Is this groovy shape the fabric of the universe?

That spirograph-like doodle above? It’s a small chunk of this much larger diagram — and, if you believe a radical new theory, it might finally explain the fabric of the universe.

It’s also got a lovely backstory. It begins with one Garrett Lisi, a 39-year-old physicist who is affiliated with no university. Indeed, he’s kind of broke, because he spends most of the year surfing and snowboarding. But anyway, a while ago Lisi got intrigued by the properties of E8, a complex — discovered in 1887 — that encapsulates the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object, and which itself possesses 248 dimensions. Lisi had been thinking about the failures of the “Standard Model” of physics, which has never been able to explain how gravity works. (String theory has been the only rival model that offers an explanation of gravity.) And he was thinking about the vast and baffling array of fundamental particles that make up the universe — and the many particles predicted by string theory, but not yet observed in real-world experiments

Then Lisi had a breakthrough. He realized that the shape of E8 could be used as a sort of map, to explain the particles and their relationships. As a story in the Telegraph reports:

“My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he tells New Scientist. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’”

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8’s 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. “How cool is that?” he says.

Lisi wrote up his idea in a paper — “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” — that he published online last November. Interestingly, since his schema predicts the existence of particles we haven’t yet seen, it will, as he points out, “either succeed or fail spectacularly”. This is nice, since of course one of the big problems afflicting fringe, mail-order doctorate physicists who offer Unified Theories of Everything is that they rarely posit how their concepts of harmonic convergence can ever be proven or disproven. (And believe me, after years of science journalism, I know this the hard way, because I’ve been snailmailed copies of self-published theories that are riddled with simply Rosicrucian weirdness.) It’s even more impressive given that the mythopoeic dimensions of Lisi’s life — a new theory of everything! developed by a surfer! based on a design that wouldn’t be out of place on your pothead cousin’s van! — would seem to fall straight into tinfoil-hat territory.

Nonetheless, despite the promise of testability, Lisi’s ideas have provoked a minor food-fight in the lunchroom of theoretical physics. The Wikipedia page for “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” has a pretty good summary of it. It’s been called everything from “beautiful stuff” to “childish misunderstandings.” Alas, grasshopper, I lack the math fu and physics fu to even begin to figure out whether Lisi is on to anything. But now I want a poster of E8 for my wall! Dude.

(Thanks to Julian Harley for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map

Should automobile software be open-sourced?

My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”

Garry Kasparov, cyborg

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a bunch of stuff

January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

)

January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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