“It’s amazing all this is happening when Lauren is out of town.”
This has already been answered pretty well above, but I’ll give my answer anyway. Here’s the thing: Just because a so-called “theory of everything” explains the fundamental building blocks of everything, it doesn’t mean it actually lets you understand everything. I mean, societies are composed of individual human beings, and those human beings are made of of organic molecules (DNA, proteins, lipids, etc.), and those molecules are made of atoms which are composed of electrons, protons and neutrons, the latter two of which are made up of quarks and all of which might be made of strings. But even if we understand strings (or whatever), do you really think this will automatically tell us everything about nuclear physics, everything about atomic physics, everything about organic chemistry, everything about molecular biology, everything about human physiology, and everything about sociology? Of course not.
As P.W. Anderson put it, “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.” I recommend his article on the subject, available here in .pdf format:
Because this discussion has gotten much too serious, I feel the need to point folks at the Large Hadron Rap, by a whole bunch of grad students that worked at CERN while the LHC was being built:
Verse 3 or 4 actually has some explanation of the Higgs.
Enjoy!
“You know better than that, Adrian. Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends.” - Dr. Manhattan, who knew from particles