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It would seem to many physicists that the unification of physics within a single paradigmatic theory has been the primary goal in science for only the past few decades, but this would not be true. Unification was the original goal of Einstein and a few other physicists from the 1920s to the 1960s, before quantum theorists began to think in terms of unification. However, both approaches are basically flawed because they are individually incomplete as they now stand. Had either side of the controversy just simplified their worldview and sought commonality between the two, unification would have been accomplished long ago. The point is, literally, that the discrete quantum, continuous relativity, basic physical geometry and classical physics all share one common characteristic – a paradoxical duality between a dimensionless point and an extended length in any dimension – and if the problem of unification is approached from an understanding of how this problem relates to each paradigm all of physics could be unified under a single new theoretical paradigm.

Nearly a half century before Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, the Cambridge geometer William Kingdon Clifford announced that matter might be nothing more than small hills of space curvature and matter in motion no more than variations in that curvature. Clifford assumed the reality of a fourth dimension of space according to the new non-Euclidean geometries. In this respect, Clifford merely followed the common assumption that geometry modeled physical reality, so the new non-Euclidean geometries represented real possibilities that space could be curved rather than Euclidean flat. These ideas were further elaborated in Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences of 1885, partially written and edited by Karl Pearson six years after Clifford's unfortunate death from consumption.

The short abstract of 1870 in which Clifford explained his model of space, "On the Space-Theory of Matter," has long been recognized in studies on general relativity and its history, but Clifford's concepts of space and their relationship to physics have been limited to the role of "anticipation" of Einstein's theory. Within this context, Clifford's model has been branded a "speculation" that was "untenable" during his brief professional career. E. T. Bell has gone so far as to liken Clifford's "brief prophecy" to hitting "the side of a barn at forty yards with a charge of buckshot." Yet these opinions of Clifford's contributions are completely inaccurate within the context of Clifford's time period era as well as when more recent trends in physics are taken into account. Clifford's work should now be regarded as the first significant step toward a unification theory in physics, rather than a simple 'precursor' to general relativity.

Quantum theory emerged the victor of the last Scientific Revolution even though relativity theory had a more progressive view of reality to offer science. As a result, the physical aspects and properties of the gravitational field were never fully explored or exploited and science went through several decades of denial concerning the relevance of general relativity and its physical implications. The only small victory that relativity theory could claim before the 1960s was in cosmology with the expanding universe. The victory was small because the expanding universe was far from the everyday needs of a science more concerned with the atom and the nucleus. Under these circumstances, the theory of relativity had no practical applications in the everyday real world, so its theoretical implications were largely ignored. However, the 1970s brought something of a resurgence of good fortunes and everyday relevance for relativity theory and quantum theorists finally accepted the possibility that unification was the primary goal of physics, albeit a unification based upon the quantum concept of discrete particles rather than the Einsteinian concept of field continuity: According to quantum field theory, the gravity field could be reduced to an exchange of gravitons. But what at first seemed a resurgence of general relativity under the quantum paradigm in the 1970s has slowly evolved into a surge of physical relevance resulting in the emergence of general relativity as a dominating field of research in physics. And the story does not end there. The recent discoveries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy are about to push physics and relativity theory into a Third Scientific Revolution in which a unification with the quantum will be made on relativity's terms. The quantum will not emerge out of the mathematics as a constraint on the continuous field as Einstein had hoped, but it will emerge as a field constant that limits the continuous field as described by general relativity.

While the confirmed existence of Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE) forms a serious and indeed revolutionary problem for physics, they are actually easy to explain if the reality of a fourth macroscopically extended spatial dimension is assumed. The four-dimensionality of space is best portrayed in the case of galactic formation in the early universe, where the DM halo that surrounds spiral galaxies can be modeled. DM is nothing more than spatial curvature in the higher fourth dimension that is not associated with local matter (matter inside the spiral galaxy itself), but is instead the result of an interaction between local matter and the overall curvature of the universe. This model yields a definition of DE that also depends on curvature in the fourth dimension in that it predicts the increasing expansion rate of the universe. The model is strictly geometrical and it does not readily reduce to a simple algebraic formula. Yet the geometry does lead to testable predictions rendering the model falsifiable and a classical algebraic formula that adequately describes the gravitational source of the DM in the geometry of the fourth dimension does emerge upon further consideration of how galaxies evolve by the accretion of material bodies gravitating toward the central core. This formula can also be quantized and relativized and thus leads to a complete unification of physics that once again establish the fundamental nature of relativity.