Detalles del libro

This book is about the methods used for unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. The process has characterized much of the history of science and is prominent in contemporary physics; the search for a "theory of everything" involves the same attempt at unification." "Margaret Morrison argues that contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. The mechanisms that facilitate unification are not those that enable us to explain how or why phenomena behave as they do." "A feature of this book is an account of many case studies of theory unification in nineteenth-and-twentieth-century physics and of how evolution by natural selection and Mendelian genetics were unified into what we now term evolutionary genetics." "The book emphasizes the importance of mathematical structures in unification and claims that despite this common feature, theory unification is a multifaceted process for which no general account can be offered.