Last week I some of the themes from my book . Today, I want to briefly state the reasons why a so-called "" (TOE) is an impossibility. We have to do away with this idea for once and for all.
First, let me say what a TOE really means. It is not really a theory of "everything." It doesn't include biology, geology, psychology or the social sciences in general. It doesn't even include chemistry, although some physicists may (wrongly) say that chemistry is contained in physics. A TOE focuses on explaining the material composition of the Universe at its most fundamental level and how these tidbits of stuff interact with one another.
"Material" here must be understood broadly to include not only particles of matter such as electrons and quarks, but also the particles that transmit the forces between particles of matter, such as the photon (the particle of light, responsible for electromagnetic forces). There are others but it doesn't matter right now.
A TOE presumably will also include more mysterious kinds of stuff, such as the elusive dark matter (not made of ordinary atoms like we are) and dark energy (an ether-like medium filling space responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe).
A TOE would combine particles of matter, particles of force, dark matter and dark energy into a single theory describing all four forces as manifestations of a single force. We don't see this unity because it is only manifest at extremely high energies, well beyond what we can perceive, even with our most powerful machines. The four forces are like four rivers that join upstream to become three, then join again further upstream to become two and, finally, join once more to become a single river at the Source of it all. In this river analogy, physicists searching for a TOE are like kayakers paddling upstream, toward the Source.
Culturally, there is no question that the impulse to unify goes hand-in-hand with the notion of unity found in pre-scientific monotheistic faiths. In Judeo-Christian faith the one God is responsible for all that is and stands beyond space and time in supernatural splendor. Even if most physicists searching for a TOE are not believers, they are heirs to old Platonist ideals of mathematical simplicity and symmetry that were later translated, in particular by Saint Thomas Aquinas, as attributes of the mind of God. No wonder that the image of "knowing the mind of God" keeps coming back in popular physics texts, most famously in Stephen Hawking's .
There would be nothing wrong with this if the notion of a TOE made sense. But it doesn't.
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