Most of theoretical physicists research for their career advancement and some others do for dignity. A few percent of them do because they have passion about physics, love for physics, they try to imagine how natural process/events occur?.....etc.

Love for a truth that is not directly visible is the one reason. And the other is the desire to save lives.

For superstition -- the adherence to false truths -- can be lethal. As the current 90 years long blemish of believing in a Big Bang testifies to: It currently can cost humankind its life and earth its existence, but no colleague tries to alert the media to the tragedy.

Does a 90-years-long intellectual blemish render every scientist a morally inferior being?

It is just plain stupidity, of course, if I am not mistaken. But an unprecedented one ever since Bruno's murder.

P.S.: I am alluding to the CERN CRIME that no one dares criticize: The fact that CERN continued with its universe-record symmetric particle collisions for 11 years without first renewing their planetary safety report LSAG from early 2008.

The primary motivational drivers for exploration are Nature and its mysterious philosophy.

There are more than five differences between the two cases.

Beauty, symmetry and complexity of the Nature motivates the theoretical physicist to dream up mathematical treatments of phenomena.

It is all about philosophy, isn't it? The beauty of seeing the nature and the universe in its "depths" and infinity. And then navigating through it to expressing this very nature (with all its visible and hidden phenomena) into a common language: coherent mathematical expression.

I do agree with Lubanzadio Mavatikua - the force is Your curiosity .

Kurt Wraae

Neuroscientist Read Montague says that the brain sometimes gives a chemical (dopamine) reward for solving a problem (p. 110, Why Choose This Book? How We Make Decisions). Part of the motivation for a theoretical physicist might be the chemically induced physical 'pleasure of finding things out' [Feynman]. Solving problems feels good and makes the problem solver want to re-experience the pleasure of finding things out.

In his book “What Is Life?”, E. Schrödinger claims that the sleep decreases the entropy of the body considered as a many-particle (thermodynamic) system. Actually, it’s the Helmholtz free energy rather than the entropy, as the body has constant temperature, but the reasoning does not change.

Considering Robert Shour's interesting view from a thermodynamic framework, maybe solving theoretical physics problems decreases, in some way, the entropy of the mind, if such a quantity can be defined.

Spiros Konstantogiannis

Your connecting problem solving to E. Schrodinger's remarks on entropy in relation to life is interesting lateral thinking.

There is a formula for network entropy, C log (n) where the base of the log is the network's mean path length and C is the network's clustering coefficient.

If entropy is a measure of the degrees of freedom of a system, then solving a particular problem may open up lines of inquiries in several more problems, increasing the degrees of freedom of problems to be solved by the network (of problem solvers or of neurons). So that might increase (not decrease) the network entropy, because there would be more problems to solve.

I am not sure how that connects to the thermodynamics of What is Life? or the views on entropy there. Your point is an interesting take.

Best wishes.

Cryodynamics has falsified many views in statistical mechanics.

Is it okay if I quote here my big review in the hope it will be criticized?

Conference Paper A Primer for Deterministic Thermodynamics and Cryodynamics

Dear Taha Ahmed Abdullah ,

Thanks a lot. You have herein mentioned, "There are more than five differences .......". Would you like to please contextualize and explain it precisely?

The main motivational agency herein:

Unveiling the Nature

For me, it is the problem solving keeps me busy. I fundamentally lazy relative to physical exercise. After I sold my electronics company in 1991, I started looking at physics again. 10 years later, I was examining the anomalies of the big and the small as one set of problems. What could be a single model to correspond to both cosmology and quantum mechanics? I thought of one in 2002 and started writing papers.

In the words of the immortal Hans Bethe, "It is the urge to know."

I think we respond to the existence of reality in general (and of physics, mathematics, biology in particular) as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. We construct societies in order to understand reality and build cultures in order to go beyond of what reality offers us. We integrate new rules in our society (via artificial intelligence for example) in order to mark progress and help enrich our reality. Therefore, reality becomes our struggle and our playground to find compatibility between the structure of the natural order and the structure of the mind.

I do agree with you that the "force" is curiosity but i think there is another important force which is "creativity". Inside cultures for instance, creativity is a key element used to bring both tradition and reality into view. All in all, interesting questions Robert Shour.

To me, it is the urge to understand our environment.

Where are we? What are we? and Why are we here?

Luckily, evolution has equipped us with the tool to do the job, a multilayer neural network of unrestrained correlation ability.

https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2019.102028

I think its the basic understanding of the nature.

Being a theoretical physicist, i keep myself busy in understanding the very fundamental things and trying to understand the our existence.

No one replies to me: Why?

The main motivational force to drive a theoretical physicist is principally composed of

(a) Creative imagination and implementation,

(b) A keen passion to empathize the mysterious truth hidden in the Nature, and

(c) An inner zeal to illuminate the mankind with the light of rational standpoint scientifically.

The main motivational force:

(1) Exploring the unexplored,

(2) Seeing the unseen, and

(3) Revealing the true 'nature' of Nature.

The primary source of motivation to study, irrespective of areas and disciplines, is to expose the truth publicly

What motivates a theoretical physicist?

About science in general, Mano Singham in The Great Paradox of Science writes (p. 161): ... methodological naturalism, the belief that a discoverable explanation must exist. ... Part ... the desire to be helpful, part ... personal ambition and career advancement, but ... also the belief that ... given sufficient ingenuity and skill and time and resources and hard work, they will find the solution.