Just this week I watched Nova’s overly produced documentary on string theory, The Elegent Universe, thinking that I should finally try to grok the coolest thing in quantum theory since Schr?ger’s Cat and parallel universes. But New Scientist reports the theory is a bit tangled these days:

“We don’t know what we are talking about.” That was Nobel laureate David Gross at the 23rd Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels, Belgium, during his concluding remarks…

Gross – who received a Nobel for his work on the strong nuclear force, bringing physics closer to a theory of everything – has been a strong advocate of string theory, which also aims to explain dark energy. “Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory,” he said. “But now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break.”

To me this seems obvious: until a theory can consider the phenomenon of consciousness, if it can account for it at all, then how the hell can we ascertain everything? Fortunately, I am not alone (see Wikipedia’s quantum mind entry).

As for the likelihood for a theory of everything, I think the mathematician Kurt G? famously summed it up best:

For any consistent formal theory including basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not included in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.