Abstract
Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex reality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called reductionism – has a long history of failures. One example is the 200-year-long attempt to describe all physical processes in terms of mechanics, such as James Clerk Maxwell's mechanical models of the electromagnetic field. Another is Hermann Weyl's failed attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravity in a single theory shortly after Einstein had introduced special relativity.