http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Is-mathematical-pattern-the-theory-of-everything-tp525305p525311.html
Yes, interesting . . . my immediate response is, not symplectic
enough . . . I never really did like so(3, 1) . . .
> Of interest to some. rl
>
>
> From the New Scientist (there are important diagrams at the site-- <
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626303.900;jsessionid=OEGLIBGOIACB>>
>
> Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?
> by Zeeya Merali
>
> GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a
> theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most
> of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains
> near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently,
> physics was not much more than a hobby.
>
> That hasn't stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking
> notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print
> archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most
> elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered
> a relationship underlying all the universe's particles and forces,
> including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter
> Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
> describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling
> unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
>
> That's some achievement, as physicists have been trying to find a
> uniform framework for the fundamental forces and particles ever since
> they developed the standard model more than 30 years ago. The standard
> model successfully weaves together three of the four fundamental
> forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which
> binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which
> controls radioactive decay. The problem has been that gravity has so
> far refused to join the party.
>
> Most attempts to bring gravity into the picture have been based on
> string theory, which proposes that particles are ultimately composed
> of minuscule strings. Lisi has never been a fan of string theory and
> says that it's because of pressure to step into line that he abandoned
> academia after his PhD. "I've never been much of a follower, so I
> walked off to search for my own theory," he says. Last year, he won a
> research grant from the charitably funded Foundational Questions
> Institute to pursue his ideas.
>
> He had been tinkering with "weird" equations for years and getting
> nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing
> E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248
> points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure
> matched his own. "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the
> implications and the beauty of the thing," says Lisi. "I thought:
> 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
>
> What Lisi had realised was that if he could find a way to place the
> various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points, it might
> explain, for example, how the forces make particles decay, as seen in
> particle accelerators.
>
> Lisi is not the first person to associate particles with the points of
> symmetric patterns. In the 1950s, Murray Gell-Mann and colleagues
> correctly predicted the existence of the "omega-minus" particle after
> mapping known particles onto the points of a symmetrical mathematical
> structure called SU(3). This exposed a blank slot, where the new
> particle fitted.
>
> Before tackling the daunting E8, Lisi examined a smaller cousin, a
> hexagonal pattern called G2, to see if it would explain how the strong
> nuclear force works. According to the standard model, forces are
> carried by particles: for example, the strong force is carried by
> gluons. Every quark has a quantum property called its "colour charge"
> - red, green or blue - which denotes how the quarks are affected by
> gluons. Lisi labelled points on G2 with quarks and anti-quarks of each
> colour, and with various gluons, and found that he could reproduce the
> way that quarks are known to change colour when they interact with
> gluons, using nothing more than high-school geometry (see Graphic).
>
> Turning to the geometry of the next simplest pattern in the family,
> Lisi found he was able to explain the interactions between neutrinos
> and electrons by using the star-like F4. The standard model already
> successfully describes the electroweak force, uniting the
> electromagnetic and the weak forces. Lisi added gravity into the mix
> by including two force-carrying particles called "e-phi" and "omega",
> to the F4 diagram - creating a "gravi-electroweak" force.
>
> [snip]
>
>
>
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