WHAT IF...WE FOUND A THEORY OF EVERYTHING?

摘要

Let's not kid ourselves: everything we think we know now is just an approximation to something we haven't yet found out. That is the frustrating, exhilarating lesson history teaches us about fundamental theories of nature. Take Newton's universal law of gravity. It did sterling service describing falling apples and orbiting planets for over two centuries, but eventually gave way to a "righter" theory -Einstein's general relativity. Ditto the solidly intuitive outlines of classical mechanics: dig down to the level of subatomic particles, and we find them fogged in a haze of quantum uncertainty.