No 'Simple Theory of Everything' Inside the Enigmatic E8, Researcher Says

Science Daily

Quote from source:
The "exceptionally simple theory of everything," proposed by a surfing physicist in 2007, does not hold water, says Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi.

Garibaldi, a rock climber in his spare time, did the math to disprove the theory, which involves a mysterious structure known as E8. The resulting paper, co-authored by physicist Jacques Distler of the University of Texas, will appear in an upcoming issue of Communications in Mathematical Physics.

In November of 2007, physicist Garret Lisi published an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." Lisi spent much of his time surfing in Hawaii, adding an alluring bit of color to the story surrounding the theory. Although his paper was not peer-reviewed, and Lisi himself told the Daily Telegraph that the theory was still in development and he gave a "low" likelihood to the prediction, the idea was widely reported in the media, under attention-grabbing headlines like "Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything."

Garibaldi was among the skeptics when the theory hit the news. So was Distler, a particle physicist, who wrote about problems he saw with Lisi's idea on his blog. Distler's posting inspired Garibaldi to think about the issue more, eventually leading to their collaboration.

Lisi's paper centered on the elegant mathematical structure known as E8, which also appears in string theory. First identified in 1887, E8 has 248 dimensions and cannot be seen, or even drawn, in its complete form.

A little background of E8 for those who care. who should be everyone.

Quote from source:

Consider a wavy, two-dimensional surface, with many different spheres glued to the surface—one sphere at each surface point, and each sphere attached by one point. This geometric construction is a fiber bundle, with the spheres as the "fibers," and the wavy surface as the "base." A sphere can be rotated in three different ways: around the x-axis, the y-axis, or around the z-axis. Each of these rotations corresponds to a symmetry of the sphere. The fiber bundle connection is a field describing how spheres at nearby surface points are related, in terms of these three different rotations. The geometry of the fiber bundle is described by the curvature of this connection. In the corresponding quantum field theory, there is a particle associated with each of these three symmetries, and these particles can interact according to the geometry of a sphere.

In Lisi's model, the base is a four-dimensional surface—our spacetime—and the fiber is the E8 Lie group, a complicated 248 dimensional shape, which some mathematicians consider to be the most beautiful shape in mathematics.[7] In this theory, each of the 248 symmetries of E8 corresponds to a different elementary particle, which can interact according to the geometry of E8. As Lisi describes it: "The principal bundle connection and its curvature describe how the E8 manifold twists and turns over spacetime, reproducing all known fields and dynamics through pure geometry."[1]

The complicated geometry of the E8 Lie group is described graphically using group representation theory. Using this mathematical description, each symmetry of a group—and so each kind of elementary particle—can be associated with a point in a diagram. The coordinates of these points are the quantum numbers—the charges—of elementary particles, which are conserved in interactions. Such a diagram sits in a flat, Euclidean space of some dimension, forming a polytope, such as the 421 polytope in eight-dimensional space.

In order to form a theory of everything, Lisi's model must eventually predict the exact number of fundamental particles, all of their properties, masses, forces between them, the nature of spacetime, and the cosmological constant. Much of this work is still in the conceptual stage—in particular, quantization and predictions of particle masses have not been done. And Lisi himself acknowledges it as a work-in-progress: "The theory is very young, and still in development."[8]

Stunning picture because I love the beauty of symmetry.

Interesting to see it proven wrong as it just narrows our pools of GUT theories.

Was an interesting theory non the less and if it were true would have been cool as it was thought up by a guy who loves to surf. Too bad though, we need a theory of everything.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

i personally dont think that we will satisfy both sides of things until we describe a 5th force. or at the very least better describe/understand gravity as a whole.

you know it is funny how we know very very little about one of the most fundamental and basic forces that act upon a body, and we are worried about the GUT?

string theory is a progress, but still flawed.

i guess we will have to wait for CERN to show us the almighty higgs boson

reply to post by wx4caster


Hey, thats the last thing they need is a 5th force. They have had fun and have combined strong/weak and electromagnetic force in quantum, they have yet to understand quantum gravity. I personally think that gravity is misunderstood and we are stuck thinking about it in the ways that Newton did and then Einstein expanded on it (not that it doesn't work, we are just stuck in the box that they made instead of trying to improve it like Einstein himself did).

We will get it eventually, we need a new generation of theoretical physicists to come in and not care what has been said in the past and put down new rules. Thats what Einstein/Bohr's generation did and look what happened. It will come, I just want it now!!

Pred...

ah gravity...

MOND can describe it just fine

GR can describe it correctly, in a diferent frame

String says its particles...

but no one can really tell us WHY the apple falls. it simply does. i guess gravity is a force of faith lol.

reply to post by wx4caster


F*** faith! I have faith in nothing...

MOND is good but a lot of the science field doesn't like it too much. I personally do not mind it as it expands on what is know about it.

I like strings... and in the theory it makes sense, I just wish we had the technology to prove it...or at least make some of the basic equations of string theory. String theory is more mathematical though and physicists are saying we are going to have to invent a different field of mathematics to figure it out.

Pred...