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“Even if we imagine that humanity will ultimately discover a ‘theory of everything’ covering all individual particles and forces, that theory’s explanatory value for the universe as a whole is likely to be marginal,” Dr. Pontzen wrote.

Both sides agree that humans won’t ever find a theory of everything everything.

Still, “the unification of the four fundamental forces, if verified experimentally one day, will be admirable and a great feat—but it will be far from the TOE, the truth of the universe,” says Demetris Nicolaides, a theoretical physicist at Bloomfield College and author of the book In Search of a Theory of Everything: The Philosophy behind Physics.

“There are plenty of open questions that we do not know how to answer, and I think it is more realistic to try to solve them one at a time rather than trying a single theory of everything,” he says.

Physicists have long dreamed of devising a theory of everything — a set of equations that neatly and completely describe how the universe works.