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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: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:23PM
No. String theory work fine at describing the universe. It just has so many places where it requires empirically derived values that it isn't useful as a general theory. It can describe a number of universes so large as to make the EWG multiverse look small. I don't know if it could match the theory used in Heinlein's "Number of the Beast", but it's not far short of that. (That theory was, basically, anything anyone can thing of it out there somewhere.)
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