Do you mean the "grand unification theory" or the "theory of everything?" (Or do you mean something entirely different?)
The whole development of philosophy and its branching effect has produced the amount of sciences which operate independently. Through this process of independent research and method, do they achieve maximum productivity. Making it all unified as a single philosophy and method is backwards. One thing I would agree on is an equal requirement for going into any area of science, where as now at least in the UK, institutions ask students to get 4 C's in their high school exams to get into say biology or physiology, where as Astronomy, Engineering, Medicine and such require much higher grades on average. Combined with modern society, this leads to a separation of intelligent people from other required fields. And in the end we end up with people becoming Physiologists, toxicologists and other professions, who really shouldn’t be there. While I agree exams aren’t a show if intelligence, the pass and admittance marks should be the same in all courses, so an even distribution occurs in all areas.
I have to agree---what does ``unification'' mean in this poll? And what does ``possible'' mean? It certainly isn't IMpossible (my Master's Thesis is called ``Grand Unified Theories in Higher Dimensions''), so if that's all that's required I would say I solved it already. To be fair---Georgi solved it in 1979 or something. I was but 26 years late. So clarify your question, and I will answer your poll.
Scientifically speaking there's only 1 unification theory to discuss, thus I didn't think I needed to further explain it. I mean the THEORY OF EVERYTHING!
Agreed, they are different. Even the "theory of everything" might not live up to its name...as it's not clear that a theory that unifies the four forces of nature, it might not explain the existence and structure of space-time itself. Quantum mechanics tends to ignore that question, and it's not clear that the answer would tumble out from a quantum theory of gravity. (Loop Quantum Gravity does include an explanation of existence and struicture of space-time, as I understand it. M-theory seems to contain an hypothesis for how it might have arisen, but I've never seen anything that explains its structure on the same level as Loop Quantum Gravity). So, even within the "theory of everything" there are some gradations between what the term encompasses. Ultimately, I do not think there will ever be a theory that actually "explains everything" since there will always be some axiom or axioms that cannot be independently verified as true or false by the theory itself.
I am not sold on the ``MTheory is not background independant'' argument that Smolin and others make, especially looking at the advances in string field theory. Certainly LQG explains the structure of space-time itself, which is nice, but it doesn't explain the number of dimensions. So LQG has a similar ``background dependance'' problem that string theory does! This is possible. It may take longer than the lifetime of the human race to figure things out.
