Why Has No one as of Yet Come Up With a Theory Of Everything?

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BAYLOR

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The Theory of everything which links together such things as Gravity and Magnetism. Einstein tired and failed to come up with a Unified Filed Theory decades before and since his time it has eluded everyone else . What do you think are principle difficulties involved with coming up with such a grand theory ? Do you think it possible that we could see it our lifetimes? Or the lifetime of our species ? Or might it just simply be beyond us ?

Thoughts?
 
Here's my personal view, I ain't done much physics in a long time and anyway I was doing complex many-body theory on computers, none of this fundamental stuff. (and I think it's Field theory you are asking for, I assume. Unless we are looking at smoothed down, reading for sanding theories...)

A couple of major issues.

Firstly we have two major theories that have been tremendously successful in their 'domains'. There is General Relatively (GR) which has proved very good at describing the very large. And there is Quantum mechanics theory (QM) which had proved extremely good at describing the very small. And although there have been some interesting approaches at applying GR thinking to the very small and QM thinking to the very big, neither really works in each others domains at the moment. We don't see 'Quantum galaxies' nor can we apply GR to the two slit experiment.

So you'd think that the 'Grand Unified Theory of Everything' would be some sort of mixture of the two.

No. Philosophically speaking it would be like trying to mix oil and water together. They won't mix, they are fundamentally different animals. (People have tried a lot to get the fundamental axioms together and trying to build something that is both. But nothing has really come of all the approaches - and they are many.)

So we need something new. How are we going to do that?

Is it string theory? NO! The problem with string theory is that although it is mathematically very elegant, but has yet to come out with a single testable hypothesis since its inception in the 1980s. By the very definition of science it currently doesn't qualify as one. It may in the future come up with something...or it may (IMHO) turn out to be a dead end.

Thus I believe we need to do real physics and real experiments on matter and energy where we can both apply QM and GR. Really in my mind, this means we need to be up close and doing countless experiments next to massive masses (or to put it another way, black holes.) There GR is currently used to describe the curvature of space-time to find the properties of the overall object and because of the massive contraction of the mass into a black hole there is also a scale where QM starts to become the more prominent. It is experimenting with objects like this close up (not just observing them from afar through a telescope) that we can start to build an all-encompassing theory that takes both into account. Essentially we need to be able to do the hypothesis/test/examine loop of proper science on a state of matter where both GR and QM are fundamentally valid.

If we can't get to a natural black hole then perhaps we can manipulate matter in the lab to do this - I don't really know if it's possible. It may be, it may not.

So as it stands now, according to my thinking, if we can't fly spaceships to investigate black holes or can't construct very high curvature space-time with mass in the lab, then I think it will be impossible to get a grand theory of everything. (We might be able to describe a grand theory mathematically, but if you can't find evidence for it, how can you possibly know if it's right?) Of course we may stumble across some other insight in the meantime that rubbishes my thoughts and let's us move on, but that's science for ya!

Second issue. Who cares. Yes, it would be a massive intellectual achievement if we have a theory that is valid over the extremely large to the extremely small, absolutely brilliant. But it will be most likely be useless at working out the tensile strength of a novel collection of elements in a new combination molecular structure, or trying to work out what the climate of the Earth will be like in 100 years time, or trying to describe the flow of water in a river...and a billion and one interesting physical questions.

--------

Ray - you could have:

Mass is a property of stuff that we describe usually as 'matter', that causes the geometry of space-time around it to deform in such a way that other bits of matter will respond as if acted on by a force, i.e. Gravity.

Or if GR is not your thing, you could say that objects that we define as matter interact with each other via gravitons, the result this particle exchange giving rise to the fundamental gravitational force.

Currently I'm pretty sure they haven't observed gravitons (but I think they are implicitly there if the Higgs Boson exists, which is seems to), so the first explanation is usually the bog-standard one. Does that help? :)
 
i think it has to do with non attraction of dark matter.
based upon the refractory sequencialism of light rays.
photons themselves. exhibit these positional irregularities that seem to be accounted for by the interaction by non attraction by dark matter.

but thats just me.
 
AFAIK there are several competing TOE in the ring. The trouble is that testing any of them is next to impossible, because one thing that seems certain is that the relevant domain is somewhere around the Planck scale - and the huge energies involved are going to take some serious work. So physicists are reduced to thinking up second and third order effects to test the theories with.

I've also heard it said that the real truth may well be; all the competing theories turn out to be the same thing in different language. This has happened before; early in the history of quantum mechanics, wave mechanics and matrix mechanics turned out to be equivalent at a deeper level. And now, physicists use either or both depending on which is easier to work with.
 
There is a computer program called 'everything', part of the UBCD or Hirams or suchlike. Perhaps, by using it, and by turning on all features at once, then focusing in on the smallest possible microcosm, applying gravitational rotation and adjusting the cosmic calipers, we could... no.
Space is so empty it's actually more nothing than anything. Isn't it?
 
We'll have to see how the Higgs Boson pans out I guess.
 
One of the problems is that many physicists insist that the universe is a modified-Newtonian one. This makes them thinks that time is a real dimension and the space-time is a fabric. But since we live in a relativistic universe, the following properties are not fundamental ones but derived ones: time, distance, mass, momentum, and energy.
 
I've got a degree in physical chemistry (think the boarder between physics and chemistry), the question is slightly out of my comfort zone, but I'll try my best to answer it.

We currently have 2 models for how the universe works. Quantum theory (or mechanics) deals with the very small scale, where we see a constantly changing highly un-ordered world. While relativity deals with the large scale which is much more ordered and slow to change.

Scientists currently believe that there are 4 fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. Quantum theory details how 3 of these forces work (namely electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) while relativity deals with gravity. Electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force act over a relatively small distance and are much stronger forces than that of gravity which becomes the dominant force over much larger distances. It is the difference between these forces that make the theories difficult to combine.

There have been some (semi) successful attempts to combine these theories, the best known being string theory, however these theories often break down in extreme environments such as black holes, which is why many of today's smartest people are looking into these types of phenomenon. We are chipping away at the grand unified theory, or whatever you want to call it, but there is a long way to go before we get there. Do I think we'll ever see it? Look at the history of science, every time we think we are close to the finish line something else, even stranger comes along and shows us how little we really know (remember that in the late 1800's before Einstein they thought they'd basically figured everything out). I do believe that we may, however, see a unified theory of quantum mechanics and relativity in our lifetime, it just won't be the end of the story.
 
I think that the real problem is that the macro world is an emergent property of whatever "reality" actually exists, in the same way that life is an emergent property of chemistry. Trying to figure out "fundamental theories" of life is a waste of time, because the chemistry could (in principle) come together any number of different ways to form "life".

String theory, as untestable as it currently is, aligns with this idea. The way that the original dimensions collapsed was essentially non-deterministic, and if they'd collapsed a different way, we'd have a different universe. The way they did collapse produced a set of constraints on the way energy behaves that forces energy to coalesce as certain classes of particles, interact using certain macro forces, etc etc etc. And at the macro level, voila, coffee! :love:

My point is that the four forces, elementary particles, probably even QM, are all results of interactions at some smaller level. We have to try to understand that, and the rest should fall out.
 
Bizmuth said:
I think that the real problem is that the macro world is an emergent property of whatever "reality" actually exists, in the same way that life is an emergent property of chemistry. Trying to figure out "fundamental theories" of life is a waste of time, because the chemistry could (in principle) come together any number of different ways to form "life".

String theory, as untestable as it currently is, aligns with this idea. The way that the original dimensions collapsed was essentially non-deterministic, and if they'd collapsed a different way, we'd have a different universe. The way they did collapse produced a set of constraints on the way energy behaves that forces energy to coalesce as certain classes of particles, interact using certain macro forces, etc etc etc. And at the macro level, voila, coffee! :love:

My point is that the four forces, elementary particles, probably even QM, are all results of interactions at some smaller level. We have to try to understand that, and the rest should fall out.
Click to expand...

Which just goes to show how pointless all this type of research is...it's just a way for adults who've never grown up to not have to get a real job :cool:

What you've said in eight lines of text, I summed up in two words in the post above.

QED
 
There are plenty theories of everything, but they are called ideologies and 'isms' and have nothing to do with science.
 
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