No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s General Relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory. If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, General Relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%.…