Unified Field Theory - Current Status

Current Status

Gravity has yet to be successfully included in a theory of everything. Simply trying to combine the graviton with the strong and electroweak interactions runs into fundamental difficulties since the resulting theory is not renormalizable. Theoretical physicists have not yet formulated a widely accepted, consistent theory that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics. The incompatibility of the two theories remains an outstanding problem in the field of physics. Some theoretical physicists currently believe that a quantum theory of general relativity may require frameworks other than field theory itself, such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. Some models in string theory that are promising by way of realizing our familiar standard model are the perturbative heterotic string models, 11-dimensional M-theory, Singular geometries (e.g. orbifold and orientifold), D-branes and other branes, flux compactification and warped geometry, non-perturbative type IIB superstring solutions (F-theory).

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