A JEWEL AT THE HEART OF QUANTUM PHYSICS. “The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, ‘scattering amplitudes,’ which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.”

Consequence: “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”