Garrett Lisi has a new paper, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Many people seem to think that I should have an opinion about it, but I don’t. It’s received a good deal of publicity, in part because of Lisi’s personal story — if you can write an story with lines like “A. Garrett Lisi, a physicist who divides his time between surfing in Maui and teaching snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, has come up with what may be the Grand Unified Theory,” you do it.
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.
So I’m sufficiently pessimistic about the prospects for this idea that I’m going to spend my time reading other papers. I could certainly be guessing wrong. But you can’t read every paper, and my own judgment is all I have to go on. Someone who understands this stuff much better than I do will dig into it and report back, and it will all shake out in the end. Science! It works, bitches.
For a discussion that manages to include some physics content, see Bee’s post and the comments at Backreaction.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the link. I’m semi-happy with the sentence the quote in the NewSci article. At least it’s a sentence I said. Though the context (“argues that Lisi’s idea could be complementary to string theory, rather than a radical alternative”) is a very fanciful interpretation of my wording (“I find it possible that a relation between these approaches can be established.”) Best,
B.
sean, I’d say you’re wise to stay clear of that one. Wow.
B, that’s about as close to accurate as New Scientist gets. And, may I say, you are a gentleman and a scholar, for hosting such a…let’s say “energetic”…discussion. Interesting in many ways.
Hi Tylor,
Thanks for the kind words. I am currently on the phone with my husband… he’s kind of irritated about me being a gentleman ;-).
Besides, I forgot to mention that the term ‘these relations’ in the sentence I actually said, did not refer to string theory only, but included LQG – a part that was completely left out. Best,
B.
B, I am very sorry for my gender-ist assumption. Truly. As a pro-feminist person, I am ashamed of myself.
I have worked as a professional forum moderator, way back in the distant past, and admire your technique.
re: NS, you’re just lucky they didn’t quote you as saying “due to Lisi’s brilliant paper I now have the E8 diagram tattooed on my back, and did I mention it also proved that cannabis is harmless and medicinally useful?”
(not a dig at Lisi, his work, or medicinal cannabis for that matter, I am just a bit tired of New Scientist’s ever-reliable unreliability and obsessions with certain clickthrough-generating subjects)
Hi Tyler, No problem. I like the idea with the E8 tatoo 🙂 Also, Tegmark should be very happy that the root diagram fits nicely on a T-shirt. -B.
OK, the hype (and my inbox) has gotten totally out of control. This is, after all, about an untested theory that may or may not turn out to be true. But, on the other hand… it’s pretty damn amusing.
Mostly, all this media attention just makes me want to go hide for fifteen minutes, and I hope to come back to see physicists pondering this E8 theory, despite the hype.
Garrett, It seems to me as a non physicist who has browsed through your new paper, that maybe you’re the one person for which the delay in the LHC coming on line is an advantage. It gives you time to work up as much as you can the properties of the twenty proposed new particles and publish before they get the beast working at high energies.
In which case, if you are right, you may have predicted the new particles they find with the LHC just a few months before they are discovered, much better than a a retrodiction a few months after.
Well, at least people is hearing about exceptional groups. Never liked E8 myself, too many particles. But E8xE8 is more excessive, or course. And the chain up of Dynkin diagrams, adding a point each step, has always been kind of motivating.
There has been an slashdot effect in all the physics blogs even if only indirectly linked, at least I am under this impression after looking my own statistics (not a factor 3, but a noticeable peak).
Well as my little contribution to people who want to know more about E8, I typed up a Java applet last night that lets you choose the horizontal and vertical projection axes and rotate the roots using Garrett’s notation. It comes up with random choices.
When I was in grad school (at UC Irvine), there was a professor who was into E8. I can’t remember his name, but he was the guy who had 10,000 rhinoceroses in his office. Anyone who attended the school in the early 80s will know who I mean.
Cool applet! It looks like a lattice.
No comment on the above article per se. I’d simply like to point out a mistake in foxnews http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311952,00.html article about Lisi as linked to above. The proper headline should read “Fallen-over-backwards Surfer Dudee May Be Physic’s next blackhole”. Indeed, Lisi-alike stuff serves but one purpose, to suck in all superfluous and irrelevant brain power that otherwise would be in the way of serious research. It remains to be seen in what form Dudee blackhole’s digestive output will reappear. One thing we know for sure, it will definitely not be as the TOE.
The foxnews story is incredibly bad. The one by CBC.ca is several orders of magnitude better.
Hi B., your quotes in the CBC story are, how shall I say it, fabulous…I had a few minutes yesterday to consider what to say about that story, and could not come up with something that reflects my opinion yet escapes the prescribed role of the “establishment” in the “maverick against establishment” storyline. I’m relieved they found someone to say something sensible.
Cosmic Variance readers like the straight, inside story; so this seems a good opportunity to tell mine. Ten years ago, I got my PhD and looked at my options. I love differential geometry, general relativity, and particle physics. But the only options available then for a postdoc in those combined areas were in string theory, and I thought string theory was overly speculative. There are many really impressive aspects of strings — anomaly cancelation in particular — but there are other things that just seem wild and physically unsubstantiated. I had gotten lucky by investing my graduate stipend in a little company many thought was going out of business (AAPL), so I decided to go to Maui, learn to windsurf, and work on physics on my own. I was pretty happy that way, spending most of my time on physics, and posting a paper on the arxiv only if I thought I’d discovered something interesting. But even though I spend money like a grad student, after several years I was broke, and things were looking grim.
Then, two years ago, the FQXi foundation started up and sent out their RFP. At the same time, the college on Maui, where I had been teaching a physics class, offered me a full-time, tenure track teaching position. This was a very nice offer, but I knew if I took it I’d have no time for my physics research. It was a very difficult choice, but I turned it down. I gambled on FQXi. I packed up the best physics I had done over the previous eight years, and sent it off as a grant proposal. And I got it. With this support, I felt the timing was right (and that I was somewhat obligated) to talk with others about my work. I flew down to the LQG conference in Morelia and presented a twenty minute talk. The LQG community is fantastic — their research is branching out in all directions to solve quantum gravity, and they’re all really nice people. Once they saw what I had been up to, Sabine and Lee invited me to visit Perimeter — which I accepted, of course, as this had been a daydream of mine since the institute was founded.
A month later, I was in Iceland at the FQXi conference, eating the best lobster I’ve ever had, across the table from Mark (Hi Mark!) and the science editor for New Scientist. During this dinner, she must have made note of me, because two months later there was an email from a reporter asking for an interview.
I was in the middle of writing up the paper when I visited PI, a fantastic nerd heaven. I talked with people there about this new E8 theory, and it went very well. I returned to Tahoe, where I’m living in a friend’s house, and finished the paper. I also exchanged twenty detailed emails with the reporter, which ended up as… well, it’s not a terrible article, and some of my conservative statements did filter in. I posted the paper to the arxiv, Sabine made an excellent and reasonable review, and the New Scientist published their article. Apparently, this was the beginning of the perfect media storm. The story spread, fast. I attempted to write accurate responses to the growing queue of inquiries from newspaper reporters. And I got a phone call from a friend who runs an ISP and hosts my web pages: “Umm, Garrett, I have the internet bandwidth of the gods, but you’re simultaneously on the front page of Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot… and you just capped it out.” It was right around then that my inbox exploded.
I am answering reporters’ questions, and trying to make it clear that I do think I’ve come up with an exciting and beautiful new theory, but that it’s grounded in a long history involving the work of many others, and that as with any new theory, it may turn out to be wrong. I’ve spent much more time answering questions on blogs, because I want other physicists to understand the content of the paper, which is mathematically sound but presents many new ideas at once. I’ve refused several requests for brief television and radio interviews, because I think they would only serve the media and amplify the spectacle, instead of increasing interest in physics and how physicists think about the world. At the same time, other aspects of the media frenzy have been very cool (Hey, I’m going to be featured in Surfer magazine!) and completely overwhelming.
The media attention will blow over. While I’m in the spotlight, I’ll try to present a message that’s good for physics. It’s not my intent to tear down academia — heck, I’d be thrilled if some academic opportunities arose from this. (Though it’s baffling to me how academics manage to juggle all the responsibilities and research at once.) It’s not even my intent to tear down string theory. I don’t happen to like it, but I think people should be able to work on what they want.
One way or another, this stuff will all work out. I believe what Sean said — science works — even if sometimes things get a little crazy.
-Garrett
Thanks, Garrett. It also baffles me how academics manage to juggle all the responsibilities and research at once.
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My memory kicked in and the professor at UCI who liked E8 back in 1984 was Gordon Shaw. He died in 2005.
Life is short and there really isn’t enough time to do research and all the duties that academia requires.
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Crackpot Carl comments: A theory of everything should at least explain the following points:
1. Why does anything exist at all?
2. Why does the laws of nature look like math?
3. Why is the universe so “fine tuned”?
1. We cannot use anything that exists to explain why something exits. So what exists comes from nothing. How is that possible? “When” nothing exists there are no hinders, no conservation laws, no need for causation that could stop something from starting to exist.
2. Only self-consistent “things” (universes) can start to exist, else their existence will conflict with their existence. The mathematics we see in our laws of nature (although not fully know at this time) is the way this universe is kept consistent.
3. Apart from what already exists, there is nothing (by logic). So Nothing keeps on spewing out self-consistent universes regardless of what exists. No wonder some of them have properties such as ours. Unfortunately the only link between these universes is Nothing. So there is no link, sadly.
🙂
Carl
Thanks for the nice story, Garrett. I’m a bit jealous of you though…I had always hoped that I’d be the first physicist in the “People Who Surf” column!
I’ll bite on running the “alternative science respectability” checklist. We have:
1) “Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.”
Author received a Ph.D. in physics from UCSD, which by itself doesn’t mean much, but it does demonstrate some minimal level of competence. Check.
2) “Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.”
The most common “fundamental objection” that seems to get raised is the Coleman-Mandula theorem. From a skim of the paper and conversation on Backreaction, it seems that the way this is dealt with is not new, though not without controversy. I’m not competent to make a technical assessment, but the standard here is “good-faith effort to confront”, rather than “definitively prove to the satisfaction of every working scientist”, which to me seems to be clearly met. The author also seems happy to dialogue about other issues. Check.
3) “Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.”
The parts of the paper which I have sufficient background to read sound fine. Again, I don’t have sufficient background to make a technical assessment of the rest, but the question here is whether the “discovery” is uninterpretable on its face, or can be evaluated. To me, it seems evaluatable, even if I can’t evaluate it. Nor do the critiques that I’ve seen suggest that it’s incomprehensible, only that it’s wrong. I’m therefore going to give this a check as well.
None of this means that this paper is interesting or correct, much less worth spending time on. It’s only a question of whether this contribution can be dismissed as “alternative” science (ie crackpottery), or if it’s boring old regular science from a boring old regular scientist with a slightly nontraditional career path. I think it’s the latter, and to suggest otherwise is a disservice.
Disclaimer: I went to grad school with Garrett. (Hi Garrett!)
Speaking of bad news coverage, I could not resist the temptation and I am making a quick translation for you of the article that appeared in the online science section of La Repubblica, the first italian newspaper. If you can read italian, the link is here.
I’m doing a literal translation, so some sentences that sound weird might be due to me, but some make no sense even in italian, trust me. I find that the style is amusingly similar to the one of the piece in The Onion linked here some time ago.
“E8: such is the Universe. A surfer’s word.
by Tiziano Toniutti
Garrett Lisi, 39 years-old, with a degree in Physics (but he doesn’t work for the University), lives in Hawaii where he does everything he can not to look like a science guru: sleeps in the jungle, spends hours on the surf board, builds bridges. He spends winter in Nevada where he practices snowboard. A 40-year-old boy like many others, but for the fact that he likes to unveil the secrets of the Universe.
Lisi has sketched a theoretical model of the Universe that he has called E8 and, according to the theories of particle physics, his computations make sense: that’s the reason why, for instance, Professor Lee Smolin from Perimeter Institute in Canada, gets to the point of affirming that Garrett’s intuition is “wonderful, one of the best models of unification that I have ever seen in many, many years”. Professor David Ritz Finkelstein of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta adds that “some fascinating theoretical opportunities spring out of Lisi’s theoy, and Garrett could have grasped something really deep”.
Lisi’s study does not require more that one time dimension and three space dimensions, so it is mathematically quite simple. It will be possible to test its effectiveness when the LHC, a structure for atomic verification which is ideal for the practical applications of the theory, will be ready in 2008.
The scientific world is thrilled by this unexpected theory of a Hawaii surfer that sometimes sleeps in the jungle. But that also is a scholar and that traces his roots back to the study of E8, a mathematical scheme of 248 points discovered in 1887 that implements an object that embeds the symmetries of a geometry with 57 dimensions and is a 248 dimension thing itself. Words that are incomprehensible for someone who is not a physicist, but it looks like Mother Nature has incorporated the meaning of E8 in the foundation of many physics rules, so much that Lisi gets to the point of saying that the Universe might have a precise graphical shape.
Lisi’s theory could replace string theory, that many see as not fully convincing and even not applicable. What is sure so far is that the experimentation is just at the beginning and we could all be surprised by the discovery of a guy that one day, instead of hitting the waves, decided to stay home writing on a notebook some formulas that most of us cannot understand.”
I think I like in particular “the LHC, a structure for atomic verification”. Or maybe the breathtaking description of E8.
PS did he say that Garrett sleeps in the jungle?
As I understand it, using the E8 lattice and inserting “imaginary” particals at vertices representing gravity, this lattice shows how all four “forces” inter-relate. I have a different supposition – it is the particles that exert the weak-nuclear, strong-nuclear and electro-magnetic forces, through their relationship described BY the E8 lattice, that produce the effect of a gravitational “force”. There are NO gravitons, etc. to be found, because the particals containing the other 3 forces combine to create the 4th “force” of gravity.
This explains why gravity is so weak, unless there is a great mass of the other particals present, and how gravity can work over large distances, and seem to propagate its effects faster than light.
. 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.
If I were in physics, I too would think that a new workable (loophole in /workaround of) Coleman-Mandula (or should we say Haag-Lopuszanski-Sohnius) is far more important and potentially revolutionary than a E8 TOE.
huh? I thought that information could never be seen propagating faster than light in any inertial reference frame… could somebody explain Jason’s comment?