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I think there's an unexamined assumption that a "theory of everything" must exist.

As it stands now we don't have a working theory of the turbulent motion of fluids. We don't know why hurricanes and eddies happen, but we're investing brainpower in understanding particle physics in a neighborhood of the big bang? Get out of here.

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It must exist because we still haven't reconciled quantum mechanics with relativity. That matters if we ever want to understand what happens inside black holes, or the moment of the big bang itself. As of right now, our physics literally breaks, it stops working. If a black hole was a computer program, we'd get a critical systems fault the moment it began running.

“Theory of everything” is a bit of a misnomer. Rather, the goal is to understand the fundamental laws of nature. That doesn’t mean all problems about complex, composite systems like turbulence will be solved. Think about it like finding the underlying simple rule of a cellular automaton, as opposed to all the phenomena such a rule gives rise to. Sometimes the fundamental is more simple than what emerges from it.

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