Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything

[groovychk]

This guy is a bit dry because he's reading his speech but it's good and once he practices some more it'll be awesome.

Comments

[azzy23.livejournal.com]

oh wow... that was awesome. The idea, if I understand, is that particles are just manifestations of the pattern as it moves. The type of particle, being defined by the direction of the pattern at any given instant... and any particle is possible. If I understand correctly, of course.

I've often wondered if there are a set number of particles, honestly. I mean... we keep finding smaller ones that make up what we previously thought were the smallest. Maybe it's just turtles all the way down?

[groovychk.livejournal.com]

that pretty much what i'm thinking - in a way at least :-) larger structures/particles are the sums of the forces, quantum particles and their relative geometry. sounds kinda similar to string theory still - at least in some ways (even though the guy seemed to recoil at that suggestion).
that's with my non-math understanding being applied of course.
i'm thinking that there aren't a whole lot of particles left to discover. i'm thinking that most of this stuff is just a result of forces and the geometry of multi-dimensional space and that it's all pretty much there for us now but we've yet to figure out exactly how to fit together what we know.

[kyrie1618.livejournal.com]

I want to know how electric charge (a long range force) can be the sum of hypercharge and weakcharge (a short range force?).

I can see how he might not like the string theory comparison. String theory is famously untestable, right? Makes no predictions that we can check anytime soon? Where as the E8 idea predicts some of the properties of 22 new particles so if we find something not on the list Lisi will know right away that he's wrong.

[kyrie1618.livejournal.com]

That's incredible! I never heard of this E8 structure before, nor had I any idea that electric charge was really the combination of two other things! But the main reason I'm excited is the idea that we may have discovered almost all of the elementary particles.

I mean, three families? Why three? I always figured there would be a fourth, and a fifth, and so on. But this implies that there will never be a fourth, and it tells us why not. I notice that the matrices he's using are rank 8 - I wonder if that means that there are 8 fundamental forces, not just 4? Could mean interesting new physics...

The best part is that he's predicted certain properties of 22 new particles and that they are the only ones left to be discovered. Sure, it could just be an ansatz. Could be he's correct about the number and type of particles remaining, but wrong about why. He still can't predict particle masses (but nobody can, except for Heim).

But if the LHC finds a few of his new particles, I'd bet serious money he's right.