Question: Are we any where nearthe thoery of everthing? Does anyone have any (reasonable) Idea of what it might be? What will it enable us to do?

Freya Wilson answered on 25 Jun 2015:

It’s too early in the morning for such interesting questions!

So the closest thing to a theory of everything that we have is something called the grand unification theory (GUT) and it’s (hugely debated) extension the Theory of Everything (TOE) in particle physics.

The GUT covers how particles and forces came into existence. It doesn’t really cover the full shebang- all the details that string theory, relativity, quantum theory etc give you, it’s more of a framework. And the TOE is an extension of the GUT. (HAhah, toe, gut. Such immature humour I have… Anyway)

So they basically say that all forces can be boiled down into four completely different types- electromagnetic, strong and weak (these two hold protons and neutrons together in an atom) and gravity. This is called the standard model. The GUT has largely been accepted as a real thing- this says that if you have enough energy and everything is hot enough then the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces are all the same thing- so back when the universe was just born and everything was hot, they were all the same.

It would then make sense if we could unify gravity into that as well- this is what the TOE says, and what the search for the Higgs boson is all about.

So far this is the closest we have. However there are still plenty of unanswered questions- and every answer frequently brings with it more questions. So I don’t know if we can ever have a true theory which explains every single thing. (In fact, if you are a HHGTTG fan- if you understand everything there is to know about the universe then the universe will disappear and be replaced with a more complex one!)

Indeed while we have got as far as unifying all the forces, we still haven’t got to the bottom of how these forces came about in the first place- we think they happen by force carrying particles (called Bosons) but how these are made up we don’t know- this is where string theory and M theory come in. Then these theories are widely debated.

Sooooo in summary- we think we know some things but are very far off knowing everything!