Are We There Yet? The Search for a Theory of Everything

We live in exciting times. The frontiers of physics have been pushed to unprecedented horizons. The Holy Grail of fundamental physics research today is to find and describe a theory that explains, at least in principle, all physical phenomena, which in turns explains chemistry, biology and other material sciences. This, however, is not without controversy. The current candidate for such a theory is known as string or superstring theory. It suffers from the problem of being a purely mathematical science with no experimental backing and belief in it has been criticized as bordering on "faith" as