Early Work
The first attempts to provide a unified theory were by G. Mie in 1912 and Ernst Reichenbacher in 1916. However, these theories were unsatisfactory, as they did not incorporate general relativity – in the former case, because general relativity had yet to be formulated. These efforts, along with those of Forster, involved making the metric tensor (which had previously been assumed to be symmetric and real-valued) into an asymmetric and/or complex-valued tensor, and they also attempted to create a field theory for matter as well.
Read more about this topic: Classical Unified Field Theories
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