A decade ago, it was practically gospel truth among physicists that the universe began with a sudden unfurling of space known as cosmic inflation. Physicists also widely believed that the cosmos’s missing dark matter consists of invisible clouds of heavy, inert particles dubbed WIMPs, and that the laws of nature respect supersymmetry, a tidy mirroring of matter and forces. The only thing left to do was gather proof of these solutions to some of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

That proof never came. Today, the cosmos’s origin story is in question, the identity of dark matter is anyone’s guess and supersymmetry is all but off the table, leaving gaps in our laws of nature. Add to that the dark energy mystery, black hole paradoxes and quantum weirdness, and it’s clear that the field of fundamental physics is experiencing both a period of confusion and one of refreshing openness to new ideas.

This year didn’t bring significant clues or answers to any of physics’ fundamental mysteries. If anything, those mysteries deepened. By contrast, condensed matter physicists, who study the exotic emergent behaviors of large numbers of particles, and astronomers, armed with powerful new telescopes, are swimming in data and discoveries.