philosophy
fromBig Think
1 week agoThe idea of "theories of everything" may be fundamentally wrong
Quantum physics and General Relativity are fundamentally incompatible, leading to a search for a unifying theory that has yet to succeed.
When most of us think about science, we don't often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all actually is. Reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding what it is and how it works is the combination of what we can observe, measure, and experiment on.
My first encounter with physics came when I was eight years old, inspired by the story of a great scientist who left an unfinished manuscript on his desk. This sparked my fascination with the universe and the fundamental laws governing it, particularly the legacy of Einstein and his elusive theory of everything, which aims to encapsulate the workings of the cosmos in a single equation.