What if there was a perfect board game? A combination of board, pieces, and rules – perhaps with some additional elements not yet invented – that would be the only board game anyone would want to play. Will it create an unparalleled experience?
That's how physicists feel about the Theory of Everything, the putative “final” framework that explains all reality at once. This is the ultimate goal of physics, and Stephen Hawking once memorably wrote that to find it is to know “the mind of God.”
Some people may consider it strange because it is a bold mission. There is no doubt that dividing reality into ever more fundamental parts is not working well at this point. But the potential rewards of a final theory are so great that some physicists are adamant and are now pivoting to radical new approaches.
The idea is that a theory of everything needs to account for all the components of reality, including space and time, so it must start with even more basic assumptions. That is why successive new and supposedly final theories have no basis in physics at all, but are based on the wild landscapes of abstract geometry. Perhaps the ultimate scientific truth lies within the metaphysical gems that calculate the universe, or the mathematics of the shimmering tapestry of triangles and tetrahedra?
It may seem bizarre, but it makes sense to Peter Woight, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York. “Our best theories are already very deep and geometric.”…
Source: www.newscientist.com
