There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is certainly beautiful in the eyes of many physicists. Beautiful enough to pursue even if it’s wrong?
Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything – that it will unite quantum mechanics and gravity and so unify all of physics into one glorious theory.
So surely there exists a deeper set of cogs and wheels – a theory that brings all observable phenomena into the same mechanical framework. That would be a theory of everything, and this is the great hope of string theory.
