I remember pausing the first time I read those words. They were in an astronomy book or magazine or something, and it initially struck me as a bit conceited that a bit of cosmological discussion could suddenly lay claim to an word that literally referred to everything. Might not musicians or archaeologists or some other unfamiliar professional discipline have already taken the “everything” name and applied it to one of their own big ideas? Perhaps an idea that was pervasive through their own fields but hardly relevant in others? Before I got to understanding what a ToE really embodied or even attempting the cut-down version that the text presented, I conjectured my own theory of the phrase’s meaning and came up with something that I feel, to the non-physicist, applies to everything even more than the Theory of Everything does.
Watching a kid grow up is just baffling especially when you only see them in sporadic seasonal bursts. By the next birthday or Christmas, they may have learned to talk or walk or do algebra right behind your back, and it’s no wonder that there’s usually the question of how much does he or she really know? floating around during their development1. To the curious mind armed with high-speed Internet, inquiry goes hand-in-hand with learning because anything that we could possibly want to know is easily accessible to learn online, and if humankind doesn’t yet know the answer, most of modern research can is summarized instead. This is how children and teenagers of the modern age learn anything, because if you’re willing to look, there are lifetimes worth of knowledge to be learnt on the web.
The physicist’s Theory of Everything does indeed transcend physics in the sense that emergent properties of complex systems can be inferred from fundamental laws, so long as one theory acceptably explains a variety of phenomena that ostensibly can’t be resolved. What is most important about the idea is the fact that not only can everything be explained, but it can be explained in terms of other things no matter how you scale or restrict your questions. In the same sense, how does a person take what he knows of an ocean wave and infer the trickery of a microwave? To the layman, there appear to be all sorts of contradictions in the laymen theories that mom-and-pop pass off as common knowledge, but so long as Piper the Plumber doesn’t need to differentiate between radioactivity and electromagnetic radiation, she has a good working knowledge of the world around him.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein
So, what’s in the world that surrounds the next generation and what do we need to know of it? The Theory of Everything that I expected meant a working knowledge of everything that concerns us today. As you advance both your formal education and your degree at the University of TCP port 80, you join and mend branches on your tree of knowledge while occasionally growing into areas new to you altogether. But in the case of public education, everyone determines for themselves how best to structure their knowledge to grow in the environment of the modern world. It’s refreshing to talk to somebody who has no visible discontinuities in the realm of their mind, whether or not they find interesting the same things you do. It’s a rare thing ever in mankind’s history to have such ease of access to education, that we’d be hard pressed to find a reason not to take advantage of resources in science and culture. For me, this whole idea brings together the argument for why we go to college or learn at all.