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String theory is the best candidate we have for a theory of everything. Bend to its rule and the various tangled theories of conventional physics emerge as part of a sublime, higher-dimensional tapestry. It can unify all four of nature’s forces, including the most troublesome of all, gravity. With any luck, it can also tame big bangs and black holes without losing the thread.
There’s just one catch: string theory can’t explain a universe like ours. Its maths can describe gazillions of different possible universes, just not one expanding at an accelerating rate, which is precisely what we see ours doing. To be sure, no one…
