We need a new Theory of Everything
A Theory of Everything is a theory that explains, well, everything: every force, every particle, every bit of matter and energy in the universe. The problem with theories of everything is that they have to reconcile so many different theories into one.
Individually, we have a good idea of how matter works and what it is made from. This is called the Standard Model of particle physics. We also have the theory of gravity which explains the universe as a geometric structure that curves to create gravitational effects.
These two ideas are largely incompatible.
It is possible that if Albert Einstein hadn’t been in the picture, if he had been content to worry about problems like Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, we might have ended up with a very different theory of gravity, perhaps one that is more inline with other particle theories.
We’ll never know.
The problem now is that there is only one serious contender for a theory of everything: string theory.
String theory isn’t one theory either. It is a collection of related theories, any of which could be true or none of them. This article isn’t about string theory, but about the lack of any paradigmatically different approach to a theory of everything.
