An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything!

Originally Posted by marcus

Christine, You have done a remarkable editing job!

Originally Posted by Ivan Seeking

We’ll wait for the work to get peer reviewed for a journal, and for those crucial testable predictions to appear, before making a judgement.

Originally Posted by Coin

Incidentally, has/will Garrett's E8 proposals been submitted for peer review?

Originally Posted by ccdantas

Thanks a lot, Marcus.

The whole CV episode was a complete mess. At the end, I was sad with how things ended.

I think blogs can serve as a serious place for technical or scientific exchanges in a friendly environment, but it is not easy, really. There are much more examples showing that it doesn't work than otherwise... I had to do some off-line moderation work. You must have time, energy and a sense of neutrality. I cannot say I have all these elements, specially the first ones...

Thanks,
Christine

Originally Posted by Count Iblis

His paper has already been reviewed by many people. So, he shouldn't bother to submit it to a journal. Submitting papers to a journal is for most papers a redundant exercise as the preprint is the postprint anyway.

Originally Posted by Ivan Seeking

The folks at Nature seem to have a different opinion.

Originally Posted by Electron17

If Lisi's model turns out to be correct, does that mean all of physics is essentially solved and there will be nothing left to do? Or will the details need to be worked out for many years afterward?

Originally Posted by mitchell porter

Lisi's theory is a theory about what the fundamental particles are and how they interact.

Chaos theory is about a type of unpredictability which happens because small uncertainties are amplified into large uncertainties. Such "chaos" is a very general phenomenon and happens everywhere there are even moderately complicated interactions. You should look it up on Wikipedia to understand it better.

...Perhaps the longest public debate on the merits of Lisi’s theory took place primarily between Jacques Distler of the University of Texas at Austin and Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, the latter of whom had been widely quoted in the media with unqualified praise for the theory. (Smolin says he was quoted out of context.) Smolin had also quickly written a paper suggesting ways to correct certain flaws in the E8 proposal. For the particles in the E8 theory to represent the known particles properly, the combination of smaller groups used to form the Standard Model must be embedded inside E8 in just the right way. Distler had demonstrated in his blog that this is a mathematical impossibility. So far as he was concerned, the theory was dead and not worth trying to resuscitate. Yet argument raged on over details of Distler’s proof and ultimately ended with neither side conceding. Lisi, incidentally, played very little part in these disputes.

Today the theory is being largely but not entirely ignored. Lisi, naturally, continues to work on it, as does Smolin. Lisi says that even if what Distler claims is true, it would only be true for the variant of E8 (“real E8”) originally used in his paper and that another variant (“complex E8”) would certainly work. Smolin argues that the press coverage gave the false impression that Lisi’s proposal was a finished work. “In reality,” he says, “almost every new theoretical proposal is first presented in a way that is flawed and incomplete, with open issues that need to be filled in.... While Lisi’s proposal has exciting aspects, this is the case with it as well.”