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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Probably

everyone listening has heard the phrase a theory of everything, right? The origins of this phrase

are actually a little bit murky. It's not such a weird collection of words that it hadn't appeared

in the literature a long time ago. People have talked about the idea of a theory of everything,

but the context in which we currently usually talk about it is either super string theory

in physics or some other competitor to super string theory. As far as I can tell,

that coinage came from John Ellis, who was a theorist at CERN. He wrote a little article in the

early days of the super string revolution, 1980s, called the super string, a theory of everything

or of nothing. So it wasn't completely triumphant, right? He was actually talking about whether or

not this possibly could be a theory of everything. It was immediately pointed out by non-physicists

and even some physicists that the idea of a theory of everything in this sense is actually

very, very restricted to a certain reductionistic way of looking at the fundamental constituents of

nature, the idea being that nevertheless, those fundamental constituents make up everything else.

But there's no sense in which that idea of a theory of everything would be the final theory

that we ever need in science, right? Because we do have higher level emergent things. We have

biological organisms, we have economies and societies, and we have people and psychology,

all this stuff, right? That is certainly not covered, not to mention easy questions about

...