The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Introduction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a series exploring the epistemology of modern physics, focusing on understanding its theories and the challenges of unifying diverse physical frameworks from an interpretative perspective.

Contribution

It offers an initial epistemological analysis of contemporary physics and critically examines the feasibility of a unified physical theory considering historical and conceptual diversity.

Findings

Highlights the complexity of unifying diverse physical theories

Emphasizes the importance of interpretative approaches in understanding physics

Questions the epistemological viability of a theory of everything

Abstract

This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and modern physics in particular) from an epistemological and interpretative perspective (i.e. versus formal perspective). Another main objective is to investigate and assess the merit of searching for a unified physical theory (the so-called ``theory of everything'') considering the fact that contemporary physics is a collection of theories created and developed by different individuals and groups of scientists in different eras of history reflecting different levels of scientific, philosophical and epistemological development and dealing with largely separate physical phenomena and hence such unification may mean ``stitching together'' an inhomogeneous collection of theoretical structures which may be clumsy (if not impossible) at least from an epistemological viewpoint.