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Unified Theories and Disparate Things

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Margaret Morrison
Margaret Morrison*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

In both philosophical writing on science and scientific practice itself there has been a long standing interest in theories and explanatory frameworks that unify various phenomena. In the history of physics the most successful theories are often those that supposedly show how diverse effects can be understood as aspects of a single underlying principle or cause. For example, Maxwell's electrodynamics unified electromagnetism and optics by providing a theoretical demonstration that light and electromagnetic waves have the same velocity and are manifestations of the same kind of process. More recently in the 1970's Glashow, Weinberg and Salam produced a unified description of both electromagnetic and the weak interactions. This electroweak theory successfully describes electromagnetic interactions as well as data from a variety of electroweak processes including scattering and number of different particle collisions.

Type
Part XII. Unity and Disunity in Physics and Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 365 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Paul Forster for valuable comments. Support of research by the SSHRC is gratefully acknowledged.

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