In the beginning of 5728, the staunch Jewish atheist Steven Weinberg proposed a theory that describes two forces of Nature, Electromagnetism and the Weak Interaction, in a unified way. At first, Weinberg's theory seemed artificial and replete with technical problems, until four years later Martinus Veltman and his student Gerard 't Hooft proved a cosmic result: Weinberg's theory is "renormalizable."
The background of the discovery is that the mathematical framework of high-energy physics (quantum field theory) shows a general tension between fundamental physical constraints such as causality, and the computability of the theory's predictions. Between Weinberg and Veltman, it was established that there is a mathematical framework, involving "gauge" symmetries, that "allows" a world like ours to exist. The philosophical corollary is that the physical world can only exist because of hidden mathematical symmetries.
The Weinberg-Veltman-'t Hooft theory was confirmed by experiment, and established definitively the centrality of the notion of gauge symmetry, and that of symmetry breaking. The revolution led to another. From understanding how a world like ours can exist, we came to understand much better how our world came into existence, some 13 billion years ago.
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