- published: 06 Aug 2014
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A theory of everything (ToE) or final theory is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.
Many candidate theories of everything have been proposed by theoretical physicists during the twentieth century, but none have been confirmed experimentally. The primary problem in producing a TOE is that general relativity and quantum mechanics are hard to unify. This is one of the unsolved problems in physics.
Initially, the term 'theory of everything' was used with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories. For example, a great-grandfather of Ijon Tichy—a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of the 1960s—was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything". Physicist John Ellis claims to have introduced the term into the technical literature in an article in Nature in 1986. Over time, the term stuck in popularizations of quantum physics to describe a theory that would unify or explain through a single model the theories of all fundamental interactions and of all particles of nature: general relativity for gravitation, and the standard model of elementary particle physics — which includes quantum mechanics — for electromagnetism, the two nuclear interactions, and the known elementary particles.
Michio Kaku (加来 道雄, Kaku Michio?, born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a co-founder of string field theory, a futurist, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times best sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel.
Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake[citation needed]. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.