Stephen Hawking's work on black holes and the origin of the universe is arguably the most concrete progress theoretical physicists have made toward reconciling Einstein's gravitation and quantum physics into one final theory of everything.



Physicists have a favorite candidate for such a theory, string theory, but it comes in five different formulations, each covering a restricted range of situations.



A network of mathematical connections, however, links the different string theories into one overarching system, enigmatically called M-theory: perhaps the network is itself the final theory.



In a new book, The Grand Design, Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow argue that the quest to discover a final theory may in fact never lead to a unique set of equations. Every scientific theory, they write, comes with its own model of reality, and it may not make sense to talk of what reality actually is. This essay is based on that book

Hawking, Stephen

Mlodinow, Leonard

English

Caltech Authors - Main

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sad1010Hawk3p.indd   68 8/23/10   6:47:32 PM
October 2010, ScientificAmerican.com 69Illustrations by Barron Storey
p h ys i cs
Stephen Hawking’s work on black holes 
and the origin of the universe is arguably 
the most concrete progress theoretical 
physicists have made toward reconciling 
Einstein’s gravitation and quantum phys-
ics into one final theory of everything.
Physicists have a favorite candidate for 
such a theory, string theory, but it comes 
in five different formulations, each cover-
ing a restricted range of situations. 
A network of mathematical connec-
tions, however, links the different string 
theories into one overarching system, en-
igmatically called M-theory: perhaps the 
network is itself the final theory.
In a new book, The Grand Design, Hawk-
ing and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodi-
now argue that the quest to discover a fi-
nal theory may in fact never lead to a 
unique set of equations. Every scientific 
theory, they write, comes with its own 
model of reality, and it may not make 
sense to talk of what reality actually is. 
This essay is based on that book. 
I n  b r I e f
Stephen Hawking’s work laid the foundation for the modern understanding of black 
holes and the origin of the universe, although, as he has pointed out, he is at least  
as famous for his appearances on The Simpsons and Star Trek: The Next Generation. 
From 1979 to last year, he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University  
of Cambridge, the post once held by Isaac Newton. His books include the classic  
A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than nine million copies. 
Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. 
He has authored seven books—including Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from 
Parallel Lines to Hyperspace and The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our 
Lives—as well as scripts for MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation. 
Physicists have long sought to find one  
final theory that would unify all of physics. 
Instead they may have to settle for several
By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Theory of 
(Elusive) 
The 
Everything 
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70 Scientific American, October 2010
The goldfish is seeing a version of reality that is different from 
ours, but can we be sure it is any less real? For all we know, we, 
too, may spend our entire lives staring out at the world through 
a distorting lens. 
In physics, the question is not academic. Indeed, physicists 
and cosmologists are finding themselves in a similar predica-
ment to the goldfish’s. For decades we have strived to come up 
with an ultimate theory of everything—one complete and con-
sistent set of fundamental laws of nature that explain every as-
pect of reality. It now appears that this quest may yield not a 
single theory but a family of interconnected theories, each de-
scribing its own version of reality, as if it viewed the universe 
through its own fishbowl. 
This notion may be difficult for many people, including some 
working scientists, to accept. Most people believe that there is 
an objective reality out there and that our senses and our sci-
ence directly convey information about the material world. Clas-
sical science is based on the belief that an external world exists 
whose properties are definite and independent of the observer 
who perceives them. In philosophy, that belief is called realism. 
Those who remember Timothy Leary and the 1960s, howev-
er, know of another possibility: one’s concept of reality can de-
pend on the mind of the perceiver. That viewpoint, with various 
subtle differences, goes by names such as antirealism, instru-
mentalism or idealism. According to those doctrines, the world 
we know is constructed by the human mind employing sensory 
data as its raw material and is shaped by the interpretive struc-
ture of our brains. This viewpoint may be hard to accept, but it 
is not difficult to understand. There is no way to remove the ob-
server—us—from our perception of the world. 
The way physics has been going, realism is becoming difficult 
to defend. In classical physics—the physics of Newton that so ac-
curately describes our everyday experience—the interpretation 
of terms such as object and position is for the most part in har-
mony with our commonsense, “realistic” understanding of those 
concepts. As measuring devices, however, we are crude instru-
ments. Physicists have found that everyday objects and the light 
we see them by are made from objects—such as electrons and 
photons—that we do not perceive directly. These objects are gov-
erned not by classical physics but by the laws of quantum theory. 
The reality of quantum theory is a radical departure from 
that of classical physics. In the framework of quantum theory, 
particles have neither definite positions nor definite velocities 
unless and until an observer measures those quantities. In some 
cases, individual objects do not even have an independent exis-
tence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many. Quan-
tum physics also has important implications for our concept of 
the past. In classical physics, the past is 
assumed to exist as a definite series of 
events, but according to quantum phys-
ics, the past, like the future, is indefinite 
and exists only as a spec trum of possi-
bilities. Even the universe as a whole has 
no single past or history. So quantum 
physics implies a different reality than 
that of classical phys ics—even though 
the latter is consistent with our intuition 
and still serves us well when we design 
things such as buildings and bridges.  
These examples bring us to a conclu-
sion that provides an important framework with which to 
interpret modern science. In our view, there is no picture- or 
theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view 
that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical 
theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical 
nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the mod-
el to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it 
is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it 
agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, 
neither one can be considered more real than the other. A per-
son can use whichever model is more convenient in the situa-
tion under consideration. 
Do Not Attempt to ADjust the picture
the idea of alternative realities is a mainstay of today’s popu-
lar culture. For example, in the science-fiction film The Matrix 
the human race is unknowingly living in a simulated virtual re-
ality created by intelligent computers to keep them pacified and 
content while the computers suck their bioelectrical energy 
(whatever that is). How do we know we are not just computer-
generated characters living in a Matrix-like world? If we lived in 
a synthetic, imaginary world, events would not necessarily have 
any logic or consistency or obey any laws. The aliens in control 
might find it more interesting or amusing to see our reactions, 
for example, if everyone in the world suddenly decided that 
chocolate was repulsive or that war was not an option, but that 
has never happened. If the aliens did enforce consistent laws, we 
would have no way to tell that another reality stood behind the 
simulated one. It is easy to call the world the aliens live in the 
“real” one and the computer-generated world a false one. But if— 
like us—the beings in the simulated world could not gaze into 
their universe from the outside, they would have no reason to 
doubt their own pictures of reality. 
The goldfish are in a similar situation. Their view is not the 
same as ours from outside their curved bowl, but they could still 
formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects 
they observe on the outside. For instance, because light bends as 
it travels from air to water, a freely moving object that we would 
observe to move in a straight line would be observed by the 
goldfish to move along a curved path. The goldfish could formu-
late scientific laws from their distorted frame of reference that 
would always hold true and that would enable them to make 
predictions about the future motion of objects outside the bowl. 
Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our 
frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. If the goldfish formu-
lated such a theory, we would have to admit the goldfish’s view 
as a valid picture of reality. 
A few years ago the city council of monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping gold-fish in curved fishbowls. The sponsors of the measure explained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl because the curved sides give the fish a distorted view of reali-ty. Aside from the measure’s significance to 
the poor goldfish, the story raises an interesting philosophical 
question: How do we know that the reality we perceive is true? 
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October 2010, ScientificAmerican.com 71
A famous real-world example of different pictures of 
reality is the contrast between Ptolemy’s Earth-centered 
model of the cosmos and Copernicus’s sun-centered 
model. Although it is not uncommon for people to say 
that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. 
As in the case of our view versus that of the goldfish, 
one can use either picture as a model of the universe, 
because we can explain our observations of the heavens 
by assuming either Earth or the sun to be at rest. De-
spite its role in philosophical debates over the nature of 
our universe, the real advantage of the Copernican sys-
tem is that the equations of motion are much simpler in 
the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.
Model-dependent realism applies not only to scien-
tific models but also to the conscious and subconscious 
mental models we all create to interpret and under-
stand the everyday world. For example, the human brain 
processes crude data from the optic nerve, combining 
input from both eyes, enhancing the resolution and 
filling in gaps such as the one in the retina’s blind spot. 
Moreover, it creates the impression of three-dimen-
sional space from the retina’s two-dimensional data. 
When you see a chair, you have merely used the light 
scattered by the chair to build a mental image or mod-
el of the chair. The brain is so good at model-building 
that if people are fitted with glasses that turn the im-
ages in their eyes upside down, their brains change the 
model so that they again see things the right way up—
hopefully before they try to sit down.
Glimpses of the Deep theory
in the quest to discover the ultimate laws of physics, no 
approach has raised higher hopes—or more controver-
sy—than string theory. String theory was first proposed in the 
1970s as an attempt to unify all the forces of nature into one co-
herent framework and, in particular, to bring the force of gravity 
into the domain of quantum physics. By the early 1990s, howev-
er, physicists discovered that string theory suffers from an awk-
ward issue: there are five different string theories. For those ad-
vocating that string theory was the unique theory of everything, 
this was quite an embarrassment. In the mid-1990s researchers 
started discovering that these different theories—and yet anoth-
er theory called supergravity—actually describe the same phe-
nomena, giving them some hope that they would amount even-
tually to a unified theory. The theories are indeed related by what 
physicists call dualities, which are a kind of math ematical dic-
tionaries for translating concepts back and forth. But, alas, each 
theory is a good description of phenomena only under a certain 
range of conditions—for example, at low energies. None can de-
scribe every aspect of the universe. 
String theorists are now convinced that the five different 
string theories are just different approximations to a more funda-
mental theory called M-theory. (No one seems to know what the 
“M” stands for. It may be “master,” “miracle” or “mystery,” or all 
three.) People are still trying to decipher the nature of  M-theory, 
but it seems that the traditional expectation of a single theory of 
nature may be untenable and that to describe the universe we 
must employ different theories in different situations. Thus, M-
theory is not a theory in the usual sense but a network of theo-
ries. It is a bit like a map. To faithfully represent the entire Earth 
on a flat surface, one has to use a collection of maps, each of which 
covers a limited region. The maps overlap one another, and where 
they do, they show the same landscape. Similarly, the different 
theories in the M-theory family may look very different, but they 
can all be regarded as versions of the same underlying theory, 
and they all predict the same phenomena where they overlap, 
but none works well in all situations. 
Whenever we develop a model of the world and find it to be 
successful, we tend to attribute to the model the quality of real-
ity or absolute truth. But M-theory, like the goldfish example, 
shows that the same physical situation can be modeled in dif-
ferent ways, each employing different fundamental elements and 
concepts. It might be that to describe the universe we have to 
employ different theories in different situations. Each theory 
may have its own version of reality, but according to model- 
dependent realism, that diversity is acceptable, and none of the 
versions can be said to be more real than any other. It is not the 
physicist’s traditional expectation for a theory of nature, nor 
does it correspond to our everyday idea of reality. But it might 
be the way of the universe. 
m o r e  t o  e x p l o r e
The Theory Formerly Known as Strings.  Michael J. Duff in Scientific American, Vol. 278, No. 2, 
pages 64-69; February 1998.
The Illusion of Gravity. Juan Maldacena in Scientific American, Vol. 293, No. 5, pages 56–63; 
November 2005. 
The Grand Design. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam Books, 2010.
CoMMent on tHiS artiCLe www.ScientificAmerican.com/oct2010
sad1010Hawk3p.indd   71 8/27/10   2:15:40 PM


The (Elusive) Theory of Everything

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The (Elusive) Theory of Everything

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