Quantum Mechanics

As a preface, I'm going to say that I try hard to resist something which, I believe, is the source of much evil in the modern world: that perspective of, "I don't understand it, so it must be an opinion." Despite this, I feel as if the current state of quantum theory really feels like people desperately fumbling around to explain something, and producing theories which aren't so much "mostly correct," as "mostly probably incorrect."

The problem, I think, is one of granularity. When Sir Isaac Newton described his theory of gravitation in Principia, he was right, as far as anyone could tell. What people could measure matched his math, and fit his theory. When we started to be able to measure things more accurately, we found that there were discrepancies. F = G((m₁m₂)/r²) was accurate, except when it wasn't, and humans were doing more things where "when it wasn't" were really important. Human's engineering granularity needs increased, and Einstein gave us physics that improved our math for these things. That was all good, except our measuring granularity increased, and we discovered that General Relativity was accurate, except when it wasn't, and so we got Quantum Mechanics. And here's where it falls apart, because (and here's where I blatently recognize that it's also where I stop being able to grok the theory, and so my perspective is suspect) Quantum Mechanics has never had a theory that was correct for what we were able to measure.

QM has always had hacks. All QM theories, that I have seen, have had the form: "Here's a theory that describes QM, except for these edge cases, so we've invented X to account for that place where it doesn't work." Dark Matter is an example: it's a thing that was invented to explain something we can observe for which our math doesn't account. Often, after we investigate X, has to add it's own exceptions.

I am in no way judging the people smarter than I. They are smarter. They understand physics and math far better than I, and they have wonderful and inventive theories backed by mind-bogglingly impressive math and experimental results. The sheer scale of the industry needed to even support the work in this field is a monument to human society. And yet, you could apply the oft-quoted economics truism: "If you have 9 quantum physicists in the room, there'll be 10 competing theories." None of the theories works without hacks.

The reason why I can't completely discount my own opinion about this as being an under-informed plebe is that, unlike