WHAT if there have been an ideal board sport? Some mixture of boards and items and guidelines – possibly with a number of yet-to-be invented additions – that might create an unsurpassable expertise, the one board sport anybody ever needs to play?

That’s how physicists really feel in regards to the idea of every part, a putative “ultimate” framework that might clarify all actuality in a single fell swoop. That is the final word aim for physics, with Stephen Hawking as soon as memorably writing that to seek out it might be to know “the thoughts of God”.

It’s an audacious mission, a lot in order that some folks take into account it quixotic. At this stage, there could be little doubt that breaking actuality down into ever extra elementary items hasn’t fairly labored. However the potential payoff of a ultimate idea is so big that some physicists doggedly refuse to surrender, and now they’re pivoting in the direction of a radical new strategy.

Since a idea of every part has to elucidate all of the constituent elements of actuality, together with house and time, the concept is that we should begin from an much more fundamental premise. That’s the reason a spate of recent would-be ultimate theories aren’t grounded in physics in any respect, however in a wild panorama of summary geometry. Maybe the final word scientific fact lies inside the arithmetic of a metaphysical jewel that computes the universe, or a shimmering tapestry of triangles and tetrahedrons?

That may strike you as outlandish, however it is sensible to Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia College in New York. “Our greatest theories are already very deeply geometrical,”…