Dear John,
Quantum mechanics is only mysterious theory as long as we cling to causality. The flaw of causality is that if we understand something only if we can reduce it to a cause, and we can understand this cause only as the effect of a preceding cause etcetera, to end at some primordial cause which cannot be reduced to a previous cause, then causality ultimately cannot explain anything.
If in a universe which creates itself out of nothing, particles have to create themselves, each other, then (the properties of) particles must be as much the product as the source of their interactions, their energy exchange. As the same holds for force between them, a force in principle cannot be either attractive or repulsive. That is, particles can only exist, have properties (attract/repulse) if they have some kind of backbone so they can, within limits, absorb energy in an increase of their kinetic energy rather than in a change of identity. However, if the rest energy of particles ultimately is as much the product as the source of their energy exchange, of their behavior, then interaction energies obviously never can become infinite at infinitesimal distances.
A universe which finds a way to create itself without any outside intervention can hardly stop doing so: gravity, the contraction of masses and the related expansion of spacetime between the mass concentrations they form, is the expression of this continuing creation process. As long as we cling to the causal, classical 19th century ideas about mass and charge, to the belief that particles only are the source of fields and forces, we condemn ourselves to waste our time on string theory and Higgs bosons. I'm afraid that physics has become too opaque a mixture of truths, half-truths and inconsistencies, to be able to solve any fundamental problem at all. For details, see my essay.
Best regards, Anton
