In physics, a pregeometry is a hypothetical structure from which the geometry of the universe 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.
No single proposal for pregeometry has gained wide consensus support in the physics community.
A 2006 paper[1] provided a survey and critique of pregeometry or near-pregeometry proposals up to that time.