If this holds up under examination … WOW!
Sorry, but I can’t upload the New Scientist review. Trust me, his math will sail over everyones heads.
Anyone looking for someone to sponsor?
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
The E8 pattern (left), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “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.”
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.
“Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years,” Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
“Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi’s theory,” adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. “This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound.”
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a “radical new explanation” for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi’s model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: “The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in.”
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: “Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I’d love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot.”
Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - 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.
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.”
What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi’s breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8’s structure matched his own. “My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he tells New Scientist. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’”
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8’s 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. “How cool is that?” he says.
The crucial test of Lisi’s work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
“The theory is very young, and still in development,” he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I’d assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
“For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online.”
Oh my gravity, it’s so simple!!! How did I miss this ?!?!
“Abstract: All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.”
Ha! It figures a surfer would come up with the Unified Field Theory.
He probably stepped onto the sand, handed-over his idea, and paddled back
out to get more waves…
…I’m not joking.
the biggest thing i am concerned with is the fact that a Surfer is breaking the mold. Spiccoli no more. Einstein here we come. Surfers have been long over due for such mathematics conquests as such for many millennia.
Nice work. Too bad the article doesn’t get much inside the theory. Let’s hope to jìhear more in the future
yo
Stefano
COULD SURFERS JUST BE HUMAN???
just a thought
Here’s more.
There is a hot link in line five (the word “paper”) in the link below that takes you to his actual paper. M_
http://chronicle.com/blogs/footnoted/1027/surfing-to-the-theory-of-everything
um…yes. yes we can.
Mark,
Thanks for posting that. This kind of stuff really stokes me.
The irony there is really something.
Tell all your friends.
Most of my best ideas come either while Im surfing or exercising.
Wonder if he was surfing at the time of the “holy crap, thats it!” moment.
Great stuff.
Hey Mark, I linked his paper in my post
fur whut it’s wurth!! I cudn make head ner tail of it
D’oh!
Sorry about that.
Guess I did need a second cup of joe after all.
This guy (see link below) calls him a crackpot among other things.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html
And some people think Swaylocks is tough…
Maybe Garrett Lisi, PhD. would like to come here and talk with us.
Somebody here has to know him.
Anybody?
Quote:
Maybe Garrett Lisi, PhD. would like to come here and talk with us.
This make me smile and make ape laffs!
Awesome stuff…would be great if it the predictions hold true! Also kinda sucks that the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was never built, or he could be testing the theory right now…
JSS
Haha
Then this will really make you go ape crap!
Check out this paper he wrote.
“Drag Reduction over Dolphin Skin via the Pondermotive Forcing of Vortex Filaments”
Here’s a link to a blog where Garrett replies to some of the concerns. Reading level difficulty: not too hard.
Quote:
Awesome stuff…would be great if it the predictions hold true! Also kinda sucks that the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was never built, or he could be testing the theory right now…
That pissed me off when they canceled the SSC. At the time they were deciding on whether to spend the money on the SSC or the ISS Space Station, and the IIS won out. Nothing significant has come out of the ISS. It was a total waste of money IMO.
Hooray for Lisi. That’s a great story. I hope that his theories get validated.
I’ve thought about the dolphin skin thing on numerous occasions after studying a dead pilot whale that washed up at Blacks, and also on a Dolphin I found on the beach in Carlsbad. It occurred to me that if one could somehow scan the dolphins fins and have an exact reproduction of the fins applied to where and how they would be placed on a surfboard, we could quite possibly do the same with the dolphin or pilot whale’s skin. You could take a sample of about 1 square foot, and digitally reproduce that to cover the bottom surface area of a surfboard. Somehow this could be applied to the bottom of a board, and one might get the similar speed results on one’s surfboard as we see in Dolphins that surf in the wild. I mean come on, people have already turned the shark camo thing into a full bottom sticker… why couldn’t we produce a 3M synthetic Dolphin Skin sticker or polymer of sorts???
Imagine the possibilities that could arise from this… this could be applied to the bottoms of every ocean-going vessel saving billions of dollars every year in the use of petroleum products that are consumed by just the shipping industry alone, not to mention what is used recreationally… okay… I’ve said enough… time to go wood shedding… I’ll immerge in a month or two with some sort of testable product… hahahahahahahaha… but no… seriously…if the entire swaylocks community pitched in some cash, some research, and time in the field… we could collectively come up with a product… and none of us would ever have to work again! We could just design and shape boards and spend the rest of our lives surfing on them! YES!!!
ANY TAKERS???
Do you think we could compete with the combined budgets of all the branches of the armed forces? They are the ones buying this kind of research.
Even if we found something they would take it away. Don’t ask me how I know. Just trust me. I know.
Sanded works, thinks I
It’s not nature, but neither’s airplanes
Guy here has done some kind of finish like that for a while
Henry Fry