Unification ideas other than string theory?

String/M theory was the first popular one on the block to suggest a means for coming up with the grand unification theory (GUT) pulling the four fundamental forces under the aegis of a single set of equations. Since its inception, several others have come along as well. Quantum gravity is one of those.

But, see, the problem with all the potential GUTs is that they deal with quanta and all the uncertainties they inherently have. And these little guys are very very very tiny, way tinier than our current or future ability to observe even one of them and, thus, at least partially validate one of the quantum theories.

And, of course, as you probably know, since none of these so-called theories has been falsifiably tested, none is a legitimate theory. They are all at best hypotheses.

Tests at the Large Hadron Collider have begun. There are reams of data to pour over. If they find evidence of the Higgs Boson and/or graviton, both predicted by string/M theory, that will go a long way into making a believer out of me. But meanwhile...

Eleven dimensions? Give me a break. If one believes in Okkam's Razor, four dimensions are the simplest answer and the right answer for our universe. Oh, yes, that's yet another little ditty, the extra dimensions. That, too, has yet to be validated. So the means to come up with the yet to be validate Higgs and graviton is itself yet to be validated. In baseball parlance, that's two strikes.

Then there're the equations themselves. They are approximations, perturbation equations. While perturbation has been shown useable at the macro level, like doing gravity forces analysis, there is no evidence that it's workable at the extreme micro (quantum) level. As we learn in the construction business (my summer jobs), the devil is in the details; and it's those details that are missing in string/M theory.

There are indeed other theories... all of them are SWAGs. One, for example, posits that space itself is granular. It's grains are minimum sized around 10^-35 m, which you may recognize as one Planck Length.

On top of the grainy nature of space, it might also be polarized according to another theory called Horava Gravity. The spin off of this speculation is that we can do away with both dark energy and dark matter, and still explain why galaxies don't rip apart under their own centrifugal forces and why the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.

There incredibly is not any debate approximately no count if string concept is conceivable: all of us is common with it is not. Falsifiability is the very essence of a medical concept. That, needless to say, does not mean that string concept is valueless, purely that it hasn't made the bounce from phiosophy to technology yet. GR and QM are thoroughly incommensurable on the essential point. GR treats time precisely an identical because of the fact the spacial coordinates--- it would achieve this, because of the fact one individual's time is yet another guy or woman's area in that concept. QM treats time in a particular way, distinctive from the spatial coordinates. the two theories hence can not be magnificent. An electron "jumps," even regardless of the undeniable fact that it does so in accordance to conventional rules of physics (QM). yet QM says time is one ingredient and GR says time is yet another. there's no bridging that hollow in need of a oftentimes used concept of each little thing, this is what string concept claims to be.

einsteingravity.com