What Are Some of the Leading Candidates for the Theory of Everything?

The universe is not made out of these weird, tiny dots that are hard to get your mind around. Instead, it's made out of these little vibrating strings. So they are quantum objects, right? And the cool thing is that if you look at these strings from really, really far away, they look like particles,. But if you zoom in, all the things we call different particles are just the same string vibrating different ways.