Nobel laureate in physics Gerard't Hooft named two features that, in his opinion, will be endowed with the theory of everything. The Dutch scientist's point of view is presented in his preprint at arXiv.org.
“It seems obvious that this solution (a consistent unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics - approx." Lenta.ru ") will not find a place for divine intervention or free will, which in itself can be used as a key (to build a theory of everything - approx. "Lenta.ru") ", - the theoretical physicist considers.
The Nobel laureate believes that modern theoretical physics should develop in the direction of building a consistent universal theory based on general relativity and quantum mechanics.
General relativity as a whole is not in conflict with quantum field theory, since both describe phenomena that occur at different length and energy scales. While the former is applicable to cosmological phenomena with huge masses, the latter is suitable for describing processes at the subatomic level.
However, both theories contradict each other on the Planck scale, since quantum corrections must be taken into account in the classical theory. The quantum version of the theory of gravity, obtained in the same ways as the quantum field theory, turns out to be nonrenormalizable, that is, its observable quantities cannot be made finite.
The Nobel Prize in Physics' t Hooft was awarded in 1999 together with Martinus Veltman "for clarifying the quantum structure of electroweak interactions", in fact - for proving the renormalizability of the electroweak sector of the standard model of elementary particle physics.