Image Collection/Alamy
WHEN the two most important figures in your life don’t get along, there will always be trouble. Just ask physicists: the two most totemic theories in their field are fundamentally incompatible, and generations of researchers have failed to reconcile them.
Quantum theory describes matter at its smallest scales, tracing three of the four basic forces of nature – the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces – to the subatomic particles that carry them. Einstein’s general relativity, meanwhile, makes sense of the cosmos at its grandest scales, revealing the force of gravity as the product of matter warping space-time.…
