It has become fashionable lately to speculate that science-specifically, physics, the king of sciences-may be coming to an end. Some physicists believe that they are on the brink of finding a “theory of everything,” or TOE, that will describe all of the forces and particles of nature in one equation that could be written on a T-shirt. As ever, the popularisations are trailing some way behind what the scientists themselves are saying. As long ago as 1980, Stephen Hawking gave a lecture entitled “Is the End of Theoretical Physics in Sight?”, in which he suggested that the TOE might be no more than 10 or 20 years away. Since then, he has made simi-lar speculations, but the TOE always remains 10 or 20 years into the future, whenever the talk is given.
But what would such a TOE look like, if it were ever attained? Today, we know of four fundamental forces which rule the universe. Gravity and electromagnetism are familiar in the everyday world, and there are two forces, the strong and weak interactions, that operate only on a sub-atomic scale. The particles that interact with the aid of these forces-the entire material world-come in just two families, the quarks (which make up things such as protons and neutrons in atoms, and therefore the bulk of everyday matter) and the leptons (which include the electrons that orbit in the outer regions of atoms). And that is it. Already scientists have found a way to combine their description of the electromagnetic force and the weak force in one package, called the electroweak interaction. And there is indeed a realistic hope of finding a TOE to describe all four forces in one equation.
But would that be the end of physics? There are lessons to be drawn from history. A hundred years ago, physicists knew about electromagnetism and gravity, but had no inkling that the other two forces existed. They were just coming to terms with the idea of atoms, but it was only in 1897 that JJ Thomson first found evidence that the electron was a piece that could be chipped off an atom (the evidence was not compelling until 1899), so that atoms were not indivisible. After that discovery at the end of the 19th century, there was a widespread belief that physics was at an end. Then came the theory of relativity, quantum physics and the discovery of subatomic particles.
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