A central question in ancient Greek philosophy was the problem of the One and the Many. It is a question that has echoed across Western culture and is still with us today in contemporary physics. Should we see the world as a coherent whole or a multitude of separate parts? The puzzle is that we need both the whole and the parts, but an explanation of the relationship between them has proved problematic and perhaps unknowable. In contemporary physics, the parts are the teaming world of particle physics, and these should make up the cosmological world of the universe as a whole and the overall framework of Einsteinian space-time. But we haven't been able to combine the two coherently.
Should we recognise that looking at the universe from the small scale and the large, is always going to be incompatible? Does it mean a theory of everything is an illusion and the attempt to combine quantum mechanics and Einstein a forlorn project? Or is the parallel with the ancient Greek puzzle accidental and the current challenge one that might be overcome?
