[ExI] grand unified theory?

[spike]

Physics grokmeisters, have you heard of this?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311952,00.html


Laid-Back Surfer Dude May Be Next Einstein
Friday, November 16, 2007

A. Garrett Lisi

A surfer dude with no fixed address may be this century's Einstein.

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.

That's the "holy grail" of physics that scientists have been searching for
ever since Albert Einstein presented his General Theory of Relativity nearly
100 years ago.

Even more remarkable is that Lisi, who has a Ph.D. but no permanent
university affiliation, solves the problem without resorting to exotic
dimensions, string theory or exceptionally complex mathematics.

A successful Grand Unified Theory would use a series of equations to show
how the four fundamental forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism and
the strong and weak nuclear forces - relate to each other.

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which controls radioactivity,
were linked more than 30 years ago, and some progress has been made with
linking them to the strong nuclear force, which binds protons together in
the atomic nucleus.

But gravity has always been an outlier. Not only have all attempts to link
gravity to the other three forces failed, but physicists still can't agree
on what gravity actually is or how it works.

Lisi solves this by using the E8 lattice, an eight-dimensional structure
visualized earlier this year in a widely circulated paper.

He noticed that several of the equations used to describe the lattice
matched those he'd come up with trying to resolve the four fundamental
forces.

"The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the
beauty of the thing," Lisi tells New Scientist magazine. "I thought: 'Holy
crap, that's it!'"

By mapping known subatomic particles, plus 20 imaginary ones, onto the 248
points of the E8 lattice, and then rotating the lattice in a computer model,
Lisi shows how the particles elegantly combine to form three of the four
forces.

The imaginary ones combine to form gravity, for which subatomic particles
have only been theorized.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," David Ritz
Finkelstein of Georgia Tech tells New Scientist. "I think that this must be
more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

But Professor Marcus du Sautoy of Oxford tells Britain's Daily Telegraph
that "there seem to be a lot of things still to fill in."

For his part, Lisi self-mockingly calls his finding "An Exceptionally Simple
Theory of Everything," and downplays the suggestion that it may be the Grand
Unified Theory.

"The theory is very young, and still in development," he tells the Daily
Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelihood to this
prediction."

He hopes the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, currently being built on the
Swiss-French border will find some of his 20 imaginary gravity-related
particles.

"This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory - it's either going to be exactly
right, or spectacularly wrong," Lisi tells New Scientist. "I'm the first to
admit this is a long shot. But it ain't over till the LHC sings."