{"id":95720,"date":"2019-09-02T17:44:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T00:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/stephen-hawking-had-pinned-his-hopes-on-m-theory-to-fully-explain-the-universe-heres-what-it-is"},"modified":"2019-09-02T17:44:02","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T00:44:02","slug":"stephen-hawking-had-pinned-his-hopes-on-m-theory-to-fully-explain-the-universe-heres-what-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/stephen-hawking-had-pinned-his-hopes-on-m-theory-to-fully-explain-the-universe-heres-what-it-is","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking had pinned his hopes on \u2018M-theory\u2019 to fully explain the universe\u2014here\u2019s what it is"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something<\/a> on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical physics, Stephen Hawking, may have passed away with similar thoughts. We know Hawking thought something called \u201cM-theory\u201d is our best bet for a complete theory of the universe. But what is it?<\/p>\n

Since the formulation of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity<\/a> in 1915, every theoretical physicist has been dreaming of reconciling our understanding of the infinitely small world of atoms and particles with that of the infinitely large scale of the cosmos. While the latter is effectively described by Einstein\u2019s equations, the former is predicted with extraordinary accuracy by the so-called Standard Model of fundamental interactions.<\/p>\n

Our current understanding is that the interaction between physical objects is described by four fundamental forces<\/a>. Two of them \u2013 gravity and electromagnetism \u2013 are relevant for us on a macroscopic level, we deal with them in our everyday life. The other two, dubbed strong and weak interactions, act on a very small scale and become relevant only when dealing with subatomic processes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical physics, Stephen Hawking, may have passed away with similar thoughts. We know Hawking thought something called [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}