For all his accomplishments, Einstein never lived to see his fondest dream come true. Our century’s best-known physicist spent most of his life searching for a comprehensive set of laws that would explain the behavior of nature on all levels, from quasar to quark. He had, in his twenties, already shown that space and time were intertwined. He then succeeded in showing how gravity is intimately related to the geometry of this curved space-time. But he failed when he tried to weave all aspects of nature--all its forces and fundamental rules--into one seamless cloth. The new science of quantum mechanics simply wouldn’t fit, no matter how hard he, or anyone else, tried.
Today physicists are still stuck in the same quagmire. Nature seems to play by two sets of rules, and they are incompatible. It’s as if physicists were being asked to go bowling with tiddlywinks or to jump-start a ...
