Physical Society Colloquium

The Theory of Everything is a set of equations that, if found, would describe everything that will happen in the Universe until the End of Time. I shall discuss this idea and argue that the Principle of Emergence known from the study of the humbler kinds of matter makes the Theory of Everything, presuming it exits, unknowable as a matter of principle until new experiments far beyond our present technical capabilities are performed. I shall argue that the Universe as seen by us is for all practical purposes a hierarchy of Theories of Things, each emerging from its parent and evolving into its children as the energy scale is lowered. In this sense Emergence has already replaced Reductionism as the central motivating idea in modern physical science.

The fractional quantum Hall effect is important because it shows experimentally that particles carrying an exact fraction of the electron charge and interacting my means of gauge forces not postulated in the underlying equations of motion can arise spontaneously as a collective effect of ordinary electrons obeying the ordinary laws of quantum mechanics. I will review the history of the discovery and eventual explanation of the effect, and then discuss the larger implications for physics.

Note: a PDF version of the poster can be found here