Pregeometry (physics)

Pregeometry, in physics, means a structure from which geometry develops. The term was championed by John Archibald Wheeler in the 1960s and 1970s as a possible route to a theory of quantum gravity. Since quantum mechanics allowed a metric to fluctuate, it was argued that the merging of gravity with quantum mechanics required a set of more fundamental rules regarding connectivity that were independent of topology and dimensionality, and which could work independently of any assumptions we might make about the properties of a surface.

Where "geometry" could describe the properties of a "known" surface, and the physics of a hypothetical region with "pre-defined" properties, "pregeometry" might allow us to work with deeper underlying rules of physics that were not so strongly dependent on simplified classical assumptions about the properties of space.