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Sam McKee, Tutor and researcher in Philosophy of Science, Manchester Metropolitan University

Theory of everything: how a fear of failure is hampering physicists’ quest for the ultimate answer

Darren Whittingham/Shutterstock

It has been over a century since the boom period of physics exploded with Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others, sending us spinning into a new world of chaos from our previously ordered universe. This brilliant generation of physicists ultimately peeled back the layers of the universe, as well as of the atom, to reveal a world stranger than fiction.

Ever since those earliest days of quantum mechanics, the theory ruling the microworld of atoms and particles, the holy grail of physics has been finding a theory of everything – uniting quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which applies to the universe on large scales.

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