The Epistemology of Contemporary Physics: Introduction

This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and modern physics in particular) from an epistemological and interpretative perspective (i.e. versus formal perspective). Another main objective is to investigate and assess the merit of searching for a unified physical theory (the so-called ``theory of everything'') considering the fact that contemporary physics is a collection of theories created and developed by different individuals and groups of scientists in different eras of history reflecting different levels of scientific, philosophical and epistemological development and dealing with largely separate physical phenomena and hence such unification may mean ``stitching together'' an inhomogeneous collection of theoretical structures which may be clumsy (if not impossible) at least from an epistemological viewpoint.