Towards A Theory of Everything
This week’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate saw physicists spar over superstring theory—a theory of everything which hopes to unite Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics.
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The laws that govern large physical bodies and subatomic ones, general relativity and quantum mechanics, respectively, are contradictory. At the Issac Asimov Memorial Debate held this week at the American Museum of Natural History, physicists confronted the problem and discussed the viability of a superstring theory that might unite the two systems currently at odds with each other. “Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, suggested that string theory seems to have stalled, and contrasted the lack of progress of ‘legions’ of string theorists with the seemingly short 10 years it took one man—Einstein—to transition from special relativity to general relativity.”
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