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 needs to play?

That’s how physicists really feel in regards to the concept of all the pieces, a putative “closing” framework that will 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 search out it could be to know “the thoughts of God”.

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

Since a concept of all the pieces has to elucidate all of the constituent elements of actuality, together with area and time, the thought is that we should begin from an much more primary premise. That’s the reason a spate of latest would-be closing theories aren’t grounded in physics in any respect, however in a wild panorama of summary geometry. Maybe the final word scientific reality 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,”…