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Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time

A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move.

One might spend hours at a chalkboard sketching Byzantine particle trajectories and evaluating fearsome formulas only to find that terms cancel out and complicated expressions melt away to leave behind extremely simple answers — in a classic example, literally the number 1. Sensing a breakthrough was close, Arkani-Hamed recruited Salvatori and Hadleigh Frost at the University of Oxford, young physicists who had been independently advancing the understanding of the associahedron’s strange shapes, along with the mathematicians Pierre-Guy Plamondon and Hugh Thomas. “They’re trying to figure out a crazy, weird mystery with all sorts of insane characters, and so am I,” he told me over Zoom one afternoon, surrounded by the digital red drapes of the “Black Lodge,” a setting inside the Twin Peaks universe but outside its standard space-time.

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