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It's one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in all of physics: string theory. At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that at some fundamental level, all the different forces, particles, interactions and manifestations of reality are tied together as part of the same framework. Instead of four independent fundamental forces -- strong, electromagnetic, weak and gravitational -- there's one unified theory that encompasses all of them. In many regards, string theory is the best contender for a quantum theory of gravitation, which just happens to unify at the highest-energy scales. Although there's no experimental evidence for it, there are compelling theoretical reasons to think it might be true. A year ago, the top living string theorist, Ed Witten, wrote a piece on what every physicist should know about string theory. Here's what that means, translated for non-physicists.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:27PM
The fact that we can't use it now doesn't make it useless. What makes it useless is that we're decades into this and there is still a distinct lack of testable hypotheses. I can't think of any other area of study that's been less productive in recent times. Sure, we've got some fancy math out of it, but that's not science.