No one knows why there are four different fundamental forces of nature: gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Then again, there may be only one. In the very first moments after the origin of the Universe, this single force would have ‘split' into the four we now know. Indeed, in the 1970s, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg successfully formulated the electroweak theory, a unified description of the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. In the future, physicists hope to also include the strong nuclear force, in what's known as a grand unified theory, or GUT.
The ultimate dream is a single overarching Theory of Everything that would describe and explain all particles and forces of nature, including gravity. For many years, 10-dimensional…
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BBC Sky at Night United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2024