Ever since the dawn of civilization people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world. And the most important, mysterious question of all time is how did all things begin? What is the origin of our universe? 

Ancient humans in different cultures wrote many myths about the origin of the universe based on their rich and wonderful imagination. Then came science, Astrophysics, the logical side of the story, the steady state model, then the Big Bang Theory came into the picture, which is probably the best answer we have so far, but still, not enough.

There are two branches in the tree of physics developed in the early twentieth century. One is quantum mechanics, and one is general relativity. According to the theory of general relativity, dark energy pushes the boundary of our universe further and further by stretching the fabric of spacetime. Since our universe is expanding forward in time, reversing time, it shrinks back in, which gives us the desired Big Bang solution, a singularity. But unfortunately it does not work. General relativity describes the curvature of spacetime in a smooth geometry, but spacetime in the small Quantum scale is entangled, fluctuating randomly in a discontinuous geometry. The universe is big, but once upon a time, it was small, so small that the quantum effect came into the picture, so the prediction of general relativity fails. 

The nature of our universe is elegantly complex but surprisingly composed of only a handful of fundamental constants with few principles of physics. Every single interaction between objects can be categorized into four fundamental forces: Gravity, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force. In classical physics, each of the four forces have their own laws and characterizations. But just in the recent decades, physicists have discovered that three of the four forces, except gravity, were once decomposed from a single force at the very early stage of the universe because of the tremendously high temperature, like a phase shift from water to vapor. Physicists believe that Gravity should also join in the party of unification, but unfortunately we don't have the answer yet. We don’t know the equation of force of our universe in its early stage, so we don’t know how the universe behaved at that time.

We now have successfully shifted the question from ---- What happened at the beginning of the universe? To the questions ---- How to reconcile the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics to build a framework to unite all the forces in nature? In answering this question, we will not only know how the universe began but also how it ends. 

A theory of everything is ever nearer. Imagine, one simple, elegant, beautiful equation that tells the story of the entire fate of our universe.