What This Site Is Actually Trying to Explain
July 2026
A NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow, teaching physics on a chalkboard, says this out loud: comparing gravity ($F=Gm_1m_2/d^2$) to Coulomb’s law ($F=kq_1q_2/d^2$) — the same mathematical shape, yet gravity only ever pulls while the electric force can push or pull depending on charge — “we as humans still do not fully understand why that is.” Not a fringe claim. A working physicist, on camera, naming a real gap in his own field. See the full breakdown of the video this came from.
That sentence is the actual scope of this site, stated as plainly as it can be: the parts of science where a credentialed working scientist himself says “we don’t fully understand why” are exactly the parts Solve The Universe exists to take a real run at.
What that does and doesn’t mean
It doesn’t mean this site thinks science is wrong, or that everything is secretly mysterious, or that expertise doesn’t matter. Almost everything in physics is settled, checkable, and not up for debate — see Proven Systems for the enormous pile of it. This site isn’t in the business of manufacturing doubt about things that are actually well understood just because they’re unfamiliar to a layperson.
It means something much narrower and more specific: there is a real, bounded set of places where the honest answer, from inside physics itself, is “we don’t know” — not “a layperson doesn’t know,” but the field’s own working practitioners saying so plainly. Gaps in Science is this site’s running, maintained list of exactly that set — dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, the black hole information paradox, and more, each with an honest accounting of what Pressure-Based Theory does and doesn’t actually offer toward it. Catalog: Unknowns is the same commitment from a different angle — a category that exists specifically so this site can’t quietly reclassify an open question as solved just because PBT has a guess about it.
A fresh example, caught in the wild
The gravity-vs-Coulomb asymmetry above is a good test case precisely because nobody here went looking for it — it turned up while writing an unrelated piece about a teaching video, and it qualifies immediately: a real physicist naming a real unknown, not a hypothesis borrowed from this site’s own work. Paper 1 and Paper 3 already treat gravity and electromagnetism as the same underlying mechanism (particle push/shadowing), which means this specific asymmetry is a fair, sharp question to eventually put to that mechanism: if both forces really do reduce to one thing, can it say why one came out one-directional and the other didn’t? Right now the honest answer is that nobody has worked that out yet — logged as an open item, not a result, in this site’s working notes.
Why so much of this site is spent on the known, not just the unknown
Solving an unknown requires actually knowing the known first — not loosely, thoroughly. You can’t recognize a real gap in a wall you haven’t studied; you’ll either miss it or mistake ordinary brick for a hole. That’s the real reason Established Physics, the Formula Catalog, Math Applications Simplified, and Practical Applications exist and take up as much of this site as they do. They aren’t a detour from the mission or filler around it — they’re the prerequisite for it. Alqaraghuli’s own video is a working example of the same principle from the other direction: he can point at exactly where gravity and Coulomb’s law diverge only because he has both equations, and everything under them, cold. Vague familiarity doesn’t produce a sentence as precise as “we don’t fully understand why that is” — mastery does.
That’s also why this site insists on grading its own claims against the Catalog rather than just asserting them: a claim that hasn’t been checked against the real, established physics around it isn’t a discovery, it’s a guess that got lucky or didn’t. Understanding the known is what makes it possible to tell the difference.
The other half of this is a standing posture, not a one-time step: hyper-sensitivity to the presence of the unknown. Once the known is actually known, the goal is to notice — immediately, not eventually — the exact moment a gap shows up: a credentialed source admitting “we don’t know,” an equation that doesn’t reproduce its own claimed numbers when checked, a mechanism that explains one case but goes silent on its mirror image. That moment is where discovery actually happens, and it’s worth treating as a signal to stop and look rather than noise to filter out. The gravity-vs-Coulomb example above is what that looks like in practice: caught mid-sentence in an unrelated video, recognized immediately because the underlying physics was already understood well enough to know it was a gap, and logged rather than let pass.
Where this actually stands
This article isn’t announcing a new physics result. It’s a purpose statement, prompted by hearing someone else say the quiet part out loud. The actual test of whether Solve The Universe is doing what it claims to do was never going to be how many open questions it can list — every physics popularizer can do that. It’s whether the specific mechanism proposed here ever actually closes one of them, honestly, checked against real data, rather than just restating the mystery in different words. Gaps in Science keeps the current, unflattering scoreboard on that. This site would rather be measured against that scoreboard than against how compelling the writing sounds.