

Our universe is the most complicated and difficult to understand game of all, and the rulebook is split into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. We only understand parts of the game, and can't seem to grasp how they all fit together.  The quantum world is a game of dice written on an edge piece, ruled by random chance and uncertainty, while our directly observable universe has a structure more like a grandmaster’s game of chess, and is somewhere in the middle of the puzzle.  Both are their own kind of beautiful mess, but getting them to fall under the same set of rules is a task that has befuddled scientists from Archimedes to Einstein to Kaku.

I’ve always had a penchant for looking at things in a different way.  Jigsaw puzzles and Rubik’s cubes are fascinating to me, and turning the pieces to find how they all fit together is a pleasant distraction from stress.  As I’m always looking for a bigger, more difficult puzzle, the puzzle that is physics captures most of my attention.  There are three main chapters in the book of physics: Quantum Mechanics (for the very small), Classical Mechanics (for everyday observations), and General Relativity (for the very large and/or the very fast).  The rules contained within each only apply to their respective areas, but the space between them is blurred and hazy.  Folding all of the physical laws into one set of rules is the greatest puzzle of all, one that needs collaboration between people with many different perspectives.  I want to contribute to the solution, to be there when all of the colored faces line up.  There’s no better time than now.