Well, looks like this will be my first embedded video.
If you haven’t heard of Garrett Lisi, behold! He’s a surfer with a PhD who gained a tremendous amount of popularity over the past year with his “Remarkably Simple Theory of Everything” that he came up with while living in his van with no steady job. He has come up with a way to use a mathematical shape to categorize fundamental particles.
As a little precursor, let me just give you an idea of what he’s actually showing in the videos on his slides. Imagine taking a soccer ball, and a sack full of coins of many currencies (dollar, pound, yen, etc.). You could try to categorize the coins based on similarities between them by placing them on different hexagons on the soccer ball. You could start with the Canadian coins and lay them on the hexagons in increasing denomination. Then do the same with the American coins and so on. Each time you would make sure that the similar coins of different currency — for example Canadian vs. American nickles — are next to each other.
A remarkably inexpensive soccer ball
This is an analogy (that should be taken with a big pinch of salt) of what particle physicists have been able to do with particles and higher dimensional mathematical shapes instead of coins and soccer balls. Garrett Lisi is suggesting that he has found a better “soccer ball” to put the particles on. The difference between his soccer ball and the one shown in the picture shown above is that his soccer ball extends into more than three dimensions, so the only way he can show it on a screen is to “project” it into two dimensions. In a way he’s showing you the shadow of his soccer ball and then rotating it to show you the different ways the particles are grouped. Hopefully that will at least give you an idea of what you’re looking at.
I should also at this point mention that this is not yet an accepted scientific theory. It still needs to be proven and fleshed out. There are several problems with it that Bee pointed out about a year ago:
To make predictions with this model, one first needs to find a mechanism for symmetry breaking which is likely to become very involved. I think these two points, the cosmological constant and the symmetry breaking, are the biggest obstacles on the way to making actual predictions.
[...] I’ve complained repeatedly, and fruitlessly, about the absence of coupling constants throughout the paper, and want to use the opportunity to complain one more time.
Hopefully the data that will eventually come from the LHC will have something to say about the correctness of this theory and many others like it. Despite its downfalls, it really is quite pretty.
Update: A great “theory of everything” joke via Telescoper:
A string theorist arrives home one evening. When he goes into his house, his wife tells him that she’s hired a private detective who has been following him for the past week and she now knows he’s having an affair with another woman.
“But darling…” says the string theorist. “I can explain everything.”
