Einstein's Quest to 'Know God's Thoughts' Could Take Millennia
Einstein's Quest to 'Know God's Thoughts' Could Take Millennia
By Don Lincoln 12 hours ago
(Image: © Shutterstock)
In 1925, Einstein went on a walk with a young student named Esther Salaman. As they wandered, he shared his core guiding intellectual principle: "I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are just details."
The phrase "God's thoughts" is a delightfully apt metaphor for the ultimate goal of modern physics, which is to develop a perfect understanding of the laws of nature — what physicists call "a theory of everything," or TOE. Ideally, a TOE would answer all questions, leaving nothing unanswered. Why is the sky blue? Covered. Why does gravity exist? That's covered, too. Stated in a more scientific way, a TOE would ideally explain all phenomena with a single theory, a single building block and a single force. In my opinion, finding a TOE could take hundreds, or even thousands, of years. To understand why, let's take stock. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
We know of two theories that, when taken together, give a good description of the world around us, but both are light-years from being a TOE.
The first is Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity and the behavior of stars, galaxies and the universe on the largest scales. Einstein described gravity as the literal bending of space and time. This idea has been validated many times, most notably with the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016.
More:
https://www.space.com/theory-of-everything-millennia-away.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
