Unfortunately it doesn't. Physicists have yet to come up with a way to unify the strong and electroweak forces...Yes, what I meant was that these three/two interactions are at least understood within the same type of model - the particle exchange model. Unlike gravity, which, despite the efforts of such things as string theories, is understood within a spacetime geometry model.
That's what scientists do. If your elegant simple theory doesn't agree with reality, then you go back to the drawing board. unification of the strong force is a case in point. I'm not sure what you're asking. This is what scientists do, isn't it? What's the philosophical question here?Yes, this is indeed what scientists do. They look for universal invariants. This is essentially the same as looking for simplicity and symmetry, because invariance means applying the same description to a large number of observations. I guess my philosophical point (if I can claim to have one at all) is: Could the universe be fundamentally, at its deepest level, messy, complex, ugly, non-symmetrical and impossible to entirely describe using a single model? Or is there an anthropic principle at work which means that any universe capable of containing creatures like us must have, at its heart, elegant symmetrical and universally applicable patterns/laws? Is it possible that General Relativity will never, no matter how much time passes, be unified into a cohesive model with particle physics/Quantum Mechanics/The Standard Model?
Just some idle thoughts, possibly based on ignorance of recent developments.
Greta:
What did you make of the more recent LHC findings where no evidence of supersymmetry was found? Some claim that it's all over for string theory and others claim that the LHC needs more power. That would seemingly look good for proponents of loop quantum gravity although I understand that that theory is less mathematically coherent than string theory, running into relativity problems when scaled up to large objects.To be honest, I don't know without brushing up on at least some of what Loop Quantum Gravity says! I'll do some reading about it and get back to you and try to sound vaguely like I know what I'm talking about!