That was what set Violet Mosala apart (from half her colleagues, no doubt, as well as third-rate science journalists – and which no amount of humanization would ever change): If a proposed TOE was inconsistent with experimental data, or unraveled under its own contradictions, she had the ability to follow the logic as far as it went, and peel away the whole beautiful failure, like a perfect sheet of dead skin.

And if it wasn’t a beautiful failure? If the TOE in question turned out to be flawless? Watching her parse Wu’s elaborate mathematical arguments as if they were written in the most transparent prose, I could picture her, when that day came – whether the TOE was her own or not – patiently mapping out the theory’s consequences at every scale, every energy, every level of complexity, doing her best to weave the universe into an indivisible whole.

The auditorium began to fill. Mosala finished the paper just as Wu arrived at the podium. I whispered, “What’s the verdict?”

Mosala was pensive. “I think she’s largely correct. She hasn’t quite proved what she’s set out to prove – not yet. But I’m almost certain that she’s on the right track.”

I was startled. “But doesn’t that worry—?”

She raised a finger to her lips. “Be patient. Let’s hear her out.”

Helen Wu lived in Malaysia, but had worked for the University of Bombay for the last thirty years. She’d co-authored at least a dozen seminal papers – including two with Buzzo and one with Mosala – but somehow she’d never reached the same quasi-celebrity status. She was probably every bit as ingenious and imaginative as Buzzo, and maybe even as rigorous and thorough as Mosala – but she seemed to have been slower to move straight to the frontiers of the field (always really visible only in retrospect), and not as lucky in choosing problems which had yielded spectacular general results.

Much of the lecture was simply beyond me. I covered every word, every graphic, scrupulously, but my thoughts wandered to the question of how I could paraphrase the message without the technicalities. With an interactive dialogue, maybe?

Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don’t tell me what it is.

[Thinks … 575]

Add the digits together.

[17]

Add them again.

[8]

Add 3.

[11]

Subtract this from the original number.

[564]

Add the digits together.

[15]

Find the remainder left when you divide by nine.

[6]

Square it.

[36]

Add 6.

[42]

The number in your head now is … 42?

[Yes!]

Now try it once again…

The end result, of course, was guaranteed to be the same every time; all the elaborate steps of this cheap party trick were just a long-winded way of saying that X minus X would always equal zero.