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

That’s how physicists really feel in regards to the concept of all the things, a putative “last” framework that will clarify all actuality in a single fell swoop. That is the final word purpose for physics, with Stephen Hawking as soon as memorably writing that to search out it might be to know “the thoughts of God”.

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

Since a concept of all the things has to clarify all of the constituent components of actuality, together with area and time, the thought is that we should begin from an much more fundamental premise. That’s the reason a spate of latest would-be last 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, but it surely is sensible to Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia College in New York. “Our greatest theories are already very deeply geometrical,”…