Tales from the arXiv: Theories of Nothing and Everything

And here comes a philosophical entry...


Title: A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)

Author: Marcus Hutter

Abstract: The progression of theories suggested for our world, from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond, shows one tendency: The size of the described worlds increases, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. If pushed too far, a potential theory of everything (ToE) is actually more a theory of nothing (ToN). Indeed such theories have already been developed. I show that including observer localization into such theories is necessary and sufficient to avoid this problem. Ockham's razor is used to develop a quantitative recipe to identify ToEs and distinguish them from ToNs and theories in-between. This precisely shows what the problem is with some recently suggested universal ToEs. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than ToEs). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor.


Comment: Subjective, indeed.

An exceptionally silly theory of everything?

GFreak e-mailed me to alert me to this article offering a potential candidate for a theory of everything. I was expecting it to be an amusing piece of psychoceramics (i.e., crackpottery), but several experts seem to think that there is some interesting stuff there. Of course, that doesn't mean one will actually get a theory of everything out of it. However, this does appear to be a legitimate piece of scientific work. I know some of the math involved and could try to understand some of the paper if I tried to think about it (I'm exhausted at the moment and don't really want to bother right now), but basically contented myself to admiring the pretty pictures and extremely admirable command of latex. The citation list is a bit strange, with almost nothing coming from published sources. (Lots of arxiv papers were cited, and perhaps some of them have actually appeared in publications.)

Because the paper looked like legitimate science, I googled this guy and he is certainly receiving a lot of press about this. It will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out.

The guy who wrote this paper doesn't have a fixed affiliation (but has an excellent educational pedigree, so I imagine this is by choice), so I am naturally having images of Perlman (who was actually well-known, so there are some differences here).

Here is the website for the guy (Garrett Lisi) who wrote the paper. Here is an article from FOX News, although that organization is hardly reputable. Here is an article from The Telegraph.

Update: I actually meant to use the word "simple" in the title instead of "silly" but my word substitution amuses me, so I'm leaving the title as is.