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."

GUT from a surfer dude!

[haluness]

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!

might be on to something

[wes33]

Lubos Motl thinks it's pure bullshit ... so Lisi might well be on to something :)

I have a horrible feeling...

[lobiusmoop]

that the earth is going to get demolished any minute now.

Best quote from the article

[Spy der Mann]

"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."

I smell an XKCD comic approaching....

Re:just a GUT feeling

[Pulse_Instance]

I don't know about string theory but there is no way he pulled it off without rope theory.

Huh?

[ratguy]

I think some people have an entirely different definition of 'Simple' than myself.

FTFA

[aproposofwhat]

it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space

then...

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

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!

;)

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[urcreepyneighbor]

Strong body, strong mind.

You can't kick ass if you can't get off yours!

Huh

[edwardpickman]

So it's not 42?

Re:Huh? Wat?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

42.

I'm sorry, what was the question again?

Re:He's to Physics what Slava Pestov is to PLT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slava Pestov, is that you?

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[EugeneK]

Well, sure. It's a little known fact that one time Einstein and Chuck Norris met, and Chuck Norris got his ass handed to him.

E8's Dimensions

[Dr. Eggman]

Underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group. Balls, cylinders or cones are familiar examples of symmetric three-dimensional objects. Today's feat rests on the drive by mathematicians to study symmetries in higher dimensions. E8 is the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional. E8 itself is 248-dimensional.

Ha! Take that, 11-dimensional Supergravity SuperString M-Theory!

I think it's some sort of ad.

[mrbluze]

Can someone explain to me what E8 is? The wikipedia article left me with more questions than answers :(

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.

Re:For the non-mathematicians

[OzRoy]

I still don't understand. Are you able to use a Car Analogy?

I'm not sold yet

[JustCallMeRich]

I'm just waiting for Dvorak to denounce it. That'll be proof enough for me.

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[sconeu]

Guess he's just seriously into Wave Mechanics....

Re:I have a horrible feeling...

[ackthpt]

that the earth is going to get demolished any minute now.

I think the universe will now be replaced by something even more inexplicable, than again, this may have already happened.

Pure Maths

[BovineSpirit]

From Wikipedia:

The designation E8 comes from Wilhelm Killing and Élie Cartan's classification of the complex simple Lie algebras, which fall into four infinite families labeled An, Bn, Cn, Dn, and five exceptional cases labeled E6, E7, E8, F4, and G2. The E8 algebra is the largest and most complicated of these exceptional cases, and is often the last case of various theorems to be proved.

"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'.

Re:For the non-mathematicians

[Lord Byron II]

Say you're Jay Leno. All of the classic cars in your garage forms a set.

If you swap two cars, that operation with the set of cars forms a group.

Maybe all of your cars are red. Then swapping any two doesn't change the pattern of colors in your garage. You have a color symmetry.

Happy? =)

Genius?

[kaiynne]

From the wiki article

It was discovered by Wilhelm Killing (1888-1890).

Man at 2 he had already mastered complex mathematics. To think what he could have done if his life had not been tragically cut short...

What is this new unit?

[viking80]

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)?

Re:I have a horrible feeling...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/8101/coincidenceph0.jpg [imageshack.us]

Would the front page of Slashdot be considered a coincidence considering the content of this news item???

Re:Best quote from the article

[Bluesman]

Since you asked:

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.
   /
/O\         O
---        ---
  |          |
/ \        / \

________________

          When I look at you, you make the
          patterns in the floor tiles
          vanish.
         /
/O\    O
---   ---
  |    \|
/ \   / \

Re:Best quote from the article

[Bluesman]

Damn slashdot formatting. Pretend that the bodies of the stick figures are shifted over to the left 1em.

Management Speak

[chill]

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.

Re:Help BadAnalogyGuy!

[Bluesman]

Don't count on any help there. BadAnalogyGuy is like a leftover acorn in the summer, long after the bears have woken from hibernation.

Re:Best quote from the article

[thermopile]

So does your mom. With velociraptors. And Richard Stallman.

Clear as mud

[Lord Grey]

From the referenced blogspot page:

If you care how the forces and particles are supposed to be embedded into his group, it's like this. You start with a non-compact real form of E8. You embed a G2 into it. Its centralizer is a non-compact version of F4. Now, you embed the strong SU(3) into the G2 while the non-compact F4 acts as the source of a "graviweak" SO(7,1) group that contains SO(3,1), a "gauge group" that is now fashionable in the crackpot circles to "describe" gravity, and SO(4), their source of cargo cult electroweak symmetry.

Of course, this group plays a different role (in the vielbein formulation of general relativity) than the Yang-Mills groups and the fact that these two kinds of a group cannot be merged is the content of the Coleman-Mandula theorem to be discussed at the end of my text. Moreover, the fermions clearly can't arise from the connection because they have a different spin and statistics and they don't transform in the adjoint representation. For people like A. Garrett Lisi, it is not hard to unify everything with everything else because they don't know any difference between different concepts in physics.

Now I know how my wife feels when my friends come over and we talk shop.

Re:E8's Dimensions

[GMFTatsujin]

We shouldn't be surprised if string theory turns out to be false ... according to this, it's *all* a pack of Lies.

Re:just a GUT feeling

[ozmanjusri]

This thread blows.

Re:For the non-mathematicians

[forkazoo]

I still don't understand. Are you able to use a Car Analogy?

The U(1) group is the group of all unitary, unicycles that leave the inner (dot) product invariant.

The SU(2) group is the group of all unitary, motorcycles that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.

The SU(3) group is the group of all unitary, 3-wheeled novelty cars that leave the inner (dot) product invariant and have a determinant of 1.

Re:This is most likely BS. Please see here.

[Pharmboy]

Wow, nice quotes. I think you nailed it with the "fanboi-ism" charge. And as a bonus, if in the second paragraph you replace "string theory" with "BSD" and "physics" with "operating systems", it still makes sense.

It's very clear that if someone dislikes BSD, she or he must dislike most of modern operating systems, too (Lee Smolin certainly does!). It's because BSD is nothing else than the crown, unification, or culmination of modern operating systems and all of its crucial results, insights, methods, principles, and values.

See? Gentoo, Linux, or anything else with fanboys. Try it with "PS3" and "gaming consoles", or any other combo. ;)

Re:Best quote from the article

[Breakfast Pants]

Hopefully the next xkcd comic will be about slashdotters who do ascii art without even hitting preview. With velociraptors.

Re:I don't understand a thing :(

[ROMRIX]

Can someone explain to me what E8 is? The wikipedia article left me with more questions than answers :(

Try to picture a spherically inverted multifaceted poly-dimensional plexoid of random size, add in an elemental variable thermal/mass coefficient linking system based on the gravitational and magnetic field enhanced rate of change fluctuations of sub-atomic particles and it all comes together like butter and honey on toast. Well, butter and honey don't really come together on toast but you get the idea...

Re:might be on to something

[3waygeek]

If this object exists in 248 dimensions, shouldn't we call it F8?

Come on!

[Ctrl-Z]

Seriously, this story was just an excuse to combine the "theoryofeverything" and "surfing" tags.

Applications

[markov_chain]

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).

Re:might be on to something

[mikael]

When I was an intern, I got to use a real hardware packet sniffer for a clients site, then we went to a truckers restaurant for lunch. That evening I knew I had eaten something bad even in my sleep, as I kept seeing these 0x0BADF00D packet headers scrolling up.

Re:might be on to something

[Tragek]

It's always nice to have someone like that.

Re:I don't understand a thing :(

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that God doesn't play dice with the universe, he plays fizzbin?

Re:No experimental basis for a theory of everythin

[pensano]

Yah, OK, so please, you try it.

-Garrett

Re:If the LHC experiments prove him right...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the LHC experiments prove him right..

I kinda feel like THC experiments are the only way to understand any of this.

Re:Are you Lubos or something?

[ColdWetDog]

Also, everyone knows that the fermions arise as chiral multiplets and not vector multiplets: they are simply not and cannot be a part of the gauge bundle.

Now I feel really bad. I didn't know that.

Re:might be on to something

[elronxenu]

No, because 8 dimensions are occupied by the packet headers and routing information.

Re:I don't understand a thing :(

[sabernet]

He just plays with a loaded D20, apparently.

Re:Huh?

[porpnorber]

... finite simple Lie group.

Can't be true.

(Sorry.)

Re:An attempt at a summary

[protohiro1]

Your karma is insufficient for breakthroughs in theoretical physics.

Re:I don't understand a thing :(

[taniwha]

no apparently she plays with a spirograph ....

Re:I don't understand a thing :(

[BobGregg]

>>No - it is called an exception lie algebra.

Not to be confused with a damned lie algebra, which is close to statistics.

Re:An attempt at a summary

[pcgabe]

Hey look, my server's melting -- must of hit slashdot...

Must have! Must HAVE!

How can you write a paper revolutionizing our understanding of physics if you don't use proper grammar?!

Re:For the non-mathematicians

[TuringTest]

there are probably several persons on this Earth named Jay Leno. How do we know which one you are referring to?

The master spoke: 'That's why we call it a symmetry'.
The apprentice was enlightened.

Re:Wikipedia link to E8 - Still makes nooooo sense

[dotancohen]

The Problem with Wikipedia [xkcd.com]

Re:might be on to something

[dave420]

What about the evil dimension? Is that in there yet?

The Great Debate

[handy_vandal]

Still, it's hard to argue with a Nobel prize winner [acidhead].

Not hard at all -- ! Goes like this:

Nobel Prize Winner: "My theory," etc.

Me: "No way, dude!"

NPW: "Way!"

Me: "Nuh-uh!"

NPW: "Uh-huh!"

Me: "Umm ... okay."

[Okay, I was wrong. It wasn't easy, and he won the debate.]

-kgj

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[Cragen]

To go somewhat off-topic, your axiom that "you only live once" is unprovable. The problem is, of course, that the statement "you live more than once" is also difficult to prove. (objectively, anyway). Logically, the statement "there is nothing beyond death" seems frivolous when using a basis of time. I do wish I knew, definitively, one way or the other.

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[Shinmizu]

Is that just for Warp Drive Engineering, or does it apply to several fields of study?

Re:GUT from a surfer dude!

[Anonymous Coward]

Classroom in 3rd grade in 2059:

Teacher: "What did the discoverer of the theory of everything say when he discovered the theory of everything?"

Class: "'Holy crap, that's it!'"

Its like E-Harmony !!

[onion_joe]

I get it! Its like an e-harmony compatibility profile where instead of dimensions of compatibility you have dimensions of particle properties!

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!!!!