 Unfortunately, developments in the last few decades have not been kind to hopes of the sort expressed by Einstein. In the eyes of many physicists, string theory is still the most promising candidate “theory of everything” in that it potentially offers a unified account of all known forces of nature, including gravity. (See Susskind 2005 for a popular introduction, Rickles 2014 for a philosopher’s historical account and Dawid 2013 for a recent, favourable, methodological appraisal.) But according to our present understanding of string theory, the theory has an enormous number of lowest energy states, or vacua, which would manifest themselves at the empirical level in terms of radically different effective physical laws and different values of the constants. These would be the laws and constants that we have empirical access to, and so string theory would not come close to uniquely determining the laws and constants in the manner envisaged by Einstein.