Abstract

Twenty years ago, in the physical sciences, the particle physics community was focused on a reductionist “top-down” paradigm whose success was embodied in the standard model of particle physics, in which one wrote down a model Hamiltonian for the so-called elementary particles – quarks and gluons – and pursued its consequences. There was heady talk of arriving at a “Theory of Everything” based on what was regarded as the fundamental approach to understanding the universe in which we live.