Grand Unification May Be A Dead End For Physics
The idea that there might only be one fundamental force might be a fundamental mistake.
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” -Stephen Hawking
There’s a beautiful, elegant idea that’s out there in physics: that everything we see, perceive, and interact with in this Universe is just a different manifestation of the same fundamental force in some way. Advances towards this end have appeared before: the discovery that the scores of different atoms were all made of protons, neutrons and electrons; the discovery that just four fundamental forces (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) were behind every single phenomenon in the Universe; the further discovery that a single equation (the Standard Model Lagrangian) perfectly described three of them, and even unified two of them — the electromagnetic and the weak force — into a single force: the electroweak force. Could there be a single, unified force that all the different forces are just different manifestations of?
