Abstract
Research that aims at identifying new fundamental ideas in physics can greatly profit from a historical approach. The present essay develops this idea by conceptually analyzing the major physical theories created since antiquity and by distilling from them the research trends that have been unmistakably successful. The author's approach to research is based on extrapolating these trends into the future. It is a method that led to a unification of quantum mechanics and relativity based on a new number system structurally located between the complex numbers and the quaternions. Following a brief description of the concrete results obtained so far, the question of what's ultimately possible in physics is addressed by speculatively generalizing the results in question.
Emile - Grgin