The year is 2008 and in an office at Google’s headquarters two men are discussing the merits of a children’s book called The Day My Bum Went Psycho. It’s about a boy whose bottom runs off and joins a conspiracy to knock out the human race with a giant collective fart.
One of these men is Larry Page, the co-founder of Google and one of the most powerful people on the planet. The other is a rumpled physicist called Max Tegmark. It may be an exaggeration to call him the most influential scientist most people have never heard of. It would not be much of an exaggeration, though.
Tegmark is at the heart of a spider’s web of brilliant minds who are trying to