  This work may be defined as a modern philosophical approach to theoretical
physics. Since ancient times science and philosophy evolved in parallel, thus
renewing from time to time the epochal paradigms of human thought. We could not
understand how the scientists of the past could have achieved so many goals, if
we neglect the philosophical ideas that inspired their minds. Today, despite
the spectacular successes of the Standard Models of Elementary Particles (SMEP)
and Modern Cosmology (SMMC), theoretical physics seems to be run into a mess of
contradictions that preclude the access to higher views. We are still unable to
explain why it is so difficult to include gravitation into the SMEP, although
General Relativity (GR) works so well in the SMMC, why it is so difficult to
get rid of all the divergences of the SMEP, and "why there is something rather
than nothing". This paper aims to answer these and other questions by starting
from a novel fundamental principle: the spontaneous breaking of conformal
symmetry down to the metric symmetry of GR. This statement is very simple but
its implementation is a little bit complicated. To facilitate the reading, the
paper is divided in a main sequence of sections and subsections and a
collection of Appendices. The first acting as a sort of Ariadne's wire for
guiding the reader through the labyrinth of specialized topics that are
necessary to understand the work.
