The theme of unity and diversity is developed in four parts. The first part is an examination of the relationship between unity and diversity in terms of the concepts of scale and resolution, using an imaginary journey in a shrinking spaceship from the cosmos to quarks in order to present the concepts in concrete terms. The second part is an examination of the roles of different fields of scholarship - aesthetics and the humanities, ethics, religion, and science - in coping with diversity and in gleaning the unity hidden in diversity. The third part is an examination of a philosophical problem, closely related to unity and diversity, that can be expected to play a central role in later stages of the URAM program: the question of what we mean by the word true. The fourth part is a discussion of the concept of reality from the epistemological viewpoint of the sciences, and how unity and diversity enter into this concept. (ERA citation 08:054057)
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