A new Boson?

[Alex K]

I think Einstein's unified field theory is hopeless, because he was lagging behind the current developments in fundamental physics already in his day (1950s), and instead kept sticking to his principles what the world *should* be like according to his tastes (as an example, he kept insisting that the universe should be static for purely aesthetic reasons, despite that not really making sense if one thinks about it, and only reluctantly changed is position). By now, his ideas about unification are so out of date that no one seriously considers them. Imagine: he barely lived to see Quantum Electrodynamics properly developed (published 6 years before his death), and never knew about the nature of the weak force which was resolved in the 80s (and to a certain extent, in 2012, with the topic of this very thread possibly changing the story again), let alone the strong force. His picture of the world was much too simple. A similar fate happened to Heisenberg who tried to build a unified field theory for protons and electrons, which appears nonsensical from a modern perspective because protons are not fundamental objects. Some of the stuff Einstein did with other people (Kaluza-Klein theory in higher dimensions) has reappeared in a much more general form in Superstring Theory. The trouble with finding a unified theory, be it fields or strings or whatever, is that if nothing very surprising happens to exist which completely changes the game (such as extra space dimensions), the phenomena of quantum gravity are not really observable in the lab, and only very indirectly in big bang cosmology. So, which is the right theory has been hard to determine for lack of good data, and speculation has run rampant in all kinds of directions without good empirical guidance. That is another thing that might not be resolved any time soon. It really depends on how kind nature is to us...