Why I still love reckoning with the quantum gravity problem

I rarely write much about it in my research papers, but every piece of science I have ever done either assumes the correctness of general relativity – our most fundamental theory for explaining gravity – or assumes it is a fantastic approximation of a more correct theory. When I and others in my field write up our research, we rarely say it out loud. But general relativity lurks everywhere in physics – from the way it allows us to navigate with the global positioning system to how it helps us launch…