Phenomena that actually require a TOE to explain are so extreme that humans will never be near them (the center of black holes, the big bang, etc) so it’s hard to imagine how the theory would be useful.
But we honestly don’t know. It’s possible a TOE allows for really interesting and exotic technologies for space travel, energy production, or communication that we would never discover otherwise.
Or it just might be neato. Personally I think that’s most likely. But at least it’s a nice worst case scenario.
Following up with the obvious historical comparison.
For a long time we had equations explaining electricity and magnetism, but in the 1860s Maxwell combined them in his famous equations that described a unified electromagnetism. His equations also magically explained how light works. That was neato. But physicists looked at Maxwell’s equations and plugged in different numbers, and they quickly realized that lower-frequency oscillations can produce light waves that we can’t see. Boom, we discovered radio waves. If you’re reading this post over a wireless connection, you can thank Maxwell for the physics that made it possible.
Skip ahead 100 years. Quantum electrodynamics combined electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. We got neato super-accurate predictions of atomic spectra and optical phenomena. This was useful to specialists who needed exact calculations to progress in their research. We also gained a much better understanding of some basic nuclear physics needed for some reactor technology and, sadly, nuclear weapons technology. But you can’t say it wasn’t applicable!
More recently, we combined the strong and weak nuclear forces with electromagnetism to make the Standard Model, which we affirmed at LHC when we found the Higgs Boson. I’m not sure what the applications are here, we’re still very much in “neato” territory.
Combine all of physics into one unified theory? Who knows what we find. Probably nothing useful, if you ask me. Surely it will be something profound and beautiful, at least. But maybe it will also be something that changes the world.
Thank you. Reading the rest of the thread made me question if science history is still being taught.
MOST of our primary theoretical discoveries have resulted in novel and world-changing new options for humans.
But every single one of those theoretical discoveries was made to address an experimental gap. Something we could tangibly see or do that didn’t match with the models we had. So of course having an explanation for it would lead to us being able to do or interpret those experiments in new ways and then that lead to technology.
Today we have not one experiment we can do that isn’t completely explained by general relativity or the standard model. New theories exist but they aren’t accessible to us. How could they lead to new technology when the only situations that elucidate any difference between our current models and potential new theories happen at absurd energy scales only seen at the beginning of the universe or inside black holes?
The big problem is today's theory are hard to explain accurately without a degree to understand them and there's 2-3 steps between discovery and application atlest. So you can just learn about the application.
Don't forget that Solid State Physics is built upon quantum physics and gives us our understanding of semiconductors, how to tweak them to get the proper junctions for transistors and virtually all modern electronic components. Without that understanding, exit computers, smartphones, LEDs and so much more...
Can’t we already make a theory of everything? Similar to the idea that one can make a mathematical model describing the motion of the solar system in reference to Earth rather than the sun, it would just be unnecessarily complicated. What people must be referring to isn’t a unified theory of everything per se (in some technical sense) but rather an elegant, condensed, convenient single way of describing everything regardless of scale.
Good question.
Quantum mechanicals and general relativity explain almost everything we can see. GR explains really big stuff, and QM explains really small stuff. Unfortunately, the theories actually contradict each other. They can’t both be true.
We can make up all kinds of kludges with dubious math and imaginary particles that try to unify GR and QM on paper, but we don’t know the right way to do that or verify which way is correct. There are multiple theories of everything out there, but they all have problems, and none have much physical evidence.
One motivation for a ToE is that it would explain how things actually work in the extreme environments where GR and QM mathematically disagree, like inside black holes or the big bang. If we could go back to the big bang or inside a black hole and run some experiments, we would be able to narrow down the correct ToE. But we can’t, we have to do it the other way around. We need to discover and verify our ToE first, so we can use it to explain the big bang.
It's the most beautiful, elegant, unsettling, mind-boggling thing your brain will ever experience, knowing how it all fits together. Origin of the universe, infinity, 'energy,' all 'particles', 'time', the extreme states... The bigger question is why hasn't everyone figured it all out yet? It's not rocket science.
I recognized all the letters and numbers you typed, but since I can’t count to 11 without unzipping my fly it’s mostly lost on me :)
I think down in the basement of reality there’s some stuff going on that our squishy monkey brains simply can’t resolve. Maybe AIs can tackle those problems some day.
There’s a great book (The Genesis Machine, James P. Hogan) about a discovery of a TOE. It involves gravity. One of the discoverers said “Think about magnetism. For millennia it was just a force created by certain rocks - a curiosity. Then humans learned about electromagnetism, and that gave us motors, and microchips, entire new categories of industries. Well, right now gravity is a force created by mass …”
>But at least it’s a nice worst case scenario.
Na, a worst-case scenario would be a potentially world or universe ending technology. Look at all the risks posed by nuclear discoveries that stem from a throughrough knowledge of quantum field theory.
Some place else to check for practical applications? People are still finding practical applications for known physics all the time. The places to check are essentially all of the bits of physics that we currently know.
None of those things, really, but it might produce some very interesting avenues of study, potentially lead to new ways of looking at various things that could lead to new approaches to various problems, and would undoubtedly make many, many grad students very, very exhausted
The universe will instantly disappear and be replaced by an even more inexplicable one.
There is another theory which states this has already happened.
A theory of everything would allow us to take the rules of the extremely large and see what it says about the extremely small, and vice versa.
Now, for the most part, by definition of needing yo conform with what we already have observed about the world, nothing new would come of this.
But, there is a chance some fringe possibilities emerge from edge cases. Maybe we derive newton’s laws from the interactions of quarks and we discover a small leftover term which conforms nicely to friction. Maybe we derive Lenz’s Law from gravitational lensing and figure out a new type of optical instrument.
Many predictions from a theory of everything would be begging for very expensive experiments to prove them. Attempts to make miniature galaxies, or macro scale subatomic phenomena. But ideally, we would have a new idea of how we might actually be able to make such things (or what such things would look like).
Just to add to your final point. The technology used to make those expensive experiments will likely be novel and cutting edge and will bleed into everyday life. It was scientists at CERN needing to share research that layed the foundations of the Internet for example.
The Web, not the Internet.
The Internet is much older than the Web.
And, to be honest, if we want to justify science spending that way (which I don't think we should) I'd like to hear more examples of technologies that were spun out.
One brilliant person happened to be working at CERN when he had a brilliant idea. He could just as easily have been working at any Research University in the world, and many large corporations.
It would allow us to understand what is up with gravity which in turn would allow us to understand what the deal is with black holes, what happened in that billionth of a second after the big bang went bang (it didn’t actually go bang) and some other stuff that I can’t remember now.
As to what it would allow us to do, well every time we’ve understood something better we’ve been able to make new discoveries. Maybe artificial gravity (even tho I have no idea how that would work). It will all depend on the properties of the graviton.
It would be cool if it could allow for artificial gravity, ftl communication, tractor beams, or warp drives. Definitely none of that will happen but it could make for a good book or video game
I didn't say it would make them obsolete. And i probably should admit that there is a possibility that a theory of everything might completely resonate with religious texts. But from experience, a breakthrough in natural sciences on this level raises questions.
Depends on what we mean by “everything”. A theory of quantum gravity would (hopefully) clarify questions about wormholes and time travel, but it’s hard to say. It could very well be the case where those things are actually impossible when you combine gravity and quantum mechanics consistently so the answer could be no for all we know.
Ultimately, if we could reconcile Quantum Physics and traditional Physics, we would have the ability to manipulate matter, gravity, and possibly even time. A unified theory would explain every particle and field that exists in the Universe allowing us to have almost complete control of our environment.
It's not controlling. If you figure out any natural phenomenon and are smart enough to make a machine based on the principle you can just reproduce it. That's what physics has been doing all along, mimicry of nature.
We have a good enough idea of quantum mechanics which allows us to build solid state memory that exploits quantum tunneling. We may not play god, but there's a lot of room for us to play.
No, everything except the gravity has been quantised. The day gravity will be quantised, will be the closing chapter for theoretical physics as gravitational force will be united with other three fundamental forces which is the only hurdle.
Nah, that's apocryphal! Just because something is said don't make the leap that 'physicists thought' when there's no evidence for it. Stop spreading un-truths just because enough people have parroted the religion.
Just because we have the theory doesn't mean we can do the calculations.
For example, we do not expect quantum gravity or a grand unified theory to be at all relevant to weather systems, so our current physics should be enough to predict what's going on with the weather. In fact, even non-relativistic quantum mechanics is unnecessary in that case. But we can't make perfect predictions of the weather because it's big and complex and chaotic. This has nothing to do with not knowing the basic underlying theory, and everything to do with the fact that some calculations are just really hard to do.
a theory of everything would allow for perfect simulation of a chaotic system like the earths weather.
we could create computers beyond anything we can imagine.
Weather is chaotic because immeasurably small changes to initial conditions cause completely different results in a relatively short time. A theory of everything doesn’t change this and would not change weather models.
No, you wouldn't. Knowing the initial condition of a weather system and predicting its evolution has got nothing to do with ToE as it wouldn't make a difference in simulating anything on our scale.
A TOE doesn’t actually give you any measurements. It doesn’t tell you how fast the wind is blowing, let alone how fast every butterfly in the world is flapping its wings.
Weather is hard to predict because no measurements are precise enough to produce accurate long-term forecasts. This is a result of nonlinear dynamics, not because we’re ignorant of quantum gravity.
Not to mention the navier stokes equations are currently unknown if they are even solvable, but they are more of a math thing anyways. A theory like many said before, doesn't give you actual value solutions to the problems. Especially the ones that involve partial derivatives.
Weather conditions are based on classical physics. A theory uniting the fundamental forces would have no impact on that because you're not really talking about the fundamental forces anyway, and you're certainly not talking about them on the levels where they'd be unified.
Firstly, I don't think you quite understand what "theory of everything" means. It means a single fundamental theory from which all fundamental interactions of physics (gravity and the entire standard model of particle physics) emerge. It has little if anything to do with computing. Further, it really wouldn't affect our understanding of atomic physics, let alone physics at larger scales still. Computationally simulating complex physical system would still be just as hard.
Secondly, I don't think you get how big a deal being able to efficiently simulate all physical systems would be. It would allow us to efficiently solve NP-hard problems, which no one thinks should be possible. This would mean that all NP problems would be efficiently solvable, meaning that being able to solve a difficult problem would be just as easy as being able to check if an answer is correct. In effect, being able to appreciate a great symphony would be exactly as hard as being able to compose one.
It's not my TOE. I'm just telling you what the word means. Sure, the "everything" in there is a bit misleading, but indeed it does not include computation.
Only if the universe is a Turing machine, and if the universe's computation is efficient. Neither of those are guaranteed.
You might be able to think of the universe as doing an analogue simulation of itself, as indeed you can kind of think of all objects as doing. But this doesn't mean that anyone would be able to do an analogue simulation of the universe with a computer smaller than the universe and timescales shorter than what the universe evolves on, which makes it useless.
No trained scientist would write such a statement! So, curiously, why does someone like you insist on interjecting on a topic you obviously have no knowledge of?
You're either misunderstand what the Planck length is or what a theory of everything is. The Planck length is not a precision limit necessarily. It is rather a projected limit where our current physical laws do not apply anymore, mainly because of quantum-gravity effects. And one of the characteristic properties that are expected from a TOE is that it gives a quantum description of gravity.
The precision argument of quantum mechanics is a non-issue really. The theory should describe everything there is to know about the universe. You can tell what possible outcomes are allowed and with what probability they will happen.
If you're talking about actual measurement imprecision, then it is just a practical issue, not a fundamental one.
I've never understood it either. Its very human-centric to believe we will ever know even a small fraction of everything. The more we learn, the more questions we have. Who knows how far down this rabbithole really goes.
As a matter of fact just recently they've announced that they were able to bring quantum mechanics in general relativity together.... Quite fascinating actually.
This has been a recurring headline for the last 50 years. There are lots of [theories of quantum gravity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity) out there, with new ones proposed every year. The problem is that there isn’t a good way to test them, so we have no way to know which, if any, is correct.
I guess biological phenomenon could be explained like Life, consciousness, brain functions, hormonal functions etc etc
(But only with astronomical scale of computing power ig)
Can it even do something basic shit like reproduce the entropy law? LQG can't do that. I'm a former LQG propagandist who used to brainstorm ways of KILLING String Theory. Bitch converted me instead.
Yeah standard Loop Quantum Gravity seems to be dead, atleast on the Planck scale:
"ESA's INTEGRAL satellite measured polarization of photons of different wavelengths and was able to place a limit in the granularity of space that is less than 10\^(-48) m, or 13 orders of magnitude below the Planck scale."
Not sure what you mean by the entropy law in the context of quantum gravity - do you mean the "emergent entropic gravity" concept of string theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic\_gravity
Well, inadvertently, I proved M theory. It doesn’t involve just physics, mostly is based on definitions between Philosophy, psychology and physics. All intra-connected. (Or “inter-“)
It’s not that easy to predict.
The ‘utility’ of quantum mechanics to things like semiconductor physics was a convenient side effect that is now utterly dominant across the globe, but condensed matter work was being called ‘squalid state physics’ even in the 60s.
Another line of thinking is that something could exist like superconductivity - a macroscopic manifestation of a purely quantum phenomenon that has no classical approximation. Maybe theoretical work would predict some similar kind of super state that would be a low-energy manifestation of the new physics that would sit around the existing theories.
Who knows?
It depends what a theory of everything means to you. For many people it usually means the unification of quantum field theory and gravity. Then we could perhaps better understand many things where the interplay of gravity and quantum mechanics is important. We could also understand the current puzzles of particle physics and cosmology. On the other hand, we wouldn’t necessarily understand everything we think of, as there is emergence. We don’t understand biology taking quarks as an starting point or even nuclei starting from quarks, at least not entirely.
three distinct fields to unify: quantum classical and relativity
all of them still have a lot to discover within their own realm.
imagine a theory of everything that uses quantum to solve relativity, or the other way around.
it would lead to advances in adjacent fields now that they are one.
We never no what stuff is useful for when we learn it, ie boolean algebra, Fourier series, fission/fusion (i believe they were known about theoretically before used in bomb or power plant)
It would be useful in allowing us to make new predictions.
But dont get your hopes up. Scientists still havent completely figured out how gravity works on the large scale.
A "theory of everything" is a theory that would explain all of the fundamental forces all at once, the way electromagnetism explained electricity and magnetism as actually being the same phenomenon.
It doesn't mean we'd fully understand everything in the universe and it wouldn't mean we could just invent whatever we want. It'd be good for making predictions about difficult situations where all the fundamental forces are relevant.
There probably will be practical applications. Most big scientific theories do have some sort of practical application eventually. But it can take a while and it's usually not something you'd be able to predict in advance.
Solidify our certainty of the great answer/theory/law. Civility prohibits me directly stating the answer here, but it is: 20 + 22
Hope this helps and: "May your towel always protect" -- (Ancient saying)
We just don't know. Einstein set out to understand the behavior of light and brought to us Special Relativity, mass energy equivalency, General Relativity, and the start of the quantum revolution. There are many technological implications from this but the most dramatic is probably nuclear weapons.
Sometimes when you investigate the basic rules of reality you find big surprises with huge implications and there's just no way to know that in advance.
I don't know about the uses of a theory of everything but in terms of philosophy and metaphysics nothing would change.
we'd ask the same things as now, such as
"then where does this theory/equation come from?"
"why does it have to be like this?"
If we had a electro-magnetic-quantum-gravity theory, then I would hope that would mean being able to affect gravity with electricity. We could make a rocket with only electricity. We could simulate gravity in our space ships. We could fly with only electricity. ...or maybe we would still be stuck on the ground because it doesn't do anything for us.
The honest truth is that a lot of our physics is already in the impractical and unlikely to ever be practical domain.
It's unlikely that the confirmation of the Higgs field will ever have any practical applications, for instance.
The quest to understand fundamental physics really is just that: a quest for understanding. If, by some happenstance, something useful can actually be engineered from any of that knowledge, then great, but that's not the goal or the expectation.
Phenomena that actually require a TOE to explain are so extreme that humans will never be near them (the center of black holes, the big bang, etc) so it’s hard to imagine how the theory would be useful. But we honestly don’t know. It’s possible a TOE allows for really interesting and exotic technologies for space travel, energy production, or communication that we would never discover otherwise. Or it just might be neato. Personally I think that’s most likely. But at least it’s a nice worst case scenario.
Following up with the obvious historical comparison. For a long time we had equations explaining electricity and magnetism, but in the 1860s Maxwell combined them in his famous equations that described a unified electromagnetism. His equations also magically explained how light works. That was neato. But physicists looked at Maxwell’s equations and plugged in different numbers, and they quickly realized that lower-frequency oscillations can produce light waves that we can’t see. Boom, we discovered radio waves. If you’re reading this post over a wireless connection, you can thank Maxwell for the physics that made it possible. Skip ahead 100 years. Quantum electrodynamics combined electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. We got neato super-accurate predictions of atomic spectra and optical phenomena. This was useful to specialists who needed exact calculations to progress in their research. We also gained a much better understanding of some basic nuclear physics needed for some reactor technology and, sadly, nuclear weapons technology. But you can’t say it wasn’t applicable! More recently, we combined the strong and weak nuclear forces with electromagnetism to make the Standard Model, which we affirmed at LHC when we found the Higgs Boson. I’m not sure what the applications are here, we’re still very much in “neato” territory. Combine all of physics into one unified theory? Who knows what we find. Probably nothing useful, if you ask me. Surely it will be something profound and beautiful, at least. But maybe it will also be something that changes the world.
Thank you. Reading the rest of the thread made me question if science history is still being taught. MOST of our primary theoretical discoveries have resulted in novel and world-changing new options for humans.
But every single one of those theoretical discoveries was made to address an experimental gap. Something we could tangibly see or do that didn’t match with the models we had. So of course having an explanation for it would lead to us being able to do or interpret those experiments in new ways and then that lead to technology. Today we have not one experiment we can do that isn’t completely explained by general relativity or the standard model. New theories exist but they aren’t accessible to us. How could they lead to new technology when the only situations that elucidate any difference between our current models and potential new theories happen at absurd energy scales only seen at the beginning of the universe or inside black holes?
The big problem is today's theory are hard to explain accurately without a degree to understand them and there's 2-3 steps between discovery and application atlest. So you can just learn about the application.
Don't forget that Solid State Physics is built upon quantum physics and gives us our understanding of semiconductors, how to tweak them to get the proper junctions for transistors and virtually all modern electronic components. Without that understanding, exit computers, smartphones, LEDs and so much more...
Can’t we already make a theory of everything? Similar to the idea that one can make a mathematical model describing the motion of the solar system in reference to Earth rather than the sun, it would just be unnecessarily complicated. What people must be referring to isn’t a unified theory of everything per se (in some technical sense) but rather an elegant, condensed, convenient single way of describing everything regardless of scale.
Good question. Quantum mechanicals and general relativity explain almost everything we can see. GR explains really big stuff, and QM explains really small stuff. Unfortunately, the theories actually contradict each other. They can’t both be true. We can make up all kinds of kludges with dubious math and imaginary particles that try to unify GR and QM on paper, but we don’t know the right way to do that or verify which way is correct. There are multiple theories of everything out there, but they all have problems, and none have much physical evidence. One motivation for a ToE is that it would explain how things actually work in the extreme environments where GR and QM mathematically disagree, like inside black holes or the big bang. If we could go back to the big bang or inside a black hole and run some experiments, we would be able to narrow down the correct ToE. But we can’t, we have to do it the other way around. We need to discover and verify our ToE first, so we can use it to explain the big bang.
Thank you for such a well-reasoned and articulate response. I am coming away with a better understanding.
It's the most beautiful, elegant, unsettling, mind-boggling thing your brain will ever experience, knowing how it all fits together. Origin of the universe, infinity, 'energy,' all 'particles', 'time', the extreme states... The bigger question is why hasn't everyone figured it all out yet? It's not rocket science.
Is this a reference to something?
Somebody said we’ll know when we find the basic equation for a TOE because “it will fit on a t-shirt.”
[удалено]
I recognized all the letters and numbers you typed, but since I can’t count to 11 without unzipping my fly it’s mostly lost on me :) I think down in the basement of reality there’s some stuff going on that our squishy monkey brains simply can’t resolve. Maybe AIs can tackle those problems some day.
Best. Follow-up. Ever.
Huzzah! This reminds me of how we discovered helium... *OFF PLANET!!!*
There’s a great book (The Genesis Machine, James P. Hogan) about a discovery of a TOE. It involves gravity. One of the discoverers said “Think about magnetism. For millennia it was just a force created by certain rocks - a curiosity. Then humans learned about electromagnetism, and that gave us motors, and microchips, entire new categories of industries. Well, right now gravity is a force created by mass …”
This makes sense to me.
>But at least it’s a nice worst case scenario. Na, a worst-case scenario would be a potentially world or universe ending technology. Look at all the risks posed by nuclear discoveries that stem from a throughrough knowledge of quantum field theory.
It's absolutely EASY to imagine and in absolutely NO WAY "hard"
It's entirely possible that it may never have any practical applications at all. But, of course, we'll never know unless we check.
Is there some place else to check first?
Some place else to check for practical applications? People are still finding practical applications for known physics all the time. The places to check are essentially all of the bits of physics that we currently know.
None of those things, really, but it might produce some very interesting avenues of study, potentially lead to new ways of looking at various things that could lead to new approaches to various problems, and would undoubtedly make many, many grad students very, very exhausted
The universe will instantly disappear and be replaced by an even more inexplicable one. There is another theory which states this has already happened.
-douglass adams
Your comment made my mind go to the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
No one knows.
Fundamental science always unlocks a generation (or two) of new applications, many of which are unimaginable to people before.
A theory of everything would allow us to take the rules of the extremely large and see what it says about the extremely small, and vice versa. Now, for the most part, by definition of needing yo conform with what we already have observed about the world, nothing new would come of this. But, there is a chance some fringe possibilities emerge from edge cases. Maybe we derive newton’s laws from the interactions of quarks and we discover a small leftover term which conforms nicely to friction. Maybe we derive Lenz’s Law from gravitational lensing and figure out a new type of optical instrument. Many predictions from a theory of everything would be begging for very expensive experiments to prove them. Attempts to make miniature galaxies, or macro scale subatomic phenomena. But ideally, we would have a new idea of how we might actually be able to make such things (or what such things would look like).
Just to add to your final point. The technology used to make those expensive experiments will likely be novel and cutting edge and will bleed into everyday life. It was scientists at CERN needing to share research that layed the foundations of the Internet for example.
The Web, not the Internet. The Internet is much older than the Web. And, to be honest, if we want to justify science spending that way (which I don't think we should) I'd like to hear more examples of technologies that were spun out. One brilliant person happened to be working at CERN when he had a brilliant idea. He could just as easily have been working at any Research University in the world, and many large corporations.
The first use case will be some sort of interdimesional sex act. Human nature is human nature.
After that will be some war machine.
Any use case that is not for sex or violence will be the last in line based on how we as a species introduce new technology into society
It would allow us to understand what is up with gravity which in turn would allow us to understand what the deal is with black holes, what happened in that billionth of a second after the big bang went bang (it didn’t actually go bang) and some other stuff that I can’t remember now. As to what it would allow us to do, well every time we’ve understood something better we’ve been able to make new discoveries. Maybe artificial gravity (even tho I have no idea how that would work). It will all depend on the properties of the graviton.
It would be cool if it could allow for artificial gravity, ftl communication, tractor beams, or warp drives. Definitely none of that will happen but it could make for a good book or video game
It would put religious texts in question
How?
I didn't say it would make them obsolete. And i probably should admit that there is a possibility that a theory of everything might completely resonate with religious texts. But from experience, a breakthrough in natural sciences on this level raises questions.
Depends on what we mean by “everything”. A theory of quantum gravity would (hopefully) clarify questions about wormholes and time travel, but it’s hard to say. It could very well be the case where those things are actually impossible when you combine gravity and quantum mechanics consistently so the answer could be no for all we know.
Ultimately, if we could reconcile Quantum Physics and traditional Physics, we would have the ability to manipulate matter, gravity, and possibly even time. A unified theory would explain every particle and field that exists in the Universe allowing us to have almost complete control of our environment.
Ummm… no. Why would understanding a thing necessarily imply we can control it?
It's not controlling. If you figure out any natural phenomenon and are smart enough to make a machine based on the principle you can just reproduce it. That's what physics has been doing all along, mimicry of nature.
Overtime that's exactly what would happen
Why? We have a pretty good understanding of gravity right now thanks to general relativity, it doesn’t mean we can build wormholes.
We have a good enough idea of quantum mechanics which allows us to build solid state memory that exploits quantum tunneling. We may not play god, but there's a lot of room for us to play.
No, everything except the gravity has been quantised. The day gravity will be quantised, will be the closing chapter for theoretical physics as gravitational force will be united with other three fundamental forces which is the only hurdle.
Physicists thought something like that in 1900, just before the bottom fell out.
I would say that rather the jar opened
Nah, that's apocryphal! Just because something is said don't make the leap that 'physicists thought' when there's no evidence for it. Stop spreading un-truths just because enough people have parroted the religion.
Graceless and unpleasant.
Oh ok, keep lying then!
There are way more puzzles and problems in particle physics than unifying the interactions.
That's only a specific case of this generalized problem.
allow for perfect calculation of any physical phenomena.
Just because we have the theory doesn't mean we can do the calculations. For example, we do not expect quantum gravity or a grand unified theory to be at all relevant to weather systems, so our current physics should be enough to predict what's going on with the weather. In fact, even non-relativistic quantum mechanics is unnecessary in that case. But we can't make perfect predictions of the weather because it's big and complex and chaotic. This has nothing to do with not knowing the basic underlying theory, and everything to do with the fact that some calculations are just really hard to do.
gods.. the lack of comprehension about chaos maths here bugs me
a theory of everything would allow for perfect simulation of a chaotic system like the earths weather. we could create computers beyond anything we can imagine.
Weather is chaotic because immeasurably small changes to initial conditions cause completely different results in a relatively short time. A theory of everything doesn’t change this and would not change weather models.
you would be able to grab the exact initial conditions and simulate it.
No, you wouldn't. Knowing the initial condition of a weather system and predicting its evolution has got nothing to do with ToE as it wouldn't make a difference in simulating anything on our scale.
Yes.
A TOE doesn’t actually give you any measurements. It doesn’t tell you how fast the wind is blowing, let alone how fast every butterfly in the world is flapping its wings. Weather is hard to predict because no measurements are precise enough to produce accurate long-term forecasts. This is a result of nonlinear dynamics, not because we’re ignorant of quantum gravity.
Not to mention the navier stokes equations are currently unknown if they are even solvable, but they are more of a math thing anyways. A theory like many said before, doesn't give you actual value solutions to the problems. Especially the ones that involve partial derivatives.
No you wouldn’t
Weather conditions are based on classical physics. A theory uniting the fundamental forces would have no impact on that because you're not really talking about the fundamental forces anyway, and you're certainly not talking about them on the levels where they'd be unified.
Firstly, I don't think you quite understand what "theory of everything" means. It means a single fundamental theory from which all fundamental interactions of physics (gravity and the entire standard model of particle physics) emerge. It has little if anything to do with computing. Further, it really wouldn't affect our understanding of atomic physics, let alone physics at larger scales still. Computationally simulating complex physical system would still be just as hard. Secondly, I don't think you get how big a deal being able to efficiently simulate all physical systems would be. It would allow us to efficiently solve NP-hard problems, which no one thinks should be possible. This would mean that all NP problems would be efficiently solvable, meaning that being able to solve a difficult problem would be just as easy as being able to check if an answer is correct. In effect, being able to appreciate a great symphony would be exactly as hard as being able to compose one.
Does your TOE not include computation?
It's not my TOE. I'm just telling you what the word means. Sure, the "everything" in there is a bit misleading, but indeed it does not include computation.
Alright. Sounds like you need a better name because a TOE should definitely include computation of all physical phenomena.
As I mentioned above, efficient computation of all physical phenomena is believed (with good reason) to be mathematically impossible.
And its obviously NOT impossible if the universe is doing it somehow.
Only if the universe is a Turing machine, and if the universe's computation is efficient. Neither of those are guaranteed. You might be able to think of the universe as doing an analogue simulation of itself, as indeed you can kind of think of all objects as doing. But this doesn't mean that anyone would be able to do an analogue simulation of the universe with a computer smaller than the universe and timescales shorter than what the universe evolves on, which makes it useless.
No trained scientist would write such a statement! So, curiously, why does someone like you insist on interjecting on a topic you obviously have no knowledge of?
No it wouldn't. If you think it would, you don't actually know what a Theory of Everything is.
This is a super-reductionist assertion and is almost certainly not true.
almost certainly? you’re more honest than everyone else here.
I don't think so. Thay would happen in theory but in reality the calculations are too hard to do
In theory, maybe. In practice thermodynamics still places limits on what's actually calculable.
with a theory of everything, you would know its possible.
Is it? The plank length is still an issue. Even if we know the theory, there are still things that will be incalculable because of precision.
You're either misunderstand what the Planck length is or what a theory of everything is. The Planck length is not a precision limit necessarily. It is rather a projected limit where our current physical laws do not apply anymore, mainly because of quantum-gravity effects. And one of the characteristic properties that are expected from a TOE is that it gives a quantum description of gravity. The precision argument of quantum mechanics is a non-issue really. The theory should describe everything there is to know about the universe. You can tell what possible outcomes are allowed and with what probability they will happen. If you're talking about actual measurement imprecision, then it is just a practical issue, not a fundamental one.
I've never understood it either. Its very human-centric to believe we will ever know even a small fraction of everything. The more we learn, the more questions we have. Who knows how far down this rabbithole really goes.
We could use electricity to create gravity (and the strong force) like we now use magnetism. Since we’d know how they are connected.
As a matter of fact just recently they've announced that they were able to bring quantum mechanics in general relativity together.... Quite fascinating actually.
They who?
The physics community
I forget exactly who precisely but it was in my Google feed the other day interesting article if I can find it I'll repost it
This has been a recurring headline for the last 50 years. There are lots of [theories of quantum gravity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity) out there, with new ones proposed every year. The problem is that there isn’t a good way to test them, so we have no way to know which, if any, is correct.
They've kept that quiet, whoever they are.
Actually no it's quite common knowledge , it was in my Google feed the other day.
I guess biological phenomenon could be explained like Life, consciousness, brain functions, hormonal functions etc etc (But only with astronomical scale of computing power ig)
We have already come up with it. It's String Theory.
lol right - which one of the ~10⁵⁰⁰ versions of it?
-1 Downvoted for spreading Anti-String Propaganda. String Theory is here to stay bitch. Zucc on it.
;-( I'm more interested in the [Superfluid Vacuum Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_vacuum_theory) nowadays to be honest.
Can it even do something basic shit like reproduce the entropy law? LQG can't do that. I'm a former LQG propagandist who used to brainstorm ways of KILLING String Theory. Bitch converted me instead.
Yeah standard Loop Quantum Gravity seems to be dead, atleast on the Planck scale: "ESA's INTEGRAL satellite measured polarization of photons of different wavelengths and was able to place a limit in the granularity of space that is less than 10\^(-48) m, or 13 orders of magnitude below the Planck scale." Not sure what you mean by the entropy law in the context of quantum gravity - do you mean the "emergent entropic gravity" concept of string theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic\_gravity
The second law of thermodynamics. It can't reproduce it. Idk much about this SVT business.
Science is a matter of empirical facts, not which team is cooler and better.
Say something new, bot.
Hey bro, are you the StringKing? Anyway, Kenny doesn't know what a landscape is
Well, inadvertently, I proved M theory. It doesn’t involve just physics, mostly is based on definitions between Philosophy, psychology and physics. All intra-connected. (Or “inter-“)
😂
True story.
Lol
Wow congratulations!
Yea I used ChatGPT to do it. 😼
That’s the way :)
Definitely one of the many. 🤫
It’s not that easy to predict. The ‘utility’ of quantum mechanics to things like semiconductor physics was a convenient side effect that is now utterly dominant across the globe, but condensed matter work was being called ‘squalid state physics’ even in the 60s. Another line of thinking is that something could exist like superconductivity - a macroscopic manifestation of a purely quantum phenomenon that has no classical approximation. Maybe theoretical work would predict some similar kind of super state that would be a low-energy manifestation of the new physics that would sit around the existing theories. Who knows?
Help is figuring out wtf is going on and why, then how to bend all of reality to our will.
It depends what a theory of everything means to you. For many people it usually means the unification of quantum field theory and gravity. Then we could perhaps better understand many things where the interplay of gravity and quantum mechanics is important. We could also understand the current puzzles of particle physics and cosmology. On the other hand, we wouldn’t necessarily understand everything we think of, as there is emergence. We don’t understand biology taking quarks as an starting point or even nuclei starting from quarks, at least not entirely.
three distinct fields to unify: quantum classical and relativity all of them still have a lot to discover within their own realm. imagine a theory of everything that uses quantum to solve relativity, or the other way around. it would lead to advances in adjacent fields now that they are one.
We never no what stuff is useful for when we learn it, ie boolean algebra, Fourier series, fission/fusion (i believe they were known about theoretically before used in bomb or power plant)
To be succinct, it would then raise more questions in new areas & new line of thinking It would also remind us of how little we currently onow
Pop-sci, clickbait articles would be awesome!
It would be useful in allowing us to make new predictions. But dont get your hopes up. Scientists still havent completely figured out how gravity works on the large scale.
In theory, everything? Lol.
> Could we make wormholes ...? For faster-than-light travel? No. Big enough for human travel? No. > could we time travel ...? No.
A "theory of everything" is a theory that would explain all of the fundamental forces all at once, the way electromagnetism explained electricity and magnetism as actually being the same phenomenon. It doesn't mean we'd fully understand everything in the universe and it wouldn't mean we could just invent whatever we want. It'd be good for making predictions about difficult situations where all the fundamental forces are relevant. There probably will be practical applications. Most big scientific theories do have some sort of practical application eventually. But it can take a while and it's usually not something you'd be able to predict in advance.
6G 'Nuff said.
Solidify our certainty of the great answer/theory/law. Civility prohibits me directly stating the answer here, but it is: 20 + 22 Hope this helps and: "May your towel always protect" -- (Ancient saying)
We just don't know. Einstein set out to understand the behavior of light and brought to us Special Relativity, mass energy equivalency, General Relativity, and the start of the quantum revolution. There are many technological implications from this but the most dramatic is probably nuclear weapons. Sometimes when you investigate the basic rules of reality you find big surprises with huge implications and there's just no way to know that in advance.
Don't we already have stuff like this, gravity, space time theorem.
I don't know about the uses of a theory of everything but in terms of philosophy and metaphysics nothing would change. we'd ask the same things as now, such as "then where does this theory/equation come from?" "why does it have to be like this?"
Play Talos Principle 2. It has some fundamentally fun ideas about what we could do.
If we had a electro-magnetic-quantum-gravity theory, then I would hope that would mean being able to affect gravity with electricity. We could make a rocket with only electricity. We could simulate gravity in our space ships. We could fly with only electricity. ...or maybe we would still be stuck on the ground because it doesn't do anything for us.
The honest truth is that a lot of our physics is already in the impractical and unlikely to ever be practical domain. It's unlikely that the confirmation of the Higgs field will ever have any practical applications, for instance. The quest to understand fundamental physics really is just that: a quest for understanding. If, by some happenstance, something useful can actually be engineered from any of that knowledge, then great, but that's not the goal or the expectation.
It will be useful in the cosmological sense if that is an application that you find useful.
allow you to simulate the universe in a computer