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What is the universe made of? The ancient Greeks conceived of the “atom,” the indivisible unit of matter. Today’s physicists talk of smaller particles — quarks and electrons, neutrinos, Higgs Bosons and photons. Understand them — and the forces that hold everything together — and we may finally get a handle on what makes it all tick.

The trouble is, the more we drill down into the subatomic world, the more complexity we find. The bedrock of reality seems as elusive as ever. Perhaps, says a leading theoretical physicist, we do not live in a world of particles and forces at all — but of pure mathematics.

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Max Tegmark, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims that at the heart of everything are numbers. On one level this is uncontroversial; the whole point of physics is that we can use mathematics to describe the world around us.

But Tegmark goes further. His Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) states that not only does math describe the world we live in, it is the world we live in. “If you grant that both space and everything in space is mathematical,” he says, “then it begins to sound less insane that everything is mathematical.”