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Originally Posted by tom mccurdy I have never even heard anything being remotely tied into religon with any search for TOE |
If you are only looking for a TOE where gravity is unified with the other three forces than I can agree with you. The four forces were not known a couple of centuries ago. Yet people have been thinking about a TOE for a really long time. Before the Renaissance there was no clear distinction between science and religion, and therefore the religious contexts we know from the past can be seen as the platforms in which 'everything' was explained. Whether you agree with them or think much of them is not the issue; their platforms are.
Two platforms stick out that are still significant for us today: the platform on which unification was thought possible (a single god), and the platform on which unification was thought to be impossible (multiple gods, like with the Greek; modern science owes them a lot).
I am not interested in finding god or gods, but through these ideas and images the folks long gone already have given us the chance to see what they were thinking. With Akhenaten, for instance, in ancient Egypt, the struggle between an actual unification and considering unification absolute nonsense is delivered to us; showing that our ideas are actually very old ideas (though they contain modern knowledge). Akhenaten believed in a single god, while everybody around him could not go there because reality does not show unification. The Egyptians obeyed Akhenaten because he was the pharaoh, but right after his wife (Nefertiti) came to power much was put in place to persuade her to go back to their multiple god system that made more sense. When she too was dead, Egypt abandoned the idea of a single god again.
Today - not in a religious but in a scientific sense - the idea of unification is very strong. Not many people challange the idea of finding a TOE based on unification (though there is a certain silent large minority to be found). The question that should be placed front and center is whether a TOE can be based on unification or not. By not addressing this first question, we may be talking Santa Claus all the time. A lot about Santa is real...
If you want to see, you can see the TOEs of the past; but if you insist that a TOE can only be about gravity, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force then there is no religious context that can be appealing. Nevertheless, the battle is the same: is there unification or is that impossible!
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The difference between a structure containing unification and a structure without unification hinges on the question if nothing is just plain nothing or if nothing is fundamental. Read In Search of a Cyclops with titilating mathematical evidence on-line (see homepage) to find out if separation belongs to the basics of our universe - or not.