Classical unified field theories describe the properties of the electromagnetic field as a purely geometric phenomenon. Einstein tried to form a generalized theory of gravitation that would unify the gravitational and electromagnetic forces (and perhaps others), guided by a belief in a single origin for the entire set of physical laws. These attempts initially concentrated on additional geometric notions such as vierbeins and "distant parallelism", but eventually centered around treating both the metric tensor and the affine connection as fundamental fields. (Because they are not independent, the metric-affine theory was somewhat complicated.) In general relativity, these fields are symmetric (in the matrix sense), but
Field (physics) of jet manifolds (covariant classical field theory). In modern physics, the most often studied fields are those that model the four fundamental forces which one day may lead to the Unified Field Theory. A convenient way of classifying a field (classical or quantum) is by the symmetries it possesses. Physical symmetries are usually of two types: Fields are often classified by their behaviour under transformations of spacetime. The terms used in this classification are: Fields may have internal symmetries in addition to spacetime symmetries. In many situations, one needs fields which are a list of space-time scalars: (φ, φ, ...