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[Phys-l] Lisi :: "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything"



Hi Folks --

Last week Garrett Lisi arXived an article entitled
"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything".
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

The abstract begins:
All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as ....

which is the sort of thing that gets people's attention. The title
page lists only one keyword: "ToE". (That stands for Theory of
Everything.)

This is not a string theory. It uses no dimensions beyond ordinary
1+3 dimensional spacetime. Lisi has been working toward this for a
while. Some good background can be found at
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week253.html

The reason I'm mentioning it in this forum is
a) It's kinda fun and interesting, and
b) New Scientist ran an article about it. The Telegraph picked it
up, and I suspect that in the next day or so lots of other media
will pick it up ... so you might get questions from students.
It's always nice to be prepared for such things.

The Telegraph headline reads
"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything"
and the whole article can be found at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

A short article with an impressive picture of the E8 root system can be
found at
http://aimath.org/E8/mcmullen.html

For those who want some not-very-light reading, Lisi's paper is online at
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770
The full abstract is:
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.

Note that the reference to Grassmann is closely related to Clifford
algebra, so if you've been wise enough to write things like
torque = arm /\ force
using a wedge product (rather than a stinky old cross product) you're
already ahead of the game.


I have no idea whether this work is right or wrong or somewhere in
between. I'm not sure anyone does as of the moment. I reckon this
is not the last we've heard of this work.