Garrett Lisi’s Theory of Everything!

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.

241 Comments

241 thoughts on “Garrett Lisi’s Theory of Everything!”

  1. Moshe wrote: It was clear from the beginning that there is no TOE there,…
    Bee wrote: …the problem are not overly enthusiastic statements. the problem is that people pay attention to them instead caring for the facts.
    amused wrote: I recommend just saying the truth.

    The truth in my eyes is that the very first offense here was the overly enthusiastic title: “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”. It is clearly a misrepresentation of the contents of the paper.

    See, Bee, people take the overly enthusiastic statements to be the facts. Perhaps none of you scientists types has been paying attention, but **that is the way** the world works. At least people are a little jaded when it comes to advertisers, politicians, government officials, religionists and so on. Yet, they swallowed the kool-aid on such varied things as subprime mortgages and on why invade Iraq.

    Now particle physicists will also be classified among the purveyors of snake-oil. I do not count this as a good thing.

    And IMO, superstring hype helped on this downwards slide, whenever anyone talked about it in public without the qualifier “We do not yet know this to be true**”.

    The whole purpose of academic freedom, tenure, etc., was that there would be this set of people in society with no obligation to anything but the strict facts. They would be one set of people who could be counted on to point out nonsense as such.

    If among the most exact of the experimental sciences – particle physics – can fall prey to overly enthusiastic statements, then why should anyone believe that any of the less exact, dealing with more complexity – e.g., climate science – is not driven by something other than fact?

    What this is to say is that the scientist needs to be painfully precise in statements made to the public, in papers and in talks. It is a professional obligation.

    (true** as in “relevant to/descriptive of our universe”.).

  2. Actually, I would lump particle physicists in with snake oil salesmen, for one very simple fact – you all claim to KNOW your current laws of gravity to be fact, but then find they don’t seem to work on the galactic scale, which you never bother to mention to the general public. You then start adding terms to your equations, and lable them dark matter and dark energy, without one moment’s consideration that your law may be simply wrong.

    Your cloistered “scientists” are merely the cardinals of a new religion that you are zealously trying to protect, lest your daily bread be taken from you.

  3. Re #52:

    It seems like you’re the one who mistakenly thinks he knows everything. There has been a ton of press about dark matter and dark energy, so the public knows all about this problem. And just because one works under the assumption that the otherwise wildly successful theory of relativity is basically correct and just needs some tweaking(addition of dark matter, etc.), doesn’t mean physicists are brainwashed cultists who can’t envision other possibilities. The fact is that dark matter has been indirectly observed in the Bullet cluster as Sean has so nicely written on in the past, so relativity works very well at the galactic scales. On cosmological scales where dark energy is invoked, there may be something else going on; no good physicist will claim to really understand it in full.

    And what do you think would happen if relativity is wrong and some new mechanism takes effect? Relativity clearly works in many situations (there are a number of precision tests in solar system and terrestrial physics) so whatever the solution is, it still just amounts to adding terms to the known equations and labeling them something.

    Get off your soapbox and learn a thing or two about what you’re spouting off about. The internet is ignorant enough as it is.

  4. “the problem are not overly enthusiastic statements. the problem is that people pay attention to them instead caring for the facts.”

    Bee, the journalists who have written about this don’t have any expertese in this area, and have had to rely on physicists and Lisi himself to provide them with the facts. And in most cases their stories have been pretty much based on the “facts” they’ve been presented with, without (much) distortion, but at the same time without knowing that these “facts” are not the real facts. It’s hard to blame them for not knowing that, how should they have known?

    As a case study, let’s consider the Sunday Times article. From the article:

    “Could Lisi have cracked a problem that has defied some of the finest minds in history? While it has in no way embraced this lofty claim, the scientific community has given it a surprising amount of respect. Lee Smolin, founder of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, is full of praise: “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years.” ”

    The journalist assumes that the views of someone of Smolin’s stature surely signify respect from the scientific community at large — a completely understandable and excusable mistake. (Normally the views of someone in Smolin’s position would signify that, and the journalist can’t be expected to know that there is an anomaly in this case.)

    “Some have rejected the proposal out of hand: one physicist describes Lisi as a “crank” and his ideas as “baloney”.”

    So the journalist went to the trouble of asking the opinion of a real live physicist — that’s pretty good! (It can’t just be from Lubos’ blog since “baloney” is an English expression which he doesn’t use.)

    “But most see the possibility, albeit far from proven, of genuine insight”

    Which is a likely impression a journalist would get from reading certain physics blogs (e.g. yours, Bee). In fact most serious physicists won’t have even bothered to look at the paper, for exactly the reason that Sean gives in his post. But we can’t really blame the journalist for not knowing that the views that have been expressed about the paper, either by Smolin&co or in the physics blogsphere, are far from representative of the silent majority view of serious physicists.

    “Lisi is unimpressed by string theory. For a man who is motivated by mathematical beauty, it is just too clumsy to be compelling and he quit university after completing his PhD rather than be forced to pursue it.”

    This is the story Lisi likes to tell journalists and everyone else (including the readers of this blog — see his comment above). The journalist can hardly be blamed for not knowing that Lisi’s meagre publication record wouldn’t have been enough for him to continue as a university postdoc in any case, regardless of whether string theory was the only option or not. Lisi “forgets” to mention this, and instead presents himself as a victim of string dominance.

    “He may not have to wait long to see if his theory is right. […] Within 12 months of the Large Hadron Collider bursting into life in the Swiss countryside next year, the giant particle accelerator experiment should deliver its verdict, revealing whether or not the new fundamental particles that Lisi’s theory predicts should exist are actually there. The whole idea will stand of fall on this crucial test.”

    Again, this is the story Lisi has been telling journalists (and also writing on his FQXi blog). Can we blame them for believing it? Lisi lets them think that he has a theory in sufficient working order to begin calculating predictions for the LHC.
    But in actual fact he has no such thing, as he was forced to admit on Jacques Distler’s blog:

    “…Addressing this inadequacy in the theory is what I will be working on over the coming months, and if I or someone else can’t figure out a good way to solve this problem, the theory won’t work.”

    Funny how he felt no inclination to point out to the journalists that his theory suffers from a potentially fatal “inadequacy”…

    In summary, I don’t see how the journalist who wrote this story can be blamed for the hype or misleading/incorrect statements. He/she was just basing it on the “facts” presented, together with a few completely reasonable assumptions.
    And the situation is more or less the same with the other stories I’ve seen.

  5. If anyone cares to see what I actually said to journalists, my responses to questions are available here:
    theory FAQ
    personal AQ
    And before slamming me for liking my own work, please note that I have managed to persuade every single journalist I have spoken with to report that this theory is speculative, still in development, and untested.

    The current inadequacies of this theory are discussed at length in the paper, and I have attempted to convey them to all who have been interested. Jacques did not “disprove” the theory, but just described the inadequacy which I described in the paper as the most important problem that needs fixing. He did find a small error — that the group here is the split real form of E8 and not E IX — but in my opinion this correction only makes this theory more interesting.

    As a result of all the press, I have received many hundreds of emails from the general public (to which I have been responding, one by one). The general theme of these emails is “Good luck with your theory, I hope it works.” People understand this is a developing theory, and that it might be wrong.

  6. #54 amused:
    In summary, I don’t see how the journalist who wrote this story can be blamed for the hype or misleading/incorrect statements. He/she was just basing it on the “facts” presented, together with a few completely reasonable assumptions.
    Even though I agree with you and Arun that scientists should be careful with what they say to journalists, it is pretty clear that many of those who echoed and copied the initial articles didn’t even care to even pretend they tried to understand anything about it. And yes, this is what I expect of journalists: that they try to find out how useful and reliable the statements are that they print. That’s their job! The problem is that everybody gladly jumps on a statement like Lee’s without caring for the details, because it’s easy it’s cheap, it gets attention, on the price of accuracy.
    The journalist assumes that the views of someone of Smolin’s stature surely signify respect from the scientific community at large — a completely understandable and excusable mistake.
    I have no idea how you have managed to downgrade your expectations on good journalism so much that you can ‘excuse’ such a deliberately unbalanced and vacuous reporting as a ‘mistake’. If somebody insists on writing a very premature article about a paper that had been just published days before, in a field where it can take years to understand the promise of an idea, then I expect he or she takes his or her responsibility seriously, and does not happily jump on a single sentence which is quotable because that guy has written some books and people will recognize his name. If a magazine or newspaper doesn’t have anybody who is qualified as a science journalist, then they should stay out of the matter.
    #51 Arun: Yes, the title was inappropriate (that’s why I mingled it up in my blog post). Yes, people take overly enthusiastic statements as fact, and yes, scientists should know this and be accordingly careful. Yes, that’s the way the world works, whether I like it or not. But whether we like it or not, not all scientists will be appropriately unenthusiastic, and I am glad about it. I find the trend that science journalism becomes more and more a fictitious story writing very worrisome. Much more worrisome than enthusiastic scientists.

  7. The events unfolding in this opera are worrying. It seems that in the years after Sokal and the Bogdanovs it is increasingly difficult for people to tell physics from “alternative physics” – to the extent that nowadays even respected professionals “jump on the train”. For me, the only important implication of “E8 theory” is that in a few years time a fake quantum gravity theory will be finally proclaimed, by media and majority opinion, a true “Theory of Everything”. This would be a victory of the fake over the authentic, and of postmodernism over science. A sad outlook.

  8. I enjoyed the double meaning of the title.

    The theory will be judged based on its agreement with experiment.

    Whether the theory is accepted or disproven, I offer my congratulations to Mr. Lisi. I also wish that I could snowboard as well as he does!

  9. #52, Josh,

    These cosmological observations that “uphold” dark matter and dark energy terms in your equations weren’t predicted, but observable flaws in previous theories that needed band-aids, for which you created these superflorous terms. Instead of admitting your previous theories were wrong, you just came up with new theories about intangible / untestable entities, as if nothing happened.

    #54, amused,

    “Funny how he felt no inclination to point out to the journalists that his theory suffers from a potentially fatal “inadequacy”… ”

    Why is that funny? Relativity and string theorists have been doing that for years, masking their shortcomings with even more theories of “dark matter” and “dark energy”, which is just backfilling in terms when observations prove previous theories wrong.

    #56, Garrett,

    Good luck man! You have the right attitude that you sense some real fundamental relationships by applying E8 to particle physics, and offer some suppositions for others to challenge / pursue, and are open to criticism / failure, which is more than I can say for the string theorists trying to protect their bread and butter.

    Too funny, string theorists will keep adding more and more terms, without ever getting down to the basic understanding of what is going on. I recommend that they start with the one true force – entropy, and build from there.

  10. Bee,

    “If somebody insists on writing a very premature article about a paper that had been just published days before, in a field where it can take years to understand the promise of an idea, then I expect he or she takes his or her responsibility seriously, and does not happily jump on a single sentence which is quotable because that guy has written some books and people will recognize his name.”

    I find it absolutely hilarious that you are directing your outrage against the poor ignorant journalist rather than the expert physicist who fed him/her the baloney.
    And it’s not as if Smolin was saying that stuff in a vacuum; there were similar noises from others, e.g. Rovelli, as well as a general buzz eminating from PI as indicated in your blogpost:
    “during my time at PI it [Lisi’s seminar] was the best attended Quantum Gravity seminar I’ve been at.”
    And it’s not as if Smolin&co don’t have any experience in dealing with journalists and couldn’t predict the likely outcome of saying what they said.

    Sorry, but I can’t take this discussion seriously anymore.

  11. Hi amused:

    Glad to amuse you 😉 The number of attendees doesn’t say anything about their opinion after the talk. I am much too tired to be outraged about anything, but you’re misunderstanding me if you think I blame the journalists. I was just expressing that I am not willing to excuse everything because the poor guys don’t know what quantization is (well, I’d have expected a science journalist should know as much as having heard of the problem of quantizing gravity and asking the question how it’s solved?).

    What I was actually trying to say is as so often, I find myself criticizing a general trend in our society that I thoroughly dislike. Scientists shouldn’t be affected by the media, but I am afraid they are because attention potentially brings money in. (Let’s face it, that’s what people get upset about. When funding goes to X, it won’t be there for Y). Journalists shouldn’t write to please their readership but to convey information, but it’s entertainment that brings money in (Let’s face it, what matters in the end is whether it sells.) We all shouldn’t sit around and watch how our society produces more and more virtual bubbles of nothing, because capitalism obviously has its limitations and we’ve already exceeded them. Ironically we don’t have time to do anything about it because it doesn’t help our careers.

    What worries me is simply how cheerful the media picks around on the ‘ivory tower’. There is a good reason why the opinion making process in science should take place independent from external influence, that includes media hypes as well as financial pressure. Isn’t it completely obvious that unbalanced reporting and fear of loosing grants affects opinions and the choice of research topics? What worries me is not so much the actual reporting, but that people in our community increasingly (have to) pay attention to it.

    Best,

    B.

  12. None of these blogs seem to have mentioned something obvious. Surely FQXi has been a factor in publicising and promoting this work. After all their website has articles about their other grant winners too, and it is only natural for them to want the research to be noticed, especially since some of these grant winners might make important breakthroughs.

    Have I got this right? Just curious about why the FQXi publicity factor hasn’t really been mentioned.

  13. Curious:

    I’m happy to comment on this, as follows:

    (a) We at FQXi are proud that FQXi support has enabled Garrett to do some research that by all accounts would not have been done without the FQXi grant. We hope that the research proves fruitful! It may, of course, take some time to discover whether this is the case. From our perspective, the way that this will happen is that if/when Garrett applies for another grant from FQXi, his application — like everyone else’s — will be sent to experts in the field for careful review of the accomplishment and promise of his research program, and funded — or not — based on those reviews. In the meantime, we wish him the best of fortune in negotiating some tricky waters (both scientifically and otherwise.)

    (b) While we at FQXi are of course happy when researchers FQXi funds do well, and enjoy basking in their successful glow, FQXi focuses its publicity efforts (such as they are…) on FQXi itself rather than on promoting any of its particular researchers. In Garrett’s case, the ‘promotion’ has been entirely limited to what you see on the the FQXi community site. Although Garrett has been very gracious about thanking FQXi for support, we have, curiously, had essentially no queries (to my knowledge) from the media about our role.

  14. As an interested layman I have been following the various blogs and internet news on Garrett Lisi’s discovery, announcement or what ever.

    Some things that I find dishearting are the tone of a lot those that don’t agree with the premise.

    Some challenge the idea, which is why it was presented. It needs to stand the test but why the hubris?

    I find Lisi seems to have taken the high road, perhaps we all should.

    Perhaps in my naive view of the beter man, I would have thought new ideas would be challenged and either supported or denied based on the math and not the man!

    This seems all so tiresome when in a short time it will stand or fall as it should.

    John

  15. Hi Bee,

    Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I share very much your concern about the adverse effects of irresponsible science journalism and hype. But while there has been some of that in the present spectacle (the fox news story in particular comes to mind) I think it would be a bit harsh to tar all the journalists who have written about this with that brush. No doubt the entertainment value of the story was part of their motivation, but some of them do seem to have made a genuine effort to find out what was going on (as can be seen, e.g., from their discussions with Garrett on his FQXi blog). Perhaps it’s naive but I have the impression they were reasonably conscientious journalists who cared about getting the story right, including the assessment of its newsworthiness. What they didn’t realize, because they don’t know how the physics community works, is that most serious physicists just keep silent and ignore work when they don’t think there is anything to it. Not knowing this, the journalists assumed that the positive noises they were hearing were a lot more representative of the physics community reaction than they actually were.

    Well, ideally science stories should only be covered by science journalists who know something about science and the way scientific communities operate. But unfortunately that’s not the reality we find ourselves in, and journalists with little or no background in physics are going to end up writing physics-related stories from time to time when they find something interesting. I don’t think that has to be a terrible thing though, provided the journalists have some reasonable level of integrity and care about getting the story right. But for it not to be a bad thing it is essential that the physicists themselves are very careful and responsible in what they say to the press. It’s maybe unfair to expect too much from the actual authors of the research work — they will of course be positive about their work and it’s understandable if they end up describing it in an unrealistically positive way. But any responsible journalist is not just going to rely on the authors’ assessments; they will surely also seek out the assessment of senior physicists at prestigious institutions who are not connected with the work. What they hear from these will be hugely influential in the journalists’ judgement of the newsworthiness of the story. This places a huge responsibility on the senior physicists that the journalists consult. They really need to be sure and correct in their judgement, and realize that they are putting their reputations on the line, before making comments that signal a green light to journalists to run with the story. And it is them that should bear the brunt of the outrage if they fail in this responsibility and spectacles like the present one occur. They should be slammed mercilessly imo, so that they and others will be more careful in the future.

    The physics community can’t really control or decide the level of scientific knowledge of journalists who decide to cover physics stories, but we can control ourselves, and that should be enough, at least when the journalists we deal with have sufficient integrity when judging the newsworthiness of a story and sufficient desire to get it right (which I think many of the journalists covering the present story probably did).

    Best,
    “amused”

  16. Hi amused,

    Yes, I agree that the scientists carry a responsibility for what they say, and to a large degree journalists have to rely on them to be careful and precise. I’ve written down my thoughts in yesterday’s post ‘Fact or Fiction’, in case you’re interested.

    One other thing that I’d like to mention though is that journalists cherry pick sentences from interviews which might not give a very clear picture of what the person actually said in toto. That seems to me is often unavoidable, but it can contribute to the polarization of opinions, even if unintentionally, and especially if others repeat such sentences without asking for the context or an explanation. I mean, I said above I am reasonably happy with the way my quote in NewScientist appears, but the one sentence I was quoted with obviously wasn’t the only thing I said. Among other stuff I said “the action does not appear naturally within this approach, but it is just chosen such that it does reproduce the standard model + general relativity. If you want, the assumption is the requirement to be compatible with what we already know, with observations that we have made, and theories we have established. This is without doubt reasonable, but given that the aim is to find a TOE, to me it is not a particularly attractive procedure. One would hope to find a less ad-hoc formulation, which might very well be possible with further investigations.”
    Besides this, following up on my ealier comments, I would like to mention that the NewScientist person I’ve been in contact with happened to read this thread and asked me why I criticised the paragraph that my quote appeared in. Mentioning that I hadn’t specifically been talking about string theory, but it comes off as such, she said the problem is otherwise it would have been necessary to explain also what LQG is because not all readers would know. It’s a reason I can relate to.

    They should be slammed mercilessly imo, so that they and others will be more careful in the future.

    I’ll leave the slamming to you, you’re doing a good job 😉

    Best,

    B.

  17. #66, amused,

    “journalists with little or no background in physics are going to end up writing physics-related stories from time to time …”

    Wow, that sounds a lot like the position of the Catholic church before the Protestant Reformation – “only priests should read / interpret the Bible”. I wish you could see yourselves from the outside looking in. Catholic clergy had the same motivations too – protecting their “way of life” (read – standard of living through indulgences, etc.).

    I think it is more important to give Lisi’s approach broad exposure, even if premature, so that many eyes are examining it, because it appears to be the first approach based on something other than observation and backfilling with terms.

  18. Amused, thanks for your thoughts above. I am convinced you are right, and more of us should talk to journalists when we have a chance, and try to provide them with some more sensible feedback. I’m usually not a cynical sort, so I am assuming that by and large they are interested in that, even though what we have to say is much less colorful than the Motl/Smolin quotes.

    (As for people paying with their reputations, that’s the way the scientific community works. I’m afraid the public sphere is more complicated, “slamming” tends to backfire even when perfectly justified).

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  20. Hi Bee,
    You are right about the potential problem with journalists cherry-picking quotes and maybe putting them in the wrong context. Not sure what can be done about that, if anything. I guess we just have to hope that if the journalists have integrity and desire to get the story right then the overall result won’t be too bad.
    P.S. I read your nice post on this topic on you blog. See you over there in the comments section at some point…

    Moshe, yes you are right about that.
    (Note to self: must resist urge to call for public denunciations — except perhaps when it’s Lubos 🙂 )

    #68, Jason,
    I have more of an outsider’s perspective than you probably expect. You won’t believe it, but the reactions from physicists you have been seeing here and elsewhere are based on their honest judgements rather than a desire to protect their “way of life”.

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  22. #71, amused,

    I don’t doubt the honesty / sincerity of the physicists – no doubt they are part of the indoctrinated faith that as long as you have ANY equation to explain a set of observations, then you KNOW / COMMAND that thing. They are faithful in their piety, and CANNOT see their religion from the inside.

    Relativity itself was a dodge of finding fundamental truth in nature, and sought to “simplify” the problem / question, by reducing the conditions around observations to a small enough subset that simple questions could be answered. Photons traveling between bodies moving at speeds relative to one another …. blah, blah, blah …..

    What “sets” the speed of light? That should give a clue about the universal reference frame, and not objects relative to one another, etc. Scribing endless equations without a fundamental theory of what sets the conditions / relationships for / of all objects in the universe is a waste of time. You can plug any data set into MATLAB and get an equation.

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  24. If E8 was expanded to the size of the universe, would you get a vector that represents gravity at that scale? And to get this vector, would the (paths) be curved i.e. the curvature of space caused by mass? The mass at the points of E8?

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