The Theory of Everything

SOHO

The colossal power of a coronal mass ejection from our sun

The other three forces can be described by the quantum theory. The quantum theory has a tortured history. Back in the 1950s, when scores of strange new "fundamental" particles were flooding out of our atom smashers, J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb) was so frustrated that he declared, "the Nobel Prize in physics shall go to the physicist who does NOT discover a new particle that year." There were so many particles, each given strange Greek names, that Enrico Fermi said, "if I had known there would be so many particles, I would have become a botanist rather than a physicist."

But after decades of wandering in the wilderness (and spending billions of tax payers dollars) physicists have unified these three quantum forces into what is called the Standard Model, based on a zoo of bizarre particles, called quarks, leptons, Higgs bosons, Yang-Mills particles, gluons, W-bosons and more. Remarkably, all known physical phenomenon can, in principle, be described by these two great theories, relativity and the quantum theory.

CERN

A segment of the largest tunnel in the world: the LEP particle accelerator

Although these two great theories represent the two pillars upon which ALL physical knowledge is based, the fundamental mystery is why these two theories are so different in almost every way. The first theory is based on the curvature of smooth surfaces, which describes the world of the very large.

The second theory is based on tiny discrete packets of energy (called "quanta") and explains the world of the very small, such as atoms and nuclei.

But why should nature, at the most fundamental level, create two totally dissimilar theories? Sadly, every attempt to merge these two theories has failed. Some of the greatest minds of the century have tackled this problem, only to be unsuccessful.

As physicist Freeman Dyson has pointed out, the road to the unified field theory is "littered with the corpses". Neils Bohr once attended a meeting when Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli was presenting his version of the unified field theory. Bohr stood up and said, "Mr. Pauli, we in the back are all convinced that your theory is crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough!"

This is perhaps the greatest challenge of all time, to unite all four fundamental forces into a consistent, coherent picture. At present, the sole candidate for the theory of everything is superstring theory.