Don Lincoln: prediction

Transcript context

…Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s a pretty strong statement, right? That’s a pretty strong statement saying we’re fifty to a hundred years out from finding a theory of everything. It took two hundred years to go from unifying gravity to unifying electromagnetism. It took a hundred years to go from unifying electromagnetism to unifying the electroweak force. Now, you could say, well, gee, that went from two hundred to a hundred, so it’s getting faster. But it’s also getting harder because the unification scale is of order ten to the fifteen, which—we can do the math. That’s a quadrillion times higher than the highest energy accelerator we can build today. And it was one thing to, you know, we are reaching diminishing returns. We get something like a factor of seven increase in particle accelerator energy every twenty years. And so we have to get to a quadrillion times. Now, if you really did believe a factor of seven every twenty years, then that’s– we’re talking like five hundred years. But you know, this is like Moore’s law, that it doesn’t continue forever. We’re not going to every twenty years get another factor of seven. So yes, I think it’s a very long time. That’s my prediction. You know, some people are far more optimistic, and we can talk about that. We should also, I should mention that I guess your intuition behind that is not just the part where you come up with a theory that’s beautiful and seems to be internally consistent, but you have to have a theory that’s making falsifiable, testable predictions.…

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