On the risk of premature unification

Abstract

Although the wish to unify theories into something more fundamental is omnipresent and compelling, nonetheless, in a sense, theories must first be unifiable. The reasons for the success of the unification of electricity and magnetism into a theory of electromagnetism are contrasted with the reasons for the failure of the Einstein-Maxwell unification of gravitation and electromagnetism and the attempts of quantum gravity to unify Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum field theory. The difference between a unification of two theories, a concatenation of them, and the existence of a formal analogy between them is also discussed.