Garrett Lisi Theory of Everything and E8 Symmetry
Jan 16th, 2009 by Brad
Portion of E8
A year ago, I posted a link to Murray Gell-Mann’s TED talk called, Beauty and truth in physics. In this talk Gell-Mann talked a lot about about symmetry.
Basically “things” with some form of symmetry have characteristics that don’t change under certain transformations (read “change”). Beautiful. Symmetry goes way beyond most people’s view of symmetry as just mirror images about a line. Amazing symmetries also exist in magnificently complex structures. Mathematicians have described a structure called E8 that is the largest possible structure with unique symmetries.
E8 is a theoretical structure in 248 dimensions. More properly it is an object known as the exceptional Lie group E8.
Enter theorist Garrett Lisi. Very basically, he looks at the relationship between the known “elementary” 226 particles on to a representation on the 248 points of the E8. You can play with the particles and the E8 online at:
http://deferentialgeometry.org/epe/
Elementary Particle Explorer Garrett Lisi
You can hear his presentation at the TED talks at:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html
Or course there are detractors:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=garrett-lisi-e8-theory
If energy is the flesh of matter, than geometry is “dem bones” and E8 is the spiritual, our children will sing.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’
John Keats
The structure is correct. The shape of planets, stars, and other solid matter bodies in the universe mimic the structure of the universe, which is a sphere. The answer was right in front of us all along.
Actually E8 isn’t a simple sphere it is much more intricate than that.
However it seems right now that Lisi’s ideas are right for explaining the particle physics. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100326132341.htm