

Surfer-Physicist's Unified Theory Leads to Fame, Backlash - bootload
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/ted_lisi

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mixmax
"Surfing is simply the most fun I know how to have on this planet. And
physics, and science in general, is the best way of understanding how
everything works. So this is what I spend my time doing. I do what I love, and
follow my interests. Shouldn't everyone?"

Now that is truly insightful.

~~~
ashu
It's more inspiring than insightful, probably.

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mixmax
Yeah, that might be the word I was looking for.

See the above comment :-)

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pfedor
<http://zunger.livejournal.com/160426.html>

"The non-technical version is that it makes for a great news story and all,
but this is the sort of idea that most high-energy physicists come up with
sometime during grad school, think about for a few minutes, and then realize
why it doesn't work."

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wallflower
I read about Kerry Black in Wired a while back. Another fascinating surfer-
physicist who is well on his way to delivering perfect surf waves on demand to
bored teens at indoor land-locked malls.

"It's evening, and Black is hosting a dinner party with his girlfriend and a
few guests at his house just blocks from ASR. As he throws a couple of fresh
red snapper on the grill, Black talks about his quest to decipher the physics
of surfing. It's one that's taken him more than 30 years, most of which had
more to do with mundane coastal dynamics and oceanography than with surfing
per se."Before you can understand surfing reefs," he says, "there's so much
other knowledge you need. Wave dynamics. Sediment transport. Computer
modeling. I was really in a long process to get those things before I could
start on surf breaks."

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/surfing_pr.html>

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ardit33
Physics is like it's own religion with it's own priests, and a social caste.
Ideas matter only depending who they come from. This guy, is basically nobody,
hence he will face a lot of this backlash from the estabilishment.

There are so many theories out there, that are just madeup mathematic formulas
with lot's of wholes, and new concepts being invented just to fill those
gapping wholes, from which those theories wouldn't make sense.

Gravitron, dark mass, dark energy, gravitational waves, all made up. They may
or may not exist. Until there if concrete proof, they just exist just as god
exist for religious people. You can't prove they exist, but you can't really
prove they don't exist.

I am still counting the number of "dimensions" comming out from the string
theorists, from 9 to 10, to 11, and now the brane theory...things that just we
cannot test with our current technology.

This guy's theory, should be partially testable, especially with the new
particle accelerator comming out of Cern. But the problem, he is not in the
establishment. He is not an insider of the religion.

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curi
The problem with this theory is that it's factually false. Physicists simply
do not behave that way. A handful do, but physicists in general are much more
principled than most other specialists in other fields, which is why physics
has been so successful.

PS you don't have to attack science to defend religion

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ashu
Is string theory also 'factually false' according your definition?

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ardit33
I don't say it is false, but there is a huge camp on the physics community
saying, as long as all those theories are not testable in any way with our
current techonology, then they are just philosophical theories, and not
science.

Remember, hard science is based on observation, and testing. When I say
testing, means that they are proven correct for some kind of settings. Just as
Newton's Gravitational Law, is correct for most human (small, or large scale),
but it is incorrect for the very very tiny (quantum scale), or it may be
incorrect for the very very large.

[http://www.teachersdomain.org/resources/phy03/sci/phys/fund/...](http://www.teachersdomain.org/resources/phy03/sci/phys/fund/theoryorphil/index.html)

~~~
rms
>are not testable in any way with our current techonology

It'd be cool if we hit singularity soon and build a planet size particle
accelerator.

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vsingh
Does he really claim to have a complete unified theory of physics, or is that
just media hype?

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rms
No, he doesn't, it's just media hype. He claims that the E8 is probably
significant to the fundamental forces.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_polytope>

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ashu
Huh? He indeed does claim that his model unifies all the forces. The title of
his paper was: "An exceptionally simple theory of everything".

From: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770>

    
    
      All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection.

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rms
I have recalled my own incomplete recollection here.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81332>

