the president and his cabinet on a host of issues. This was not how he’d imagined his life would be. Now, at the age of forty-two, he was acting as a trusted adviser to the president of the United States as well as to other heads of state.
As a young man, Mr. Gregory had been interested in science. It was at a time when everything seemed organized and well ordered, except for a few anomalies that appeared at the smallest and largest scales of the universe. No one had to deal with the strangeness that they created, aside from a few people who worked in special realms of science, such as in high-energy physics and cosmology. Not many people were involved in those fields, so everyone else could simply march along blithely without even noticing.
Mr. Gregory came of age at a unique time. Information systems were becoming a hot topic, and engineers of all kinds were in high demand. That was when he started to work on his project. No one knew exactly what it was, and when he tried to explain it to people, they got lost in the details. It had something to do with information and connections, but beyond that, everyone lost interest.
No one took much notice of him until he came to the attention of regulators in the financial sector. Even though he didn’t have a background in finance or any knowledge of investments, he seemed to be able to buy and sell stocks at exactly the right times to make money. At first, he didn’t have much to invest, but that changed as he continued to make more trades. He seemed to get it right every time, and he became rich in the process.
Because of the uncanny success he had with his investments, other traders began to follow his lead. That was when regulators got involved and conducted a full investigation of his activities. However, there was nothing to find; he’d been trading with his own money, and he never owned more than 5 percent of the stock of any company, so there wasn’t much for them to investigate. When they interviewed him, he just said that he used “a system” to make his investments. Everyone agreed there was nothing wrong with that. After all, if he could invent a better approach to making investments, more power to him. Many people made businesses out of that. Their conclusion was that he was just good at picking stocks.
Soon it became apparent that his extraordinary insights were more wide-ranging. The chief executives of some of the world’s largest companies invited him to counsel them on their business strategies. He gave them advice in interesting ways, sometimes subtle and sometimes not. He had them get out of what seemed to be profitable ventures just before their fortunes began to decline, and he positioned them in ways to capitalize on markets they hadn’t even imagined before he mentioned them. The companies changed their business models, products, and services so that they bore little resemblance to what they’d been before he made his suggestions. He seemed prescient, and all of these activities made him much richer.
He soon became the darling of both the press and Wall Street, which was an unusual combination. People seemed to hang on his every word. Reporters started to hound him. He couldn’t get a moment’s peace. But he took it all in stride and always maintained a cool and calm demeanor. Nothing seemed to surprise him. It was almost as if he knew what was going to happen.
Then the central bankers in Europe approached him. A financial crisis was developing, and it was spreading rapidly. The European Central Bank had shored up the bonds of its weaker member states for long enough that they had exhausted all their tools to avert the collapse of their common currency and, with it, the stability of some of the biggest economies on the continent. There seemed no way to remedy the situation, and they felt powerless. In response, Mr. Gregory recommended measures that were at odds with accepted economic theory. Because they had never been considered before, the bankers were reluctant to adopt them at first. But when they did, there was a turnaround, then a recovery, and then an economic resurgence that enveloped Europe in a wave of prosperity.
After that, the heads of state from other parts of the world began to seek his counsel, including the leaders of countries in death spirals of decline. He went to meet with them in Africa, Asia, and South America. Based on his recommendations, they adopted changes to their infrastructures, economic systems, and social policies that they initially viewed with a high degree of skepticism. Nonetheless, soon after they implemented them, their countries began to prosper, and a short time later, they became wealthy.
All of these accomplishments made him famous. He was even featured as the Person of the Year on the cover of Time magazine and was touted as one of the world’s most influential people. But despite all of his successes, no one had a clue how he did it.
Clearly, he could predict things that no one else could and in ways that people didn’t even consider before he brought them up. He was soft-spoken and would say only that he “followed the logical interconnections of things” to know what to do and when to do it. “I don’t invent things,” he would say. “I only follow clues about where they are to know where they’ll be heading.” Everyone agreed there was nothing special about that. He just did it better than anyone else.
THE QUESTION EVERYONE HAD WAS HOW MR. GREGORY did what he did. When asked, he said that most people didn’t think about the underlying structure of space-time. They typically only cared about what they needed to know to get around and do things in their everyday lives. Ordinarily, they didn’t give the matter much more thought until they were forced to consider that the Earth was a sphere—for example, when they flew in airplanes or saw pictures taken from satellites. Then it became obvious that the structures analogous to straight lines were meridians and that parallel lines were actually curved.
During the twentieth century, the study of gravitational fields showed that the geometry of space was coupled to its distribution of matter and bundled together with time. But because nothing about everyday life made the curvature of space obvious, the implications were reduced to a few buzzwords and phrases such as black holes, E = mc2, and some unusual paradoxes related to gravity and relativity.
At about the same time, physicists were trying to develop a deeper understanding of reality by combining all the rules governing the design and evolution of the universe into a single model. To accomplish that, they considered complex space-time geometries to account for everything they could observe. Even so, a single theory of everything—a grand unified theory—was beyond their grasp, and the further away from ordinary experience their descriptions became, the more difficult they were to explain, in terms of common language and even mathematical abstractions. Not only did their esoteric theories leave ordinary people behind, but they left most of the scientific community behind as well.
Nevertheless, their investigations made one thing perfectly clear: the number of dimensions needed to explain everything was much greater than the four that humans knew about. Mr. Gregory realized that meant the shape of space-time had to be something very peculiar.
While other people considered a mathematical labyrinth of possibilities to arrive at a unified theory that would encompass everything, Mr. Gregory thought about things a bit differently. No matter how much the underlying geometry of space-time was curved, stretched, twisted, or partitioned, it could still be modeled as a network—a set of discrete points with connections between them. By viewing it in that way, a new understanding of reality could be uncovered. Mathematicians called such points nodes and the connections between them edges. By using only those two elements, any geometrical shape could be represented in any dimensionality.
In contrast to other scientists who were searching for a theory of everything, Mr. Gregory was interested in understanding the underlying fabric of space-time. That was what he needed to know to make sense of everything that happened by using network theory. However, to do that, he also needed to understand something else that was related to it: how information was transferred and processed within it.
To explain what he was thinking,
