bootstrap

Physicists are translating commonsense principles into strict mathematical constraints on how our universe must have behaved at the beginning of time.

In three towering papers, a team of mathematicians has worked out the details of Liouville quantum field theory, a two-dimensional model of quantum gravity.

By considering simple symmetries, physicists working on the “bootstrap” can rediscover the basic form of the known forces that shape the universe.

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original secret.

A decades-old method called the “bootstrap” is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.