It is only the optimists who achieve anything in this world —theorist John Ellis once read this adage on a candy wrapper. It stuck with him, so much so that in 1986 he referenced this candy-wrapper wisdom in his Nature article “The superstring: theory of everything, or of nothing?”

“I was pretty upbeat,” Ellis says. “I was pretty positive about it.”

According to Ellis, ‘theory of everything’ is a rather tongue-in-cheek term for an encompassing framework that links together all physical phenomena on a fundamental level. The idea went viral, both scientifically and culturally. Numerous authors, philosophers and scientific influencers jumped on the bandwagon, including the makers of a 2014 biopic about Stephen Hawking.