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Albert Einstein was one smart cookie; there’s no doubt about it. But even he knew his general theory of relativity – the 21st century’s answer to Newton’s universal theory of gravity – wasn’t perfect.

Like the second-hand car you bought using your first paycheck, it does the job for day-to-day errands. Push it too hard up a steep hill or park it near a quantum strip mall, and that engine shudders to a standstill.

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia astrophysics grad student Hamidreza Fazlollahi’s solution is to dive under the hood and see which components aren’t as essential as they seem.

By plucking out a law conserving a mathematical quality involving energy and momentum, he believes general relativity just might make it over a few more speed bumps.

Gravity describes the tendency for things with mass to come together. Whether it’s colliding galaxies, a moon struggling against inertia in its pull towards a planet, or an apple falling to Earth from the top branches of a tree, models of gravity need to explain why masses attract.

Yet such a theory also needs to operate in a Universe where objects of identical charge repel, explain why atomic nuclei stick together with incredible force, or why neutrons spontaneously decay to form protons. It also needs to work still when masses become so dense or space-time so compact, light itself can no longer escape.

And frankly, as good as it is, general relativity just isn’t up to the task.

“The problem of non-renormalizability of Einstein’s gravity is well known. It has led to dozens of attempts to treat it as a low-energy theory,” Fazlollahi says.

Renormalization is a magical sleight-of-hand used by theoretical physicists to make frustrating infinities in quantum fields disappear. When loops of reality seem to recede forever into the distance in a confusing fractal, pull a few of these techniques out of the bag, and your model is on solid ground once again

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