{"id":11938,"date":"2020-08-21T17:58:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-21T21:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?post_type=faq&#038;p=11938"},"modified":"2022-05-22T19:28:03","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T23:28:03","slug":"if-not-string-theory-what-is-your-unified-theory-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"faq","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?faq=if-not-string-theory-what-is-your-unified-theory-of-everything","title":{"rendered":"If not string theory, what is your unified theory of everything?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  The text below out of date.  Recently I have a proposal (quite incomplete) for an approach to unification using twistor geometry.  This proposal is described in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11899\">this blog posting<\/a>, and in detail <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2104.05099\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Older text:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have such a theory, and agree that the lack of good ideas is the strongest argument in favor of the continued pursuit of not very good ones like string theory unification.<\/p>\n<p>In general terms though, I think the lesson of the last forty years is that the Standard Model has turned out to be far better than people have thought.  Given this, it seems like a good idea to take it seriously as a truly fundamental theory, not just a low energy approximation to something different and better.  There is much that we still don&#8217;t understand about the Standard Model, especially outside of perturbation theory.  Much of the physics of QCD remains a mystery.  Outside of perturbation theory, the behavior of the electroweak interactions is not understood, with, as far as I can tell, no completely consistent non-perturbative formulation of the theory.  Working on these problems is not popular because they are very hard.<\/p>\n<p>Personally I&#8217;m fascinated by the amazing deep relationships between fundamental mathematical issues in representation theory and the formalism of gauge fields, spinors and the Dirac operator that make up the SM.  A better understanding of these relationships may very well teach us either something new about mathematics, or something new about physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"template":"","faq_groups":[],"class_list":["post-11938","faq","type-faq","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/faqs\/11938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/faqs"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/faq"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"faq-group","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ffaq_groups&post=11938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}