ABSTRACT
A number of scientists maintain that physics is the most fundamental of the sciences, capable of explaining all the others. And among those who have not voiced this claim many tacitly subscribe to it. Sound scientific knowledge leads, then, to a unity informing our conception of the world, whether it concerns nature, society or human beings. If the notion of the unity of science is to be tenable it must be possible to trace the branches of enquiry back to several first principles from which all other scientific claims and assumptions may be derived. The principles would be the simplest and the most general: simple in the sense that they are not composite and general in the sense that they would encompass and exhaust that subsumed under them. Physicists claim to be able to explain how the universe evolved and how it is that matter is homogeneously distributed in space.
