quantum physics

[rickyricardo]

So basically the universe was designed w/ a spirograph?

[parson]

248 dimension spirograph

[masstronaut]

So basically the universe was designed w/ a spirograph?

The aeon is a child at play, moving pieces on a board, a child's is the kingdom. - Heraclitus 500bce

[masstronaut]

actually there are lots of extra dimensions predicted:
"E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape.""

"Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts."

Ok, so they're not time and space dimensions. That's good - I'm bored of those ones anyway.

[parson]

yeah i'm going to need a better article

[masstronaut]

yeah i'm going to need a better article

I think this is his paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

Good luck!

[parson]

A. Garrett Lisi
(Submitted on 6 Nov 2007)

Abstract: All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Comments: 31 pages, 7 figures
Subjects: High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
Cite as: arXiv:0711.0770v1 [hep-th]

[parson]

"sometimes things look like they don't have any order and then later you find out that it does have order

its like climbing a mountain

look around you see trees and rocks and bushes pressing around you
and then you get above the treeline, you see everything you just went through and it all like comes together

you see that it has a shape after all

sometimes it takes a long time to get high enough to see it but its there"

[anarekist]

i dont believe in it.

[slothrop]

actually there are lots of extra dimensions predicted:
"E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape.""

"Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts."

Ok, so they're not time and space dimensions. That's good - I'm bored of those ones anyway.

Yeah, basically he's got a fairly abstract mathematical object - E_8 - certain parts of which he uses to correspond to things in the real world (or at least, in particle physics). So he can (or could in principle - apparently he's a fair way off that so far) read off all the properties of fundamental particles and forces from certain properties of E_8.

It's E_8 that's 248-dimensional, not the world that he reads off from it.

I'm not a theoretical physicist, but the ones I know say that the idea looks interesting and rather nice but still has a long way to go before it's a serious contender for 'the theory of everything', eg it needs to actually give some quantitative values for things we can measure in the real world.