  In these lectures I propose to push Einstein's principle of coordinate
independence to the extreme in order to restrict the possible form of
fundamental equations of motion in physics. I start from nearly tautological
system theoretic axioms. They provide a minimal amount of a priori structure
which is thought to be characteristic of human thinking in general. It is shown
how formal discretizations of Maxwell and Yang Mills theory in flat space and
of general relativity in Ashtekar variables fit into this frame work.
