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Most physicists find it hard to believe that, at rock bottom, our deepest theoretical understanding of the universe will be composed of a mathematically inconsistent patchwork of two powerful yet conflicting explanatory frameworks.

Greene cannot emphasize this point enough. He, and many physicists before him—Einstein being the prime example—simply cannot accept the idea that the universe is framed by incompatible sets of laws. The search for a “grand unified theory” or a “Theory of Everything” is the attempt to resolve this inconsistency. String theorists believe that, “at rock bottom,” only one theory can reveal the real inner workings of the universe.

Immediately before this passage, Greene describes quantum foam, the violent fluctuations that occur in a “rather esoteric realm of the universe.” It is only at extremely short-distance scales that quantum fluctuations occur, but even ultramicroscopic turbulence overturns Einstein’s conception of space as a smooth geometrical surface. General relativity works on the large scale, but not at all on the small scale. The existence of quantum foam fundamentally undermines the central principle of general relativity, which presupposes a smooth fabric of space.

Einstein was one of the first physicists to suspect that there was, as Greene says, “an essential flaw in our understanding of the physical universe.” But though he labored for thirty years to uncover it, Einstein never arrived at a satisfactory one-theory solution. In the years after his relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics emerged, physicists tended to study either large-scale or small-scale phenomena, seldom both. Superstring theory, Greene argues throughout the book, is the first attempt to articulate a mathematically sound theory for both.

For all its advances, however, physicists continue to debate the merit of superstring theory. Many think the inconsistency is not “worth worrying about,” and contentedly study either the laws of quantum mechanics or the laws of general relativity without endeavoring to synthesize the two “conflicting explanatory frameworks.” It is only as the mathematical underpinnings of superstring theory slowly fall into place that more and more conservative physicists are coming to accept it.

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