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Correspondence

Nature 403, 241-242 (20 January 2000) | doi:10.1038/35002186

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There's a place for the theory of everything

John Ellis1

  1. Theoretical Physics Division, European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

As the originator of the term 'Theory of Everything' (TOE) to represent the ambition of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their fundamental interactions (Nature 323, 595; 1986), I was dismayed by the tone of a recent review by my old friend George Ellis of The Quest for Unity (Nature 401, 527; 1999) by Etienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Ray.My definition of a TOE — a theory to "unify all the fundamental interactions" and "explain the number and couplings of all the elementary particles" — is not different from Ellis's "theory unifying all fundamental forces into one", but I take issue with his (and your headline writer's) assertion that this "is ... irrelevant to most physicists".