WHAT if there were a perfect board game? Some combination of boards and pieces and rules – maybe with a few yet-to-be invented additions – that would create an unsurpassable experience, the only board game anyone ever wants to play?
That’s how physicists feel about the theory of everything, a putative “final” framework that would explain all reality in one fell swoop. This is the ultimate goal for physics, with Stephen Hawking once memorably writing that to find it would be to know “the mind of God”.
It is an audacious mission, so much so that some people consider it quixotic. At…
