Mosala came across as relaxed and unassuming; she’d been visibly nervous in the footage I’d seen of earlier appearances – the Nobel ceremony, especially – but if she wasn’t yet a seasoned veteran, she was definitely more at ease. She had a deep, vibrant voice – which might have been electrifying if she ever took to making speeches – but her tone was conversational, not oratorical. All of which boded well for Violet Mosala . The awkward truth was, some people just didn’t belong on a living room screen for most of fifty minutes. They didn’t fit – and they emerged distorted, like a sound too loud or too soft to record. Mosala, I was sure now, would survive the limitations of the medium. So long as I didn’t screw up completely, myself.

The first few questions came from the science correspondents of the non-specialist news services … who diligently resurrected all the old non sequiturs: Will a Theory of Everything mean an end to science? Will a TOE render the future totally predictable? Will a TOE unlock all the unsolved problems of physics and chemistry, biology and medicine … ethics and religion?

Mosala dealt with all of this patiently and concisely. “A Theory of Everything is just the simplest mathematical formulation we can find which encapsulates all the underlying order in the universe. Over time, if a candidate TOE survives sustained theoretical scrutiny and experimental testing, we should gradually become confident that it represents a kind of kernel of understanding … from which – in principle, in the most idealized sense – everything around us could be explained.

“But that won’t make anything ‘totally predictable.’ The universe is full of systems which we understand completely – systems as simple as two planets orbiting a star – where the mathematics is chaotic, or intractable, and long term predictions will always be impossible to compute.

“And it doesn’t mean ‘an end to science.’ Science is much more than the search for a TOE; it’s the elucidation of the relationships between order in the universe at every level. Reaching the foundations doesn’t mean hitting the ceiling. There are dozens of problems in fluid dynamics – let alone neurobiology – which need new approaches, or better approximations, not the ultimate, precise description of matter on a subatomic scale.”

I pictured Gina at her workstation. And I pictured her in her new home, recounting all her problems and small triumphs to her new lover. I felt unsteady for a moment, but it passed.

“Lowell Parker, Atlantica . Professor Mosala, you say a TOE is the ‘simplest mathematical formulation of the underlying order in the universe.’ But aren’t all these concepts culturally determined? ‘Simplicity’? ‘Order’? Even the range of formulations available to contemporary mathematics?” Parker was an earnest young man with a Boston accent; Atlantica was a high-culture netzine, produced mainly by part-time academics from east coast universities.