Physicists’ relentless drive to unify their theories—to bring together the laws of the universe and encapsulate them in a single neat mathematical equation—a ‘theory of everything’—often appears to be no more than an obsession with simplicity and compactness, an effort to package up the complexity of all natural phenomena using the minimum number of underlying principles. In fact, it’s subtler than that. Throughout the history of physics, the more we’ve discovered about the workings of nature, the more connections we’ve found between seemingly unconnected forces and particles, and the fewer
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