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.
4 days ago
3 comments:
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance didn't think it was worth reading (though for some reason it was worth blogging about), for whatever that's worth.
Maybe that's because the number of people on earth who understand Lie algebras are limited, and those who comprehend the solution to the E8 algebra (published this past March or May) likely number in the low hundreds in the world. (Comments?)
Lisi himself puts a low likelihood on this theory being "it", but he figured his insight was too... uh... insightful... not to publish.
While it's true that E8's full solution was only published recently (I remember glancing through an article in the AMS Notices about it), there have been partial results on it for quite a while. (I'm too lazy to check exactly how long, etc.)
Lizi's stuff is legitimate science regardless of whether it pans out. If it's an interesting idea with some scientific meat (it's definitely the first and it certainly seems to be the latter, and I'm not qualified to peer review it to check for sure), then it absolutely should be published.
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