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A New Theory of Everything?
goatherder writes "The Telegraph is running a story about a new Unified Theory of Physics. Garrett Lisi has presented a paper called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" which unifies the Standard Model with gravity — without using string theory. The trick was to use E8 geometry which you may remember from an earlier Slashdot article. Lisi's theory predicts 20 new particles which he hopes might turn up in the Large Hadron Collider."
The fact that he's a surfer dude deserves some mention as well - not everyday you see hard core mathematical physics coming from the beach!
Lubos Motl thinks it's pure bullshit ... so Lisi might
well be on to something :)
that the earth is going to get demolished any minute now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Fascinating. Were you able to do this without using string theory as well?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Can someone explain to me what E8 is? The wikipedia article left me with more questions than answers :(
simplicity comes from complexity
proud caffeine whore
I smell an XKCD comic approaching....
I don't know about string theory but there is no way he pulled it off without rope theory.
Now I have to relearn everything. Just when I thought I was done with school...
I think some people have an entirely different definition of 'Simple' than myself.
then...
Well, am I alone in thinking that invoking another 244 dimensions is rather excessive?
Especially when an extension of spinor theory to only 6 dimensions (3 time, 3 space) looks to provide a more elegant explanation?
Sorry, surfer dude - you fail it!
;)
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
42.
...or does that guy bear an unsettling resemblance to Jeff Gannon/Guckert?
So it's not 42?
Garrett Lisi is to Physics what Slava Pestov is to the study of programming language theory: young blood with new theories that will greatly challenge the status quo. Slava Pestov's Factor programming language is essentially the GUT of the PLT domain. It ties together functional programming, stack based programming, imperative programming, OO programming, and even constraint-based programming into one small, tidy package. In short, it is the one and the only.
A set is a collection of things, such as the integers are a set of numbers.
A group is a set with an operation (and a couple of extra properties), such as the integers under addition.
The set of a symmetry group is the set of operations that you can perform to an object and have the object remain unchanged. For example, for an equilateral triangle, rotating it by 120 and 240 degrees leaves you with a triangle. So does flipping it around any of its three axes. Add the identity operation, which leaves the triangle untouched and you have the symmetry set for an equilateral triangle. Add an operation and you have a symmetry group.
The U(1) group is the group of all unitary, 1-dimensional operations that leave the inner (dot) product invariant.
The SU(2) group is the group of all unitary, 2-dimensional operations that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.
The SU(3) group is the group of all unitary, 3-dimensional operations that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.
The Standard Model obeys the symmetry found by combining the three above groups: SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1).
E8 is another group with some special properties. The author of the paper is claiming that E8 contains the Standard Model (SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)), plus the symmetries belonging to gravity.
http://aimath.org/E8/e8.html
I found this site easier to understand than the wikipedia link. I warned my trig students about higher dimensions - wait till I tell them about 8-d vectors, they'll love it!
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
here's the abstract for those wondering if they should download it:
Although it is chock full of pretty pictures as well. If he's right, somebody is going to do a story about how the Star of David came to be important (Ezekiel's Wheel?) and want to talk to those soldiers who saw the ship in the woods in Britain that was decorated with a complex pattern with triangles in the middle.
OK, enough mindless rambling...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Demented But Determined.
Just from reading the previous /. articles, it seems that the people working on E8 all along expected it to be applied to theoretical physics and a GUT (grand unified theory). I don't understand how it can be called his original idea and thus a breakthrough. Can anyone explain?
Seriously. Stop posting stories from New Scientist. Or articles in other publications on New Scientist articles.
Simply put, it's a complex dimensional algebra with lots of non-trivial, commutative degrees of freedom. It features symmetry groups, conjugation and adjoint representation, and comes with a free manifold which displays automorphism - so it can neatly fit into any space. For a small extra fee, we'll throw in some Vogon Polynomials and a Spin(16) (Z/Z2) which, fundamentally, gets your clothes drier, quicker. The best thing about the E8 is it's R8 Root System(TM), which, with the use of Euclidean Space Vectors is guaranteed(*) to make sure you don't get octonions on your breath. And if you order now, we'll send you a bonus 8x6 photo of Jacques Tits.
But honestly, I foud the wikipedia article pretty useless too. I'm not nerd enough.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Maybe we can call it Everything2.
Well, let's see...42 has no infinities. That makes it better than a lot of the theories out there.
And it has as much experimental evidence to back it up as most of the other theories have.
Back in the day, I thought I might win the Nobel when I grew up. But life intervened; as of this month I have twenty years as a software engineer. I'm sick to death of it. But I'm not going back to Physics - download the tracks in my sig, and you can help me go back to school to study musical composition.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Adding 20 new, unobserved, unproven particles makes for an "exceptionally simple" theory? Wonder what Occam would say about that.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I'm just waiting for Dvorak to denounce it. That'll be proof enough for me.
http://Communityville.com - A free place for new and old neighborhood webmasters to hang out.
Please see what a real physicist thinks of this. There's always a chance that he's stumbled onto something awesome of course, but odds are low. Basically he takes some stuff that looks cool and extracts physics from it in various ways.
:-) The author is not constrained by any old "conventions" and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings.'
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html
'That's pretty cute!
This is garbage. Pure and simple.
For eg., look at Lubos Motl's blog entry on the subject:http://motls.blogspot.com/
A media-frenzy over horseshit that makes precisely zero sense.
Azural - instrumentals
"complex simple Lie algebras"?
Mathematics needs some new words, I think. And they need to stop using 'simple' in this kind of context. What about; instead of 'simple' they use 'mindbogglingly complicated' and instead of 'complex', 'totally headfucking' making the statement a more accurate 'totally headfucking mindboggleing complicated Lie algebras'.
Stephen Hawking and Chuck Norris met... Chuck Norris got his ass handed to him.
That would've been far more credible than Einstein... whom, I believe was long dead by the time Norris was conceived.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Hey, where is BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?
Liberty.
From TFA: "if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan."
Is that more than a LoC(Libraries of congress)?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
If I'm reading this right anyway, which I may well not be.
It's more a very good argument for what he thinks the solution will looks like. The mathematics is low enough that I can (barely) understand it well enough to follow the general argument, but certainly not well enough to be able to catch any oversights. But it's the first thing I've seen in a long time that looked simple enough I felt like I could hit the books and maybe get to a point where I *could* understand it properly. (He says, as if he's really done the last three or four things like that he promised himself he would do. My head exploded reading the first volume of "Art of Computer Programming" and I haven't got in gear to finish *that* yet either.)
But it sure *looks* pretty.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I was going to make an Alpha Centauri joke but it's been a long, sleep-deprived week so I'm drawing a blank. Anyone want to make up one for me?
He calls it "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything", but it is based off of E8 mathematics -- ...a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
He must be using a form of the word "Simple" that I am not familiar with.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Slashdot trolls think they're some infamous, important, uber-annoying counter-culture. No one else really gives a damn about them since most people don't surf at level 0, and modding tends to handle Goatse links quickly. The only exceptions are the clever trolls that manage to occasionally get modded up, but they're a rare and generally completely separate breed.
Ah shit. The vogons will be here any time now to blow us all the fuck up.
Good going, surfer dude.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Lubos, on Bee's blog has shown himself to be nothing but an clown. He argues as if he's on the SA forums. When he did attempt to make a point he was quickly made to look like an asshat.
Judging by the comments from others there, he certainly intelligent, but close minded, immature, and prone to lapses in judgment.
no simple theory can be explained with numers and formulas.-
?
One might be able to come up with a "TOE" in physics, But it should be recognized that this is highly limited. It does not for example explain why aging occurs, something which also effects each of us.
While it is highly interesting to understand how the universe works -- it would be equally interesting to understand precisely what kills each and every one of us -- so perhaps we could engineer solutions to it.
So here are two questions in life -- "How is the Universe constructed?" and "Why does aging occur (and how can I stop it)"? I believe the importance of answers to the second far far outweigh answers to the first.
The amount of energy and attention devoted to the first question seems to me to be far in excess of the amount of attention which should be devoted to the second.
Robert
Slashdot's new ajaxy comment system displays more comment headers below the current threshold, which encourages the trolls who can fit the troll into the subject line and first line of the post. You can filter out the noise with a simple drag, but the defaults show 'em still.
It's all just noise. They have no motivation, they're just socially retarded kids that stopped chewing their keyboards long enough to make funny screen noise.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Seriously. Stop posting stories from New Scientist. Or articles in other publications on New Scientist articles.
Can we still post stories from newspapers that are about articles in other publications about New Scientist articles?
Ok, just to toss this out there, but, why do you need a theory that links gravity into the standard model when there is, as of yet, no known force that actually effects gravity. There's no battery operated anti-gravity machine, so, why unify something that isn't?
Sounds to me like all this is a just some mathemeticians tacking on a few extra dimensions, making it internally consistent, and calling that new. I think if you sat down and worked it out though, there's probably an infinite number of theories of everything that can actually intersect all the data out there, so its really not like there's just "one".
This is my sig.
Now I know how my wife feels when my friends come over and we talk shop.
Since the 50s, particle physicists have found ways of classifying particles intro groups, much the way Mendelev classified elements into groups via the Periodic Table. When doing this, they discover "missing" particles that fit within a certain group but were not yet known, thus giving such groupings predictive power.
Different groups have different symmetries. E8 is a group in Lie algebra. The group is "exceptional" and "simple" which is why the article is entitled tongue-in-cheekishly "Exceptionally Simple". The power and beauty of the E8 group has been known for a long time, and it's featured in many theories of physics that have tried to provide an framework for explaining the bewildered world of particles and forces that make up the universe.
What this author has done is use E8 in a new way to come up with a potential new theory that unifies all the forces and fields. This is not *strictly* a theory of everything, as there's a lot more that has to be answered, but if true it provides a geometric model that can give us insight into the underlying principles that are involved, just the way the Periodic Table does for elements.
The guy is no kook, but his theory leaves a lot to be desired. One problem is that E8 and other lie algebras and their associated symmetries have been well-studied for decades, and most all of them have run into intractable problems or incorrect predictions, so this may just be another beautiful theory that doesn't fit reality. Lisi uses a little-known method called "BRST connections" to make it all seem to work, which most physicists are unfammiliar with. Another is that his theory actually forces something physicists call as "spontaneous symmetry breaking" into the calculations to make it fit what we know to be true in the "standard model". Many people feel this is putting the cart before the horse; they would prefer a theory where the symmetry is broken in a "nautral" way and the "standard model" of the universe just naturally falls out of it. Lisi's theory doesn't really tell us WHY this is the case, it just says it is, but here's the symmetry that underlies it and which you apply it to.
Another problem is that the theory is still new and doesn't have an quantitative predictions as of yet... there's a lot of math that needs to be done, and it's not clear that such calculation *can* be done given the contraints of his theory. At issue is something known as the "Coleman-Mandula" theorem, which basically says a lot of what Lisi does in his theory doesn't work if there are subgroups in the algenbra that are equivalent to what are known as Poincare groups. Lisi says this doesn't apply to his new theory because it posits that the vacuum of spacetime doesn't have Poincare symmetry but instead is deSitter space. Well, the idea of deSitter space is well-known and has been examined in theoretical physics for decades as well, but there are a lot of problems with it. One is that the "Smatrix", which physicists love so much in making calculations in theories with Poincare symmetries, no longer works and simply becomes an approximation.
The theory also predicts a very LARGE cosmological constant, which is contrary to observation, but there are other theories that explain how this is not actually a problem, so that might not be an issue. Perhaps the largest obstacle of the theory, once the calculations can be figured out, is that it pretty much obsoletes all of String Theory in favor of something like Loop Quantum Gravity. This will make a LOT of string physicists very unhappy.
Lisi's theory will probably not be the last work in physics, but it might bring us a step closer to a real "Theory of Everything". The truth is physicists have been toying with similar geometric approaches and arrange particles in tables and trying to tie in gravity for decades now and every new theory looks great but never quite actually works out. The fact that the universe can *almost* be described via these methods probably tells us we're on the right track, but a true
....is that the theory of everything equates to "Surfs up dude!"
This thread blows.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You realize that a blog is functionally equivalent to me posting here; in fact, you could argue that it's identical, particularly since in REST notation the two *are* functionally identical.
Please follow along here... this new "theory" might be crap. But pointing to a blog is not the way to debunk or disprove anything. I graduated with several degrees in the sciences 30 years ago, but as far as I know, that part of science hasn't changed at all.
Really well explained. Thanks.
E8, you say? E EIGHT? That's exactly the number of corners of nature's harmonic simultaneous TIME CUBE!
The Unified Theory of Cake is a Lie Algebra.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
...humans trying to understand all the math and science of how God created the laws and inner workings of the universe is about the same thing as insects trying to understand how a computer works.
...right here in its entirety.
It's simple, elegant and totally complete in a one-liner.
We'll call it A/C's Grand Theory of Computer Science:
"You can write any program using only ones and zeros."
That's all, folks!
And oh! almost forgot Duke Nukem Forever.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
this "everything" really is. How is he planning to explain quantization in this continuous model? Well, only matter of time before Adele's will be the physicist's numbers. Then I'll believe it when they talk about theory of "everything" -- quantum mechanics and gen relativity tied in one.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
It is official; Science now confirms: Physics is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Physics community when IDC confirmed that phyics enrollments have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all undergraduates. Coming close on the heels of a recent Science survey which plainly states that physics has lost more enrollments, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Physics is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing to successfully form a Theory of Everything in at least half a century of trying.
You don't need to be an Einstein to predict Phyisics' future. The hand writing is on the wall: Physics faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Physics because Physics is dying. Things are looking very bad for Physics. As many of us are already aware, Physics continues to lose funding. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything"
A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality
Subalgebras, lie algebra!!! What class do you get that math? WTF is his definition of exceptionally hard?!
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Seriously, this story was just an excuse to combine the "theoryofeverything" and "surfing" tags.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
No sig for you!!
Published in PDF: An Exceptionally Obtuse Format for Everything.
(Or you can grab the tar.gz bundle with a bunch of other formats, all at one time.)
for a double major in two hard science disciplines. This isn't some foo-foo private university where they'll graduate you in 4 no matter what you do, it's two degrees from a University of California campus. Lots of classes that are required are taught only once a year -- or sometimes even every other year. If you can't get a spot in the class, tough. You get to spend an extra year. God forbid you have two required courses that are only taught once a year -- and they're scheduled at the same hour. It's not uncommon for people to get "out of sequence"... and spend an extra year. (I speak from experience on that front)
We see lots of forces and different particles. We want to know what makes them do/be what they do/are. Thus we look for what makes them up and we want to drill down to the most basic level and we expect to find one basic element that makes up everything else.
If we can understand that, we can try to manipulate it, and thus turn lead into gold, turn ourselves into supermen and generally do what we could not do before.
Clearly that is what we are all still after.
Although wonderfully elegant it seems more like a taxonomy of particles and fields rather than a theory of everything. What underlies and determines a "particle"? Why so many fields? I would think a theory of everything would be composed of a single field interacting with itself to give various configurations which would appear to be other fields and appear to be localized particles.
presumably you clicked the link?
then you did just what he wanted you to, which was this:
1) confuse you
2) get you to click the link
3) ???*
4) PROFIT!
*presumably something involving using that page to sell ads, but since I haven't clicked the link...
2^3 * 31 * 647
Let's also mention some applications of E8. The E8 Lie group has applications in theoretical physics, in particular in string theory and supergravity. The group E8×E8 (the Cartesian product of two copies of E8) serves as the gauge group of one of the two types of heterotic string and is one of two anomaly-free gauge groups that can be coupled to the N = 1 supergravity in 10 dimensions. Clearly, E8 is the U-duality group of supergravity on an eight-torus (in its split form). Also, any fool can see that one way to incorporate the standard model of particle physics into heterotic string theory is the symmetry breaking of E8 to its maximal subalgebra SU(3)×E6.
(mostly stolen from the Wikipedia article).
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
You know you're a balls-to-the-wall super-nerd when you laugh out loud at a HEX JOKE.
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
The 248-dimensions that he is talking about are not like the time-space dimensions, which particles move through. They describe the state of the particle itself - things like spin, charge, etc. The standard model has 6(?) properties. Some of the combinations of these properties are allowed, some are not. E8 is a very generalized mathematical model that has 248-properties, where only some of the combinations are allowed. What Garrett Lisi showed is that the rules that describe the allowed combinations of the 6 properties of the standard model show up in E8, and furthermore, the symmetries of gravity can be described with it as well.
Now, there are other valid combinations of properties within E8 beyond the ones that represent the particles in the standard model, and these combinations would represent new particles that we have not seen before, if the model is correct.
Clifford Algebras, Grassman Algebras, Spacetime Algebra, and Geometric Algebra are a group of mathematics notations that are related to the ones being used here. The notation in use has interesting properties that make it more likely that an equation will be valid in any number of dimensions, embeds the behavior of complex numbers, quaternions, hypercomplex numbers in a purely real system, etc.
I have read of ideas for unifying physics by using these notations for their superior ability to reason with space. (David Hestenes has good examples.) A good physical theory should be like a consistent programmer's interface. If the "code" continues to become unwieldly over time, then a point will be reached where rewrites must be done in order to eliminate special cases and bring out hidden symmetries.
This particular paper may end up failing important tests, but it does seem clear that at some point Clifford Algebras will end up being the thing that ended up simplifying physics.
Ok, just to toss this out there, but, why do you need a theory that links gravity into the standard model when there is, as of yet, no known force that actually effects gravity. There's no battery operated anti-gravity machine, so, why unify something that isn't?
I believe the idea is that if there can be a valid theory developed which linked gravity in with the rest of physics, it *would* be possible to build a device which had an effect on gravity. Sort of like now that we know how particle entanglement works, we can build quantum encryption systems. Just because no one in the 19th century could build a quantum encryption device didn't mean that there was no point in researching quantum mechanics.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Here's the actual paper summarized as a microprocessor analogy (thought I'm sure someone will be happy to correct me where I get it wrong):
If E8 was a microprocessor, it would have 248 I/O pins. Lisi has discovered that if you put values for gravity into pins 1-12, you get electromagnitism results on pins 128-130. And if you put Strong Nuclear Force values into pints 64-76, then you get weak nuclear Force results from pins 192-204. If you put an electron into pin 36, you get a neutrino out of pin 189. Etc.
Because E8 seems to produce relationships between all of the fudamental forces (including gravity), Lisi is proposing that E8 must therefor be the key to describing and explaining all of the fundamental components of the universe.
If his ideas hold true (and thanks to the fact that they have testable predictions there's a way to know), E8 would be the starting point of describing anything in physics.
Unless you've got proof it's garbage, it's an unproven theory just as valid as any other unproven theory with no actual real world repeatable experimental evidence supporting it.
Kinda like string theory.
It really irritates me when people post things on arxiv.org and try to claim that it is something worth reading. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that there are some important ideas in there, but the truth is that it is a non peer reviewed pre-print repository. So, unless it can be backed up with an actual accepted peer reviewed journal then why such the big deal. If it is really so great perhaps we should be reading about it in Science or Nature.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
Of new theories of 'Everything'....seriously. Yes, everything seems to exist...great...now go make me a sandwich... err....sudo go make me a sandwich?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)
Holy crap! - I can read all the words, but none of it makes any sense. It's like the took regular English words and gave them all different meanings. I haven't felt this uncomprehending in a loooong time - and even the dumbness felt from quantum chemistry pales to this.
..........FULL STOP.
I knew my name had to mean something.
arent they still teaching 'god did it'
*ducks*
Yah, OK, so please, you try it.
-Garrett
The best part of this is that this guy is proving that you don't have to follow one of the soul-crushing "normal" career paths in physics. The bad part of this is that having not done that, he's at a political disadvantage and probably can't get many people to pay him anything to do physics (though he does appear to have one grant).
With more publicity like this, the Dr. Strangelove stereotype of physicists may someday go away. Most of us are very reasonable people (also, anyone here could understand that paper if you did nothing but study particle physics for 8 years).
Some variety of gluons? Lay off the porn, buddy...
blog |
Quantum mechanics combined with special relativity works well for freely moving (unbound) particles. Richard Feynman and (sp?) Tominaga shared the Nobel Prize for formulating Quantum Electrodynamics, which calculates with great precision what happens when light (photons) and charged particles interact.
But nuclear particles are bound by the "color" force, which is far, far stronger than electromagnetism. Quantum Chromodynamics has to take into account relativistic effects because the binding energy of nuclear particles has significant mass. Conceptually, the quarks that make up neutrons and protons are moving close to the speed of light.
Unfortunately, this makes the equations so much more complex that no one knows how to solve them. My understanding is that the Standard Model, when applied to the bound states of nuclear particles, is just an approximation to the sought-for precise theory. It's full of what they call "injectable constants" that are tweaked to make the numbers come out right, but nobody has ever pretended that the Standard Model was any kind of physical law. It's just a device for making calculations, much as Ptolemy's epicycles weren't based in any kind of physical reality, but still could serve as a device for calculating the motions of the planets.
To my knowledge, there is not yet a fundamental theory that allows us to calculate, for example, the gamma-ray spectrum of radioactive nuclei, or their half-lives and the like. Instead, we have the Standard Model that sorta kinda gets the right answers.
If this fellow's theory can explain relativistic bound states of particles, then he'd really be onto something.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
See above. Apart from that, we still need a theory that makes sense, so even if you can't make a battery-operated anti-gravity machine, we still need a theory that works well for all cases. Today, you have to look at the scale of the problem, and decide which theory to apply. That is not very elegant, and can't cover every case.
Even the slashdot summary made it clear that this is not about string-theory, so why are you still talking about it? The trouble with having an infinite number of theories, is that (a) either they're all similar to each other, but with different wording, or (b) an infinite number of them are wrong (and at most one of them correct). Theories of everything is like the Highlander, there can only be one!bradbury:
Aging is a problem of biology. Biology is a specialization of chemistry. Chemistry is a specialization of physics. You might go further and say that mathematics is the foundation of physics, but that question gets philosophical.
If you have a usable theory of everything then you can eventually solve problems in all of the layers closer to everyday life. But it won't be quick. It'll be like discovering the machine code for a computer and then building up tools and operating systems and applications and networks that are based on the machine code but whose behavior is not apparent by looking at the machine code alone.
Xtravar:
Getting old might not be beneficial for an individual human but I suspect it's beneficial for human genes. Old people are resistant to change, both in the inability to change their genes and in the reduced flexibility of their minds past their formative years. That can be a problem for the genes if their host organisms are failing to adapt to changes in the environment.
Growing an organism with a mechanism to die and make room for offspring with rescrambled genes and fresh, absorbent brains could be a tremendous evolutionary advantage for the genes involved. And the environment includes not just geological and solar variations but other organisms in the ecosystem and the behavior of the organism's own peers, so change can happen very fast and the genes that produce rapid adaptation win.
Apples and oranges could equally well have described matter and energy prior to special relativity. How could Lubos be so clueless as not to recognize that many insights in physics arose precisely because someone dared to add apples to oranges? Lubos has an interesting psychological configuration. He would be an ideal subject in an fMRI imaging protocol on the pathological constriction of rational thought. I'd love to see how his brain glucose dances while I recited out loud the most recent Peter Woit blog post. I suspect his amygdala would be more fired up than the tympanist at an indoor performance of the 1812 Overture.
Lubos should at least feel compelled to explain why the apples of adding fermions to bosons is completely unlike the oranges of adding matter to energy, but he's always lacked that layer of subtly in his expository style.
In more general terms, Peter Woit also suffers some misconceptions concerning the evolution of physics as a discipline. Fifty years ago, the formalisms were less daunting. A good physical intuition could usually be translated to an acceptable formalism. Much progress was made on that basis. Once the standard model was achieved, the balance shifted. These days most of the obstacles to further progress are inherent to the expressive power of the available formalisms. At one end of the spectrum you have people working within formalisms that are far too expressive (string theory) and hence far removed from any specific prediction. At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who take a step back and potter away within formalisms that might ultimately prove to be insufficiently expressive for the physics we actually have.
If the string theorists have managed to demonstrate that the expressive power of string theory exceeds any practical potential for concrete prediction, that actually amounts to good progress. I see the present era of physics as being more about determining the advantages and disadvantages of the available formalisms (on the spectrum of insufficiency to excess sufficiency) quite apart from predicting actual particles, however nice that might be. The cost of each new fundamental particle discovered experimentally has increased exponentially. How could any serious thinker be surprised we ended up at this impasse?
It has always been a problem with the psychology of earthlings that we undervalue negative demonstrations. From what I read (quite a lot, without understanding much of the math at all) it seems as thought Lisi is exploring a coherent mathematical system which at least contains certain essential features of known physics in an unusual combination. I regard that as a useful line of inquiry regardless of whether or not it is doomed with respect to describing the whole of known physics.
Obviously, this places physics on a far different trajectory for the amount of work required relative to the progress achieved than the glory days of the mid 20th century. What I suspect is driving the social turmoil within the discipline is that society has not necessarily agreed to continue funding physics to the same level given this severe softening of trajectory. Funding continues on inertia despite original premises that are no longer true. Woit presses for a return to those original premises (short path from new theory to verifiable predictions), while ignoring that it might no longer be possible to progress on those terms due to vastly more constraints emanating from the formalisms themselves.
I found a cool video that explains it all.
Well, personally I still don't understand a thing, but it looks cool anyways, and hey, what wouldn't one do for karma points!
You just got troll'd!
Can it explain why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
I've lost track of the number of times folks have yelled GUT only to be proven wrong or stranger yet have their lifes work so out there the few people on earth capable of understanding it have better things to do with their time.
Like bigfoot, aliens, and winning the lotto its easier to just sit back and blanket poopoo all announcements with the word GUT in them because you simply have a better chance of being right about them being wrong.
When useful predictions are made using these theories (ie producing a real gravity modifying hoverboard that runs on two Nicad AA) then I'll change my mind.
This Wikipedia article on E8 geometery is the most mind warping, dense, and incompenisble thang I have ever seen!
A challege for some one who does not even understand calculus.
Someone, I hope to understand.
If you understand it, I honor you!
Cool that someone does have a hypothesis that can be TESTED! Take that string theorists!
I made a new theory of everything too. It's called Poo Theory. It predicts 30 new particles. I hope they find them. Then I'll be a genius.
42!
I think he's Dick Feynman back from the dead
"Yo mama so fat, she exists in 248 dimensions!"
The quick-and-dirty explanation is that the E8 "object" is a nasty-ass shape that exists in 248 dimensions, and which is notable for various reasons that only mathematicians can really grasp fully
If you make the model complicated enough, it becomes a kind of physics Turing Machine that can bend to be just about anything if you "program" it by tweaking parameters. It may be good at predictions, but that does not necessarily make it the "actual" model that the universe runs behind the curtains. In essence it is no longer falsifiable because if you find new observations, you just tweak more parameters to make it fit the new observations.
By the way, has anybody tried using Genetic Algorithms to evolve a model that matches known observations? Or are the training rounds too CPU intensive?
Table-ized A.I.
http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/lisi111307.mp3
THIS IS WHY:
/O\ O
________________
When I look at you, you make the
patterns in the floor tiles
vanish.
/
--- ---
| <b>\<b>|
/ \ / \
This looks neat and very promising, but I don't think it's background free, is it? This is based on page 2, "The building blocks of the standard
model and gravity are fields over a four dimensional base manifold. I think there remains an unanswered question regarding what "x" means in the equations. And you can derive some stuff trying to answer that question. Just 2 cents.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Oh shit after seeing your screenshot I'm so happy I'm running OS X, that was some ugly text. No freetype at all?
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/1540/bild7tj0.png
So he's like the Theo of physics?
But I happen to like Theo, but I guess I don't have to like everyone who think different(tm).
People assume that the universe is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, stuff.
No, I'm serious. Look at the illustration on page 17 and tell me that's not what it looks like...
We can make very precise calculations of quantum electrodynamics using the standard model because the coupling coefficient, the fine structure constant (roughly 1/137, represented by the Greek letter alpha) is small enough to allow us to use an approximation, expanding the exact solution by orders of alpha:
The coupling constant for the strong force is roughly one so we can't get meaningful results from a similar simple expansion.But please realize that almost all of physics consists of devices to make calculations. No physics theory is "based on reality" apart from its ability to be used as a device to make calculations. Ptolemy's epicycles were just as real as any other theory except for one thing. It lacked beauty and simplicity. The Standard Model's description of the strong force is almost the exact opposite of Ptolemy's epicycles. It has beauty and simplicity but it doesn't really serve as a device for making calculations.
My take on it is that the Standard Model is fine even though it can't make precise predictions of strong interactions. It is small and simple and beautiful. The next big step is not to improve the calculations of the standard model (although there are many bright people trying to do just that), the next big step is unifying the Standard Model with gravity and General Relativity as this paper claims to have done.
I've read the paper, I could only understand a small percentage (IWATP) but it felt right. The Standard Model is beautiful because it uses the same mechanism of symmetry groups to explain: the strong, the weak, and the electro-magnetic forces. The same game is played with different symmetry groups to describe the different forces. Perhaps it was a little ad hoc to just pull these different symmetry groups out of a hat, but this paper seems to cure that ad hockery. It shows that a much larger symmetry group called E8 contains all of the groups from the Standard Model in a very natural way. It also contains a group (or groups) that can be used for describing gravity.
This is ever so much more appealing than string theory. It is string theory (not the Standard Model) that lacks ties to physical reality. If this paper holds up, even if it doesn't give us new predictions about relativistic bound states IMO it would be the biggest discovery in physics in our lifetimes. By far.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think it is a bit early to claim there are no experimental tests or verifications. The theory does predict new particles and new forces. ISTM that this new theory will be much more likely than string theory to provide experimental tests.
But even if it doesn't give us new physics that can be tested in the real world, if this paper holds up and really does unify the Standard Model with gravity then it would be a very wonderful, Nobel-worthy addition to physics. Using the single symmetry group, E8, is much more beautiful than the various smaller symmetry groups used by the Standard Model. If E8 can also be used to describe gravity as well then this new theory is breathtakingly beautiful. It reminds me of Newton's law of gravity which linked celestial mechanics with the force of gravity we feel on the surface of the Earth. Linking those two things together was absolutely gorgeous and this current paper (if it is true) is beautiful in a similar way.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
This is really a very clear explaination.
... but all I can say about it is that E8 is one wicked smilie.
And that the graphic of the E8 model reminds me very much of certain mandala's.. perhaps I should check out the Sacred Geometry field.
E8 is not the answer, M is the answer!
... I mean, E8 has *only* 248 dimensions, whereas M has 196,883 dimensions!
AFAIK, E8 is the largest exceptional Lie group, but why limit reality to Lie groups?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple_groups)
I think our reality deserves to be described by the largest sporadic group, the Monster:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/M/Monstrous_Moonshine_conjecture.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week66.html
I only wish!
Not hard at all -- ! Goes like this: [Okay, I was wrong. It wasn't easy, and he won the debate.]
-kgj
-kgj
The universe is a lie!
And after even BEGINNING to read, contemplate and understand all of that... to quote Strongbad, "MY HEAD ASPLODE!!!"
Karma: NaN
I have no doubt that Lubos knows more physics than me, but he obviously has no idea how internet culture works. As anyone who uses the internet knows, it is best to ignore trolls regardless of there opinion. To Lubus: if you don't like the theory, publish a paper, but don't cry about it in a blog. You are basically doing everything wrong that you accuse Lisi of doing.
It's really quite elementary. There are code words in the titles of mathematical books and papers.
When the title contains the word "advanced", it means the material is suitable for an undergraduate course in that topic.
When the title contains the word "elementary", it is suitable for graduate students who have taken a few courses in the related topics.
When the title contain the word "simple", it means the professors are going to have study for a while before they begin to understand it.
When the title contains the word "foundations", it means either: it is quite beyond the faculty at most schools; or, it can be successfully used as a high-school text.
The article said there are "20 gaps" which could be new particles or forces. Perhaps the new CERN collider might find some of these.
The problem with String Theory is there are so many free parameters that it doesnt make testable new predictions.
I'm not a professional or anything, but here's my take. First off, it's unfortunate so many people are jamming Slashdot with karma-mongering nothings when the topic at hand is such a nerdgasm for me, but I'll try to get over it. This paper seems to confirm a theory I've held to for a long time, that string theory (and related studies) really ARE just developing arbitrarily complicated models to describe the data, and weren't bothering to deal with anything like reality whatsoever. To go back to an older argument- something like a very simplified Heisenberg versus Einstein. And yes, I know I'll get murdered for putting it in these terms. When two particles collide, the results seem to be random. To Einstein (or, someone working from sensibility up) the most rational explanation was that there were measurable forces acting on the collision that we just didn't know how to correct for yet. To Heisenberg (or, somebody working from the math down) it was perfectly acceptable to say that the universe itself was entirely random and that this was just something we were going to have to deal with. Again, yes, I know that's oversimplified. String theory follows those lines (as does much of quantum mechanics). How do we explain all these bits we've observed that make no sense? Let's propose universes with n-dimensions where things happen that even the best mathematicians in the world are only really trying to guess at because these things only work on paper and make no sense whatsoever, really, when uttered. ...or maybe there are just a bunch of smaller particles and/or forces that we haven't observed yet. And yes, Occam's Razor applies here. It's turtles all the way down, baby. When these particles turn out to behave strangely, we'll have more bizarre theories to be solved by things sounding much more rational. Ad infinitum, perhaps. This brings up the argument of the first cause, but hey, that's for a later date.
I've thought for the longest time that the "one theory" would be forehead-slappingly simple. Err... compared to string theory. I hope this one pans out. Would be nice to have been "in on" it. But even if this guess is a bit off, I'm willing to bet is much, MUCH closer to reality than string theory ever came.
---Vote None of the Above---
No strings attached!
168570
Think about it.
And Still The Best Theory of Everything
I downloaded the paper in an furious attempt to dispute it. Here are my conclusions:
* Complex math tells me (ouch head hurts)
* Nice pictures tell me (oooh shiney!)
Most people are dumb.
Most surfers are dumb.
Most skydivers are dumb.
Most people who drive cars are dumb.
Most people who live in your town/city are dumb.
If you are in a profession that biases towards intellect (physicist, biologist, etc), chances are the people you encounter outside your work environment and in the general population are going to be dumber than you are. If everybody was smart, it wouldn't be called smart, it'd be called 'normal'.
If you hang out with physicists in California, there's a good chance you'll run into a physicists who likes to surf. Because even smart people have hobbies, and a common hobby in California is surfing.
But, that's just because you know a smart guy who likes to surf. Just because most A are B does not mean that most B are A. Lots of people in California like to surf, and just like anything else that doesn't have a bias towards intellect, most people who surf are dumb. But not all people who surf are dumb.
paintball
mg = milligrams
g or mcg = micrograms
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
NT.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I, like, just discovered the answer to, like, life, the universe and everything, man.
...is the possibility that our existence may indeed be based on a Lie.
*chuckle*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Garrett recently gave a talk to the International Loop Quantum Gravity Seminar: http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/ has slides and audio from the talk (and many other less controversial talks).
I think a lot of math students, at least, would tend to agree with you.
I have a BS in mathematics and reading this stuff still gives me nightmares.
This Slashdot post of his gives you a pretty good idea of his lifestyle:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144751&cid=12122943
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
slightly rude, but informative.
the standard model is particle physics, not quantum physics.
You forgot....
Most slashdot posters are dumb...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
But I see something weird here (from wikipedia): "In conjunction with the 258-question relationship questionnaire, this is how all of the matches are delivered. One significant scoring factor is what may be called the honesty factor. Subtract the proposed divorce rate Dr. Warren wants in the US (10%) from the number of questions and...and...
HOLY CRAP!!!!
sig sig sig siggy sig
I find many scientists are quick to judge other's work when it directly affects the validity of their work. Instead of saying maybe there is something here we can look at the are saying he's a crackpot. Even some crackpots like Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin have had good ideas.
I just wonder what kind of theory can describe "a mathematican" who discribes the universe ?
Yes read that again that's a bit different..
Would it be a fractal ?
If so its only a question if the universe would like to be described by itself.
But if it can describe itself by using a mathematican, then the universe is inteligent.'
If so there is some room for gods this way.
On the other hand if it wouldnt like to described it still might be inteligent (keeping its secrets smartly away).
Hmmm this reminds me of the movie "pi"
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
OAHU, Hawaii, Thursday -- Laid-back surfer dude Garrett Lisi is wowing the world of theoretical physics with his new paper "An Exceptionally Simple Theory Of Everything," reducing all fundamental physical forces to a single mathematical construct, the E8 Lie group.
Like many an unsung genius, Dr Lisi has failed to turn his theory into bucks. "Being poor sucks. It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Physicists worldwide were agog at the news of Dr Lisi's discovery. "Dude," said Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, "did you hear that? He has a girlfriend. He -- has -- a -- GIRLFRIEND. Duuude!"
Dr Lisi's theory is "so simple a string theorist could grasp it. I was out surfing, the equation floated into my head, and I went 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
Dr Lisi's theory notably bypasses problems with string theory, presently popular in the world of physics. "String theory is something that doesn't work, for guys without charm or a personality. No woman worth talking to will take a string theorist seriously. Even on bikinis it's just for decoration -- any serious surfin' girl knows to wear a one-piece.
"String theorists are the sort of pain-in-the-ass nerds who hassle anyone with a female name showing up on IRC. Can you imagine those dweebs even being in the presence of a female without peeing themselves? Hahahahaha!"
[Picture] A representation of E8, assembled by Dr Lisi one evening after scoring a particularly mellow sample. The white dots are girlfriends worth knowing, the green dots are sexy but crazy. A macho hunk of physicist who can negotiate their way through the 58-dimensional 240-node construct here illustrated can talk their way out of anything. In bed.
[Picture] Dr Lisi with 222 very close personal friends, each corresponding to one of the 240 roots of E8. If his next 18 very close personal friends match the theory, it will be proven. "It's not finished yet, of course," he says. "I did have to establish the angle of the right eyebrow empirically."
Czech mad scientist Dr Lubos Davros-Motl pooh-poohed Dr Lisi's theory. "Dr Lisi's theory is pooh-pooh," he said from his fourteenth-century castle high on a crag in Transylvania. "It is typical of anti-string crackpots with IQ below 100 who control academia. Crackpot Garrett Lisi does not understand the difference between fermions and bosons! Cranks with their "theories of everything" who know less than 1% what I do and whose IQ is 45 below mine! Literally an inferior species! Standard Model has been proven to be a consequence of compactified heterotic string theory back in 1985! Lisi and Smith and Sheppeard and Hossenfelder will NEVER get onto hep-th on arXiv! 4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth! They are EDUCATED EVIL and STUPID! STUPID STUPID!" Dr Davros' henchmen then started waving large clubs with spikes in the direction of our reporter, signaling the end of the interview.
Dr Lisi is not fazed. "String theory is a dying field," he said. "I mean, it's not like they're going to reproduce."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
...or does that guy bear an unsettling resemblance to Jeff Gannon/Guckert? Not this Gannon, right?How many years are there between the UNIX epoch and end of this age in the Mayan calendar, rounded down? (Answer: Forty-two.)
What should we build in ourselves to help us face our problems? (Answer: Fortitude.)
nt
the E8 grup describes the tighest structure of particles, formed by density fluctuations of another particles, recursivelly. Such particles can form the observable mass, if our generation of Universe is formed by interior of dense giant star (sort of black hole). Therefore this model has a physical meaining even in the scope of Newton's theory.
Is it just me or does the 2D representation of the E8 structure look suspiciously like a Maldala. And not the newer ones but the older ones that go back to Buddhism and Bohn religion. These people could have already seen this structure in their meditation states way back then.
I came up with a theory of everything, but it predicted that it was wrong, and it was right, and now my head hurts.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
This thread has been sitting in a tab for six days as I slowly worked my way down to find your marvelous exposition here. I'm just glad I know enough to follow it and appreciate it, though far from enough to try to add anything to it. And I am definitely going to link to it from somewhere a lot less volatile.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.