When I saw the title of the story (Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything), I thought the link is to that finest news source of America, Onion. But, no! The report seems to be genuine, though, the language does remind you of Onion — like this paragraph for example:
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.
Here is New Scientist on his work, and his paper is available in arXiv. Link via Scienceblogs.
Update: A couple of bloggers give their comments on Lisi’s paper and the surrounding hoopla: here is Sean at Cosmic Variance as to why he would rather be reading something else:
The paper seems to involve a novel mix-up between internal symmetries and spacetime symmetries, including adding particles of different spin. This runs against the spirit, if not precisely the letter, of the Coleman-Mandula theorem. Okay, maybe there is a miraculous new way of using loopholes in that theorem to do fun things. But I would be much more likely to invest time trying to understand a paper that was devoted to how we can use such loopholes to mix up bosons and fermions in an unexpected way, and explained clearly why this was possible even though you might initially be skeptical, than in a paper that purports to be a theory of everything and mixes up bosons and fermions so casually.
Rahul at E’s flat, Ah’s flat too wonders if Lisi is a crackpot (and links to several posts for and against the view point):
When such “manifestly crackpot” work can cause such excitement, one is inclined to sympathise with Motl when he frets: ‘Would cranks with their “theories of everything” who know less than 1% what I do and whose IQ is 45 below mine – literally an inferior species – would be placed upon us or even dictate what we can think about physics? Well, this epoch just here…’
Motl observes that the author, Garrett Lisi, is so ignorant of basic physics as to add fermions to bosons, or Grassman numbers to ordinary numbers. As he says, high school students know not to add quantities of different dimensions. So this Lisi guy must be quite a crank.
But the media quotes some well-known physicists — Lee Smolin, for one — as being quite excited by Lisi’s work. And Abhay Ashtekar is quoted here as being receptive to the work, and unconcerned about its defects: “You have to solve problems one at a time.” We’re surrounded by crackpots.
Or maybe Motl missed something? Lisi thinks so.
Take a look!
Tags: E8, Garrett Lisi, Theory of everything
