
Has a surfer Ph.D. rewritten physics? Maybe. - robg
http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200805/garrett-lisi-1.html
======
gaika
Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my
site: <http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow> :)

You might also soon hear about his friend mentioned in the article, Brandyn.
He's working on a problem that is just as important as ToE. They had a running
joke: who would find ToE first, Garrent by math and thinking or Brandyn by
inventing AI that would do it for him.

~~~
bootload
*"... Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: <http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow> :) ..."

Hey Joe thanks for reminding me of jaanix again. I seem to remember it being
reviewed in HN a long while ago. Looking at it again the sig/noise is pretty
good. Is the site pulling HackerNews from RSS?

------
donw
My knowledge of mathematics is dwarfed by anybody with a higher degree in the
subject, and Algebra (the abstract kind, not the kind with lots of letters)
was my worst subject, but part of me is a bit pleased that E8 might be related
to an important bit of physics. It's a rather interesting structure, although
not 'the largest' as the article claims, as there are some which (if I recall
correctly), reach into million-dimensionality.

E8 also has some interesting properties relating to symmetry, so I'm not
surprised that it gets used in physics. It's just a pity that the universe
couldn't be related to A4, or A8, because I can actually grasp what's
happening in those groups.

Even if he's wrong, it goes to show that stepping outside the mainstream can
often times be the only way to starting out on a novel, and potentially
revolutionary, approach.

~~~
ninguem1
E8 is an exceptional Lie group (ie a group that is also a manifold, hence in
particular infinite). You seem to be mixing it up with the exceptional finite
simple groups. Wikipedia explains.

~~~
donw
Spoken like a man with a drastically better grasp of group theory than my own.
:)

------
canoebuilder
I'm not entirely keen on the hubbub refered to(the articles on Lisi from about
this time last year?)

Here is another article I read the other day, probably pretty similar, but it
wasn't bad

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_wallacewells?currentPage=all)

~~~
robg
Not surprising given the source, but that's a much better version. Thanks.

------
senthil_rajasek
Here is a nice observation from Lee Smolin about this theory,

"I don't see it as a finished theory," he says of Lisi's formulation. "I see
it as some mathematical observations and then a proposal."

------
dehowell
No. Even though particle physics gets all the media attention, theories like
this (and string theory for that matter), are shallow in comparison to
statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

It's exciting to find out what the smallest building blocks look like, but all
the real structure in the universe arise from the interactions... and
statistical mechanics addresses the interactions at all scales.

Modifications to our understanding of the smallest scales will trickle up to
stat mech and thermo, but statistical mechanics is the true heart of physics.

------
d0mine
No, he has not.
[http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001505.htm...](http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001505.html)

~~~
wheels
I find that blog post characteristic of what's wrong with academia. Lisi's
obviously not a nutjob, and obviously not an idiot, and he's treated with
contempt for proposing a big idea that might be wrong; might even be
spectacularly wrong. Academia as a whole would usually rather see people get
back in line and go on solving irrelevant problems. I found it encouraging
that in the originally linked article that he at least did find some people in
the scientific community that would treat him with a modicum of respect even
if it was just in taking the time to explain why his theory doesn't fit the
bill.

~~~
d0mine
There are "big ideas" which look interesting and fresh for a general public,
but they are boring and plain wrong for any professional in the field.

I'm sure you can find such things in your area of expertise.

All that glisters is not gold.

~~~
wheels
Sure, but boring and correct isn't a whole lot more interesting, and academia
seems to produce a seemingly endless stream of such in my field of expertise.
Many of the breakthroughs would have seemed naïve prior to having become
dominant. Incidentally, some of my most productive research while in college
was sparked by reading a paper that was patently wrong, but off-kilter enough
to get me to look into some previously unexplored corners for new models.

------
rguzman
I really don't know enough to say one way or the other, but for those who
care, here is some skepticism about Lisi's paper:
[http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-
theor...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-
of.html)

~~~
vsingh
This Lubos Motl guy seems to be a sort of Erik Naggum of physics. Yikes.

------
brentr
I don't remember where I read it, nor the exact wording, but there is a quote
that is perfect for this. It went something like this, "Godel proved
incompleteness. Anyone who thinks there is a theory of everything laughs in
the face of Godel."

My point is that physics does not exist in a vacuum. It is built up from
observational data found in nature and taken from experiments. If mathematics
can't come to complete truth (Godel has proven this), then there is no hope
for a theory of everything in something that uses mathematics as its language.

~~~
sarehu
That's complete nonsense. There's nothing about Godel's theorem that says the
physical rules of the universe can't be described. You're babbling
religiously.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
"A small number of scientists claim that Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves
that any attempt to construct a TOE is bound to fail. Gödel's theorem states
that any non-trivial mathematical theory that has a finite description is
either inconsistent or incomplete."

That's from the Wiki, FWIW. I'm not big on using Wiki as a source.

"Babbling religiously" is right on the line in my opinion. It makes you sound
like an arrogant jerk. If you have problems with the content of the comment,
state your case in neutral terms.

Learn to live with other people's ambiguity and looseness in phrasing. Then
perhaps they'll be more forgiving of yours. (Downmod)

~~~
tb
You appear to misunderstand the meaning of the terms "inconsistent" and
"incomplete" in the context of Gödel's theorem.

"Inconsistent": There is at least one statement within the system that can be
proved both true and false.

"Incomplete": There is at least one statement within the system that is true,
but cannot be proved to be true within the system.

Since Gödel's theorem applies to formal systems in mathematics, it does not
say anything about the possibility or impossibility of constructing a
"complete" (whatever that means) mathematical description of our reality.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thank you.

If I understand your last statement correctly, you are saying that a complete
but non-formal mathematical system could exist which models our reality.

I'm not sure that's where you wanted to go, but I appreciate the help and
clarification.

------
Allocator2008
Well leaving aside Godel, I think one can have a theory of everything that
has, as Rumsfeld would say, "known unknowns", i.e., a theory of everything
which "manages" in some way unknown parameters. Like infinities in quantum
field theory go away by the nature of string theory's elimination of
arbitrarily small distances. Anyway. I think I'm keeping my money on string
theory, but an interesting thought nonetheless!

~~~
DanielBMarkham
If you read a bit of Wolfram, he asks a provocative question: suppose the
universe is, in fact, discrete and not continuous. If this is the case, and I
think that's non-controversial now, then it may be that Sir Newton took us way
down the wrong road with his discovery of the integral. We've been doing
continuous math-type things with a universe that simply does not work that
way. The integral was simply a cheat -- a numbers game that looked as true to
reality as we could possibly verify at the time.

So we're working with known unknowns. That is, the integral works so well in
most everything we do we're comfortable where it falls apart -- right around
ToE, probably. But if we went belly-up as far back as Newton, where to start
to fix it? I know I'm sounding like a shill for NKS now, but I _did_ find it
had some really interesting ideas. In a computational universe, we could have
really simple physics that lead to incredibly complex and non-intuitive
results.

~~~
DaniFong
I didn't think the question of continuous versus discontinuous universes has
ever really been resolved in a convincing way. Do you have any references?

~~~
aswanson
No references and I may be going down the wrong path here, but wasn't there
some relatively recent activity with respect to the quantization of space,
with the Planck length being the minimal quantum?:
[http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck...](http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck.pdf)

~~~
DaniFong
As far as I know the question is completely theoretical: we haven't been able
to use the idea to produce any predictions which we might use to measure
whether the universe is this way or isn't.

Also, that linked paper seems to be nothing other than numerology. It is
interesting that the numbers are so close, but that could be a pure
coincidence.

~~~
aswanson
Numerolgy, hilarious. I have to use that one someday, hope you don't mind. At
any rate, I meant to post a Smolin paper on LQG that posited quantized space,
and if I recall there was supposed to be some data coming in from an
observatory that could lend some weight to the theory (back in 2005?).

------
timothyandrew
Complex stuff.

