When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called <i>confusion</i>. It's a very diffi… - Richard Feynman

It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Some will tell me that I have just described a religious experience. Very well, you may call it what you will. Then, in that language I would say that the young man's religious experience is of such a kind that he finds the religion of his church inadequate to describe, to encompass that kind of experience. The God of the church isn't big enough.

Why are the theories of physics so similar in their structure?
There are a number of possibilities. The first is the limited imagination of physicists: when we see a new phenomenon, we try to fit it into the framework we already have—until we have made enough experiments, we don't know that it doesn't work. So when some fool physicist gives a lecture at UCLA in 1983 and says, “This is the way it works, and look how wonderfully similar the theories are,” it's not because Nature is really similar; it's because the physicists have only been able to think of the same damn thing, over and over again.
Another possibility is that it is the same damn thing over and over again—that Nature has only one way of doing things, and She repeats her story from time to time.
A third possibility is that things look similar because they are aspects of the same thing—some larger picture underneath, from which things can be broken into parts that look different, like fingers on the same hand. Many physicists are working very hard trying to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game, but at present time none of the speculators agree with any of the other speculators as to what the grand picture is.

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.