1. Introduction

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were manufactured by people independently of one another, with no more than vague and arbitrary notions of what, if anything, the picture was supposed to be. What would be the chances of that puzzle ever producing a coherent final construction?

This illustrates the nature of the problem that confronts modern theoretical physics. It is that as our knowledge of nature approaches what we think of as completion, we find that the traditional ways of interpreting observations in the separate and largely independent sectors of research fail to fit one another. This creates problems and paradoxes, all attempts to solve which have created conceptual mayhem.

To impute these problems to nature is a fallacy. They are no more than problems of convention. If these conventions had not become so culturally ingrained, it would be a relatively simple matter to replace them, in hindsight, with more logical and conceptually economical interpretations of observation.

Whilst to revise our knowledge in that radical way is logically feasible, it is culturally inconvenient. There are times, however, in the history of science, when such cultural considerations need to be set aside in the interests of progress. Many think there is such a need right now. This, in particular, is due to the persistent failure to achieve a natural synthesis of the two main sectors of physics, relativity and quantum theory.

POAMS proposes an answer to that need. It demonstrates how more than two millennia of tortuous scientific tradition could have been logically condensed into a single generation of coherent thought devoid of the implications that have led to our current confusions.