"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.” So ran a Daily Telegraph headline last November. The story circulated and quickly achieved widespread notoriety (even my dentist asked me about it). The physics blogosphere carried long threads of comments attacking and defending the theory and then attacking the tone of the discussion. The shouting and acrimony have died down, and the mainstream physics community remains largely unconvinced that the theory can stay afloat. In the words of Marcus du Sautoy, a University of Oxford mathematician writing in the Telegraph in late January: “Unfortunately, the consensus, after investigation, is that it is impossible to use E8 in the way Lisi was hoping and produce a consistent model that reflects reality.” Not everyone, of course, agrees.
A. Garrett Lisi, the surfer dude in question, came up with his theory while dividing his time among surfing, snowboarding and speculating about physics. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego, but has held no academic affiliation since then. He presented his ideas at conferences and invited seminars months before the media furor. From the start, he has been quick to comment that the chances of his theory being correct are very small, but he considers string theory (the approach most favored by physicists) to be even less likely.
Taken at face value, the theory sounds like an incredible discovery. It is based on a remarkable mathematical structure called E8. With 248 dimensions, E8 is the largest, most complicated and most beautiful of five idiosyncratic objects known as the exceptional simple Lie groups. (The title of Lisi’s paper, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” is first and foremost a pun.) And although E8 has a vast number of dimensions, the physical universe described by the theory could have only the four dimensions we are familiar with and not the 10 or 11 of string theory.
E8 has come up before in physics, most notably in string theory, but Lisi’s theory harkens back more to the early 1960s, when physicist Murray Gell-Mann noted that the zoo of subatomic particles then known could be organized into patterns that corresponded to features of another (and far more elementary) Lie group, SU(3). One of the patterns was missing a particle, and Gell-Mann predicted that a particle with certain properties should exist to fill that spot. Experimentalists soon discovered just such a particle.
Today the Standard Model of particle physics organizes all the known elementary particles into these patterns (or “representations”), but it takes a combination of three Lie groups to account for how the particles can interact via three fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces). Lisi’s insight was that he could place all these particles onto a representation of E8 with only a small number of spots left empty. This process is not just a matter of putting particles in nice-looking patterns in some arbitrary fashion; several properties, such as the electric charges of the particles, have to match up exactly with the relevant quantities in the representation. Furthermore, the patterns include particles that produce the four fundamental forces—including gravity. Hence the optimistic use of “theory of everything” in the title of Lisi’s paper.
Closer examination, however, revealed a few Jurassic-size flies in the ointment. For instance, the theory combines the matter particles and the force-carrying particles, referred to in the trade as fermions and bosons, in a way that at first appears fundamentally inconsistent. Various “supersymmetric” theories (including superstring theory) do combine fermions and bosons as well—but only with a detailed mathematical underpinning that E8 does not provide. One way of stating the problem is that if the new theory really describes bosons and fermions, then the structure it places them in cannot possibly be a Lie group at all.
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Add CommentJhy nott toss this in to the mix
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this? Here is another Theory of Everything which probably, unlike the surfer dude will be completely ignored.
The Oscillator/Substance Model, A Theory of Everything
Summary: This article presents a view of existence as being within a substance, at its triple point, consisting of separable oscillators. As such it gives new definitions of mass, energy, force, gravitation.... Included are possible explanations of "The Big Bang," Black Holes, Neutron Stars.... In terms of this model there is also a warning of possible danger from the Hadron Collider which is due to go into operation in the Summer of 2008.
The "Oscillator/Substance Model of Everything" is a second-generation model developed from the Motion in a Matrix Model.* The key insights of that model were that the speed of light being a limiting velocity of information transfer implied a necessary medium for interaction and that the interconvertibily of mass and energy implied that they were different aspects of the same thing. The original thought was that mass coordinated to point-centered motion and energy to motion along a line. While this seems to be in general quite close to the facts, it was realized that modifying the ideas to mass being motion confined within a surface and energy being a less specific term covering all types of motion, with Kinetic Energy being the type that would be dissipated along a line would be a more usable view.
If, instead of postulating a fixed matrix of dots as a basis for a model, it be assumed that there be a basic substance which will remain at, or return to its triple-point, the problem of whether the model is dealing with a solid, liquid or gas disappears. At the triple point the substance can act as any of the three depending upon slight variations in conditions. We may even postulate that the triple-point temperature is approximately the temperature of outer space, about three degrees Kelvin.
Postulating a substance basis for everything, allows us to define a number of things which are otherwise undefined or have "circular definitions." Mass becomes the balance between the motion content of the substance within a particular surface and the remainder of the substance.
WE ARE OUT OF SPACE HERE. if you want to read a version of the whole article see, www. deanlsinclair.blogspot.com