Why a Theory of Everything Is Not What It Thinks It Is: 1 What Does “Everything” Mean, Exactly?

Disentangling Unification, Exhaustiveness, Closure, and Totality

The phrase “a theory of everything” has an irresistible rhetorical gravity. It gestures toward finality, mastery, and conceptual completeness — the sense that physics might one day say the last word about reality.

But this rhetorical force conceals a problem:

the phrase “everything” does not name a single ambition.

It bundles together several distinct — and crucially non-equivalent — aspirations. Some of these are legitimate, even necessary, for physics. Others are not merely unachievable, but category-mistaken. The difficulty is that they are rarely distinguished, and so critiques and defences of “theory of everything” routinely talk past one another.

This post makes a single cut:

it separates four different ambitions that are silently conflated under the banner of everything.

Only once these are disentangled can we see which ambitions physics may pursue — and which it must refuse.

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1. The Rhetorical Weight of “Everything”

“Everything” functions less as a technical term than as a promise. It suggests:

• no remainder

• no outside

• no further question

In everyday discourse, this is harmless. In ontology, it is dangerous. In physics, it becomes doubly so — because mathematics can simulate closure even where ontology cannot support it.

The mistake is not that physicists seek unification or generality. It is that the word everything silently imports completion, whether or not anyone intends it to.

To see why this matters, we need to prise apart the ambitions compressed into the phrase.

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2. Four Ambitions, Not One

(i) Unification

Unification is the ambition to describe multiple domains of phenomena under a common theoretical structure.

This is entirely legitimate. Indeed, it is one of the defining virtues of modern physics. Unification seeks:

• shared principles

• systematic constraint

• reduction of arbitrary distinctions

Nothing about unification requires finality. A unified theory may be powerful, elegant, and deeply explanatory — while remaining open-ended.

Unification governs relations, not inventories.

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(ii) Exhaustiveness

Exhaustiveness is the ambition for a theory to apply across its entire intended domain.

This too is legitimate. A physical theory should not work only sometimes or only here. Exhaustiveness means:

• no privileged exceptions

• no unexplained pockets

• no ad hoc boundaries

But exhaustiveness concerns scope, not completion. A theory may be exhaustive with respect to a domain without claiming that the domain itself is total or complete.

Exhaustiveness answers the question:

Where does this theory apply?

It does not answer:

Is this all that exists?

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(iii) Closure

Closure is a stronger claim. It suggests that the theoretical structure is finished — that no further principles are required, and no further differentiation is possible.

Here we cross a line.

Closure does not follow from unification or exhaustiveness. It is an ontological surplus: a claim not about how the theory works, but about the end of theory itself.

This is where Gödel enters — not as a technical limit on physics, but as a structural warning:

systems rich enough to do serious work cannot close themselves without contradiction or triviality.

Closure is not an achievement.

It is a refusal of further articulation.

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(iv) Totality

Totality is the strongest — and most problematic — ambition of all.

Totality claims that the theory does not merely unify or exhaust a domain, but that it somehow includes all that exists, without remainder, perspective, or cut.

This is not a scientific claim. It is not even a metaphysical one, properly speaking.

It is a category mistake.

Totality attempts to treat being as if it were an inventory rather than a structure of possible instantiation. It assumes that existence could be gathered into a single, perspective-free “all”, as though ontology could be completed in the way a list can be completed.

But ontology is not a list.

And “everything” is not an object.

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3. Why Physics Needs the First Two — and Must Refuse the Last Two

Physics legitimately aims at:

• unification of principles

• exhaustiveness of application

It does not need:

• closure of theoretical possibility

• totality of existence

Indeed, the latter two actively undermine the former. Closure halts refinement. Totality dissolves discrimination. A theory that claims nothing lies outside it cannot meaningfully explain why anything is the way it is.

A theory of everything, understood as totality, would be a theory that cannot be wrong — and therefore cannot explain.

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4. The Quiet Slippage

The danger is not that physicists explicitly endorse totality. Few do.

The danger is the quiet slippage:

• from unification to closure

• from exhaustiveness to totality

• from mathematical completeness to ontological completion

Once this slippage occurs, the ambition of physics subtly changes. Explanation is replaced by proclamation. Constraint gives way to inclusion. And the discipline of perspective is traded for a fantasy of a view from nowhere.

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5. What Comes Next

In the posts that follow, we will show:

• why unification does not imply completion

• how relativity already undermines totality from within physics

• why “everything exists” explains nothing

• and how a theory of everything can be reconceived as a theory of constraints on instantiation, not a finished universe

For now, one thing is clear:

The problem with “theory of everything” is not that it aims too high —

it is that it does not know which kind of height it is aiming for.

Completion is not the goal of physics.

And totality is not an ontological achievement.

It is something ontology must learn to refuse.