Sam McKee

It has been over a century since the boom period of physics exploded with Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others, sending us spinning into a new world of chaos from our previously ordered universe. This brilliant generation of physicists ultimately peeled back the layers of the universe, as well as of the atom, to reveal a world stranger than fiction. Ever since those earliest days of quantum mechanics, the theory ruling the microworld of atoms and particles, the holy grail of physics has been finding a theory of everything – uniting quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which applies to the universe on large scales. But we still don’t have a tried and tested theory of everything. And I believe a fear of failure is a big part of the problem.