The search for unity is the engine of great physicists.

Unintentionally perhaps, science sometimes manages to unify phenomena which seem to be distant in appearance. Thus, at the beginning of the 1980s in the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratories (CERN) in Geneva, the electromagnetic force, exerting its influence over relatively large distances, was unified with the weak nuclear force, force acting at the heart of the atomic nucleus and responsible, among other things, for beta radioactive decay. This unification is only one of many.

In the field of physics, in the 10th century already at a time when science and faith were unified by the unity of God, Abu Rayhan Al Bairuni had hypothesized that physical phenomena obeyed the same laws either on earth and in the universe. This fundamental affirmation is the basis of the unification of all contemporary physics. Galileo, whose work is based on those of Copernicus, demonstrated in the 17th century, six centuries after Al Bairuni, that the laws of shadow formation were the same on the Earth as well as on the Moon. This observation has enabled physicists to develop the fundamental principle now called “Galileo symmetry”, which specifies the universality of the laws of physics.

In 1680, Isaac Newton asserted that the force that make the apple fall from the hands of an earthly being or from a tree, the one that retains objects such as humans on earth or the one responsible for the movements of the planets around the Sun were the same universal force called “gravitational pull”. The discovery of this force clearly shows that the Earth is linked to other celestial bodies by seamless links and that, by these same links, every great event occurring on a body is present throughout the universe. newton was noticed after publishing the book “Principia Mathemathica

Chronological of the unification of physical theories

Albert Einstein, a physicist who contributed to the development of several unifying ideas, was able to unify mass and energy se well as to integrate, theoretically, time into space, as a fourth dimension. Long before that, Mohammed Iqbal, in his poem Djavid Nama, had said “open your eyes to time and space, both are only one state among the states of the soul, because by the unity of the gaze, atoms become Sun ”.

In the same spirit of unification, the two physicists Michael Farady and André Ampere demonstrated in the 19th century that the electric force and the magnetic force are only two aspects of the same force. This unification allowed humans to develop all the technological advancements of the 19th century. In fact, the electromagnetic technology, combined with the Newtonian mechanics, contributed to putting into practice the concept of mastery and possession of nature as advanced by René Descartes. Colonization, and its lasting consequences till today, is an unfortunate example of this materialistic adventure.

James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest physicists of our time, unifier of optics and electromagnetism, showed that when an electric charge is accelerated, it transmits energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. This unification was first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865, through a real theory on the propagation of light. He was nicknamed, at the time, Maxwell the “theologian”, thanks to the way he established his famous equations which are used today in the theories approaching the infinitely small, on an atomic scale, and the infinitely great, on a universal scale.

The unification of Maxwell is behind all telecommunications technology, as developed throughout the 20th century. And this is the unifying ambition of telecommunications, since they work to make humanity united within this great village that our planet has become. Maxwell’s equations unified the infinitely small and the infinitely large: Nobel laureate Abdu Salam, in collaboration with Steven Weinberg and Glashow Sheldon, implemented a theory that made possible the unification of electromagnetic forces and weak nuclear forces. This unification constitutes one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the 20^th century, because nothing seemed to be able to reconcile these two forces. The first force exerts its influence over great distances while the second force acts at the level of the atomic nucleus. This theory, developed in the 70s, was not verified until 1983, by the two Nobel Prize winners in physics Rubia and Simon Van, at the CERN research laboratory and, later, in American laboratories.

All celestial bodies and all materials are the result of a single event: The Big-Bang.

In the field of astrophysics, significant progress has also been made with the deployment of radio telescopes which explore regions of the electromagnetic spectrum hitherto invisible, and which thus help man to acquire new knowledge about the universe.

The verification of the “Big Bang” model made it possible to develop the feeling of unity, in the sense that everything started from a point following an energy explosion. This confirmation, which makes it possible to unify the infinitely small and the infinitely large, presents some problems for deterministic scientists, as we do not know how to answer the following question: how can a flow of energy that flows aimlessly spread life and consciousness in the world?

The Russian physicist and mathematician Alexandre Friedman, who was interested in the overall structure of the universe, was the first person to claim that the universe is not static. He found that an expanding universe is a solution to Einstein’s equations. While the latter, like Newton, believed in a static universe.

Experimental confirmation was provided by Hubble telescope in 1929, who made allowed the discovery of the phenomenon of galaxies moving away from each other, in perfect agreement with this idea. This discovery is also one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.

The path of unification continues, with the aim to integrate the gravitional force and the strong nuclear force with the other forces already united. Outstanding theories are devised and large particle accelerators, operating at high energy, are being built or planned to move forward on the path of unification. The study of matter and the unification of all fundamental forces remain a preoccupation of major research centers in the United States, Europe and other countries. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded in this context.

In conclusion, we give the quote from Steven Weinberg, 1979 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics:

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy”.

Ahmed Khaouja physicist and telecom engineer.