History of the Theory of Everything

The so-called "Theory of Everything" is a concept in physics that has eluded even the most intelligent scholars and researchers for about a century. It is the “holy grail” of physics; a theory that marries quantum physics to relativity; a perfect model of the universe. This theory would show the most elementary workings of the universe, and would help physicists understand the nature of matter and physical laws. For years, Einstein hoped to unite the contemporary ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics. Yet, he could not unite these theories because he limited his parameters for a unifying equation to the four dimensions that humans consciously experience. The first physicists to truly pursue the theory through additional dimensions were Kaluza and Klein. They noticed that if a fifth dimension were to exist in the universe, there would be fields of angles between all of the existing dimensions. By applying this to Einstein’s geometric model of gravity, Kaluza and Klein noticed that gravity, the force that relativity is concerned with, and electromagnetism, one of the forces that quantum mechanics deals with, showed similar properties. Therefore, by adding a fifth dimension to the universe, the same equations that apply to electromagnetism could also apply to gravity. The first major breakthrough to the discovery of “strings” occurred in the late 1960’s. A scientist named Veneziano was working in a lab in Geneva, Switzerland studying strong nuclear forces when he discovered that his results could be modeled by a purely mathematical equation (the gamma function) derived by a Swiss mathematician 200 years before.