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Surfer’s ‘everything theory’ wipes out
- kiba 17y agoI think I felt an optical illusion in the E8-inspired graph.
- cubicle67 17y agoWasn't this from about a year ago?
- troystribling 17y agoThe original E8 theory of everything paper by Garret Lisi was written around 2 years ago. The paper mentioned in this article, published about a month ago, claims to prove that a theory of everything cannot be based on E8 http://www.springerlink.com/content/h3h4wh813606ggq8/?p=6d2b3d700fc647d886e66eb40c3ade4e&pi=3 http://www.springerlink.com/content/h3h4wh813606ggq8/?p=6d2b...
- beefman 17y agoYes. A preprint has been on the arxiv since May '09. Lisi has also responded to the criticism at length, and others have weighed in too.
- BigZaphod 17y agoBummer, dude. Totally.
- hristov 17y agoWell I am glad they listed a helpful analogy with a room and a bunch of chairs that cleared everything up for me.
- queensnake 17y agoAs opposed to giving you a graduate education in math & physics and many years of research besides?
- hristov 17y agoThe problem with putting jokes on HN is that you always have to explain the damn joke afterwards. So yes I think good analogies can be helpful, but this particular analogy made no sense whatsoever. I mean what does it mean that one has to put two chairs on top of each other? And why does that make the theory invalid. Theories do not have to look nice or symmetrical to be valid. In any event the analogy is completely baffling. If you cannot come up with an analogy that actually makes sense you may as well resort to authority and just say this was published in a peer reviewed journal so until someone refutes it, it is probably right.
- JCThoughtscream 17y agoA gearbox with sufficient volume, but whose design prevents the gears from meshing as intended?
- wdewind 17y agoIt made sense to me (although correct me if im wrong because i dont know anything about real math or e8): the room is a collection of furniture, the e8 is a collection of theories. if you rearrange all the furniture, it's still a room full of furniture, but now all the smaller pieces' intended purpose (sitting on them, putting books in them etc) no longer work. he still keeps e8 intact holistically, but he manages to do so only by invalidating the sub theories which make up the e8. close?
- yummyfajitas 17y agoBased on my reading of the first few pages of the paper (available here http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658 http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658 ), your description appears roughly correct. E8 is a lie group, which is a set of matrices which is closed under inversion and multiplication. In fact, E8 is a very large group. Particle physics is based on a set of smaller groups, but these groups are distinct. A "theory of everything" would embed these smaller groups into a single large group. Lisi showed that you can embed these smaller groups into E8, although he didn't show that all the important properties hold. Garibaldi showed that there are only 6 ways of doing this embedding which don't create higher spin particles. He then showed that none of these 6 ways preserve chirality (the right-handedness of the universe). So basically, while the relevant groups can be embedded into E8, they don't preserve the physics necessary for a theory of everything.
- Snark7 17y agoThat's nothing, I understand that a paragliding philosopher has proven that both the original theory and the refutation are immaterial contributions to knowledge under his own theory of scientific progress, to be published soon.
- stcredzero 17y agoWhich would have all come to naught if a particle physicist stunt driver crack shot brain surgeon rockstar hadn't saved the world from alien annihilation in the early 80's. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gNJ1z-ulB4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gNJ1z-ulB4
- nanofiggis 17y agoGarrett Lisi: "Dear Skip, you're now the guy who "proved E8 Theory can't work." Good luck. In physics, the universe gets the last laugh."