What is the significance of the search for the theory of everything?

Essay - 4 Minute Read

“The more the Universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,”  Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg writes in the final chapter of his book, The First Three Minutes. Given that Weinberg himself devoted much of his life towards unifying the universal forces and possibly deriving the Theory of Everything (TOE), this quote seems, at first, to disparage the pursuit for the TOE. However, in truth, Weinberg’s assertion serves as a warning, indicating that past its material and physical importance for the innovations it can foster, the TOE search only truly retains significance on a metaphysical level through stirring provocation.  

To appreciate the significance of the TOE pursuit, we must first grasp the consequential results that the search has enabled thus far. Most recently, the modern quantum computer revolution, where the application of quantum mechanics on the scale of computing bits has enabled processing power of near-fantastical proportions. Intrinsically, the quantum mechanics that these computers utilise were birthed from the pursuit to more precisely understand how the universe operates, or in other words, from the pursuit for the TOE. Thereby, it stands that all scientific revolutions across human history are offsprings of this search for understanding, with the only difference across time being the modern conceptualisation of this understanding as a ‘TOE’. Without devotion towards this pursuit, the principal motivation that drives science forward would dissolve; there would be no field of biology to describe life, no chemistry to explain change, no physics to elucidate reality; science, itself, would be stagnant. 

Fortunately, we have sustained commitment to this pursuit for understanding, and science has evolved. Therefore, as humanity looks to the future, it remains irrefutable that this devotion must be perpetuated to enable further innovation. Currently, there exist around thirty fundamental mathematical constants, from the speed of light to the electron mass, that despite being integral to our present theories, science is unable to explain. Developments from the TOE pursuit would allow for the derivation of these constants, thereby fostering our understanding of all physical processes and contributing to exceptional innovations: from cellular regeneration to quantum vacuum sustainable energy. The pursuit would enable technologies so significantly advanced that they would be indistinguishable from magic.  

But why then, did Weinberg warn humanity? The answer lies in an absurd duality: the more we understand, the less, we must realise, we truly know. As Hawking puts it, “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”. By acknowledging this, we see the impossible elusivity of the TOE and the inherent tragedy in its pursuit. The universe remains enigmatic, immensely unfree, and does not allow perfection., Yet therein lies the significance of it all. To reject this tragedy and audaciously claim that the TOE will be found would be human. To humbly accept this tragedy and yet romantically persist in the TOE search would be human. The TOE pursuit retains its significance by preserving the unequivocal human desire for understanding, by broadening the lens of focus from scientific progress to human nature. Or rather, as Weinberg writes in the penultimate chapter of The First Three Minutes: “the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”  

Bibliography

Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination’, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, London: HarperCollins, 1962, p. 21.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Éditions Gallimard, Oct. 1942.

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. 1988. London, Bantam Books, 2016.

Kaku, Michio. Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything. Doubleday, 2 May 2023.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica . “Physical Constant.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Sept. 2016, www.britannica.com/science/physical-constant. (Accessed: 25 August 2024)

“The Story of Everything,” Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking [TV Mini Series], Dir. Nathan Williams, Discovery Channel, 2010. (Accessed: 25 August 2024)

Weinberg, Steven. First Three Minutes : A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. Basic Books, 2015.