Dreams of a Nuclear Theory of Everything

Abstract:  A major aspect of the beauty of nuclear physics is the rich variety of behavior found across the nuclear chart, and even within the same nucleus. This has lead to a predominantly phenomenological approach to nuclear theory in which various models address specific regions or behaviors. Many of these models have achieved great success and provided considerable insight into the inner workings of nuclei. However, it is not always easy to connect one model to another or to trace a given behavior back to its origins in the interaction between constituent protons and neutrons. A nuclear theorist\'s dream is a single consistent theory of all nuclei, rigorously connected to the underlying nuclear interaction, which makes predictions with quantified uncertainties. This is a dream that may never be realized, but I will argue that if such a theory were to be realized, it would very likely take the form of a large-scale shell model approach connected to an underlying interaction by a controlled nonperturbative transformation. I will present the current status of one such realization of this approach the valence space in-medium similarity renormalization group and suggest some future directions, both short-term and longer term.