Scientific knowing is usually associated to logical-mathematical structures and is often used in narratology as an example of non-narrative communication. However, interdisciplinary research recently showed how narratives, too, can play a role in the construction of scientific knowledge both at the epistemic and at the socio-cultural level, which in practice can never be neatly separated from each other. These results do not stand in contrast to, but rather complement logical-mathematical analyses of science, allowing to grasp so far neglected aspects of past and present research cultures. I will discuss the role of narrative knowing in theoretical physics using as an example the first widely successful form of theories of everything: the Grand Unified Theories which emerged in the course of the 1970s.

Since the late 1970s physicists have been searching for principles underlying all phenomena, from the nanophysical to the cosmic scale. Candidates for such a "theory of everything" appear to laypersons as coherent mathematical constructs, but in fact the mathematical elements of these theories are fragments bound together by words, diagrams and images which, together with the symbolic formulas, form a multi-medial construct telling a story, for example of how all different interactions are transformed when moving to higher and higher energy scales, to finally unify at the highest, experimentally unreachable energies.