The Lustrous Dream of Unification

Synthesising and unifying apparently unconnected phenomena have always been the main pursuit of physics. More than any other science, physics likes asking about the fundamentals, and abhors complexity. From as early as classical antiquity Democritus had set the tone. With the atom hypothesis he aimed to account for the properties of matter on the basis of a more general unifying understanding. A similar quest runs through the work of both Aristotle and Plato.