Let’s take a closer look at the theory of everything, which is one of humanity’s greatest efforts to fully understand the universe.
theory of everything, no “why?” about the universe. A study arising from the effort to create a single theory that can answer the question. It must be admitted that the name is not very creative.
What happens if you rewind the video while watching the inflation process of a balloon? The balloon becomes smaller and smaller and eventually turns into a tiny, shapeless object like a fruit whose pulp has come out. Likewise, what if you could watch a video of the state of the expanding universe and rewind the video? Galaxies would get closer and closer to each other, the environment would become more and more chaotic, and at the same time, everything would be pushed closer together, and eventually everything would be stuck in a single point. The key lies in this one point.
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There are four fundamental forces that we know control the universe today:
1- electromagnetic force
2- weak nuclear force
3- strong nuclear force
4- gravitational force
These can now be examined as separate forces, but when we rewind the video of the formation of the universe, a fact emerges: these forces must have been combined with each other at that moment of formation, when everything came together at a single point.
In fact, this perspective solved some problems in the world of science even before the theory of everything thing came into play. For example, let’s look at the electromagnetic force, which I listed as the fundamental force above. All physical phenomena called electricity, light and magnetism were already known in the scientific world. It was James Clerk Maxwell’s chance to gather these under the name of electromagnetism and show them as a single force. In other words, we have known for a while that some physical phenomena that we thought were different from each other might actually be different reflections of the same thing at some point. The same was true, for example, of quantum physics, which combined atomic theory with classical physics. There are other examples, but I won’t go into further detail. I will add a visual below regarding this.
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Let’s go back to the incident I said above. I wonder, just as we can reduce electricity, light and magnetism to a single phenomenon under the name of electromagnetism, can we also reduce the 4 fundamental forces to a single phenomenon – as in the situation we estimate to have occurred when the universe was formed? can we combine these?
In fact, physicists had already combined some physical phenomena with each other through studies carried out over time – as I mentioned above. As a result, the theory of the electroweak force emerged, which brought together the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force under a single roof. The question of how to combine this with the third fundamental force, the strong nuclear force, gave birth to the grand unified theory.
The last remaining force was the gravitational force. The math was pretty tame in terms of somehow reconciling the first 3 powers, but there was trouble with the 4th power. Albert Einstein’s studies told us that the universe consists of a smooth texture. However, when quantum mechanics was born, the opposite result emerged: the fabric of the universe was a discrete structure. It wasn’t smooth. Both of these were great crowing roosters in their own wasteland, but when tried to put them together, they produced meaningless results because the smooth and curved space-time fabric did not work correctly in quantum scale situations.
“What if it doesn’t work? After all, they work properly when they are not together!”
In some cases, yes, we can explain things without having to bring the two together, but what about the singularity within a black hole? What about the exact moment when the big bang appeared?
We cannot answer some questions that are important for cosmology. The weakest force among the 4 fundamental forces is the gravitational force, but for example, in the case of a black hole, the gravitational force creates an extremely strong field and the laws of physics as we know them become ineffective here. We need more than we have to explain exactly what is happening in such regions.
Of course, it won’t end here. Even if we can explain the mechanism behind the formation of the big bang, we will still need more about some of the remaining features of the universe. such as dark matter, dark energy, multiverse model…