Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

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From: dewayne-net [mailto:dewayne-net () warpspeed com] On Behalf Of Dewayne
Hendricks
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 1:45 AM
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Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

[Note:  This item comes from friend John McMullen.  DLH]

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: November 23, 2007 10:33:51 PM PST
To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

 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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