The ab initio way: different levels of theory.

[royh24]

If one is to accept the general trend in science: that of reductionism, then it would be easy to explain that the theory that lies under quantum mechanics is the “Fundamental Theory” of Nature (accounting for the quantization of gravity), and thus this would be the most ab initio theory there could be. However, physics has proved to be even more entertaining than this; not only is reductionism questionable, but not fundamental according to the theory of complex systems, where emergent properties arise among different interactions in the system. That is why we need to define what I like to call different levels of theory. Classical Mechanics has its own ab initio methods, different from those of Quantum Mechanics, or say, Electromagnetism. Nonetheless, there could be one unique way to incorporate all of these under a Theory of Everything, and that would not imply that there is a fundamental ab initio way.

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