Contents |
Theory of Everything
The Theory of Everything (TOE) is the hypothetical unification of all of the physical phenomena, laws and principles. That such unifications are possible is motivated by spectacular precedents, such as electricity + magnetism (Electromagnetism) itself unifying with the weak force (Electroweak interaction) and possibly as well with the strong force (Grand Unified Theory, GUT). There are other, similar cases in other branches, e.g., space and time (Special Relativity) itself getting unified to gravity (General Relativity). Interestingly, unifying gravitation and quantum physics proved to be harder than expected, harder in the sense that the most brilliant, motivated and disparate scientists from all trades and over decades of efforts could not get any close to it. The more you try, the more difficult it looks. This makes the TOE pending to address :
- Is it possible at all? Gödel's incompleteness theorems may forbid a complete theory for Physics.
- What does it tell us about the nature and/or meaning of the Universe?
- Will a TOE be for Everything or only fundamental things (the problem of Emergence, e.g., is consciousness part of it? maybe central to it? Or something solvable without worrying about AdS/CFT correspondence?).
Standard Model
That's the farthest we could successfully go. This is not complete, yet it works till that point. This is the model that accounts for the Gauge fields from which the elementary interactions are produced: Electromagnetism (yielding QED or Quantum-Electrodynamics), the weak and strong forces. This is discussed in more detail in Lecture 19 of my Modern Physics Lectures.
String theory
Link
- A Fight for the Soul of Science on Quanta Magazine.
- The Best Explanation for Everything in the Universe by Natalie Wolchover.
AdS/CFT correspondence
The Maldacena breakthrough provides a thread to connect gravitation to quantum systems, by working out a particular (toyish-model like) anti de Sitter space (AdS) to another particular, conformal field theory (CFT). Although our own universe is more de Sitter than anti, and CFT are not the full story, this might be enough to understand the essence of the quantum gravitation conundrum.
People
Links
- TOE mapped (interactive).
- Quanta magazine article on the Sycamore wormhole experiment[1].
Links
References
- ↑ Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. D. Jafferis, A. Zlokapa, J. D. Lykken, D. K. Kolchmeyer, S. I. Davis, N. Lauk, H. Neven and M. Spiropulu in Nature 612:51 (2022).
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