Since everyone's going on about the LHC...

[alien_radio]

I'm not going to. While it is exciting, and while was it amusing about 8 months ago to ironically discuss the species threatening nature of the hunt for the Higgs boson, thousand of retards going "LOL END OF DER WOLRDZ1111", or panicking "OMG WE'RE GONNA DIE", has kind of taken the shine off it

Comments

[siranui]

There are a few problems though, not least of all that it’s pure conjecture

[alien_radio]

I suspect that it's more of a useful abstraction tool for mapping relationships and interactions and telling us where to look than a complete theory, I'm sure the mappings themselves will require refinement, because I suspect that while useful and accurate on subsets of E8 in one projection when rotated through other dimensions in the full model hidden aspects of underlying principles will come to the fore.

Think periodic table, the elements were arbitrarily mapped into a geometric construct of groups based on similarity in properties. The original was inaccurate in the detail, but the principle was sound, and SIMPLE.

Further experimentation has shown further drawbacks with the model, but there's still some emergent geometry there.

most of the physics and chemistry equations even at A level is nothing but simplified and abstrated generalisttions of the hard core equations.

I suspect this is an exceptionally powerful abstraction.

[siranui]

It would be a powerful model if it was a two or three dimensional relationship model.

Sadly, it has eight, which makes it only really useful to people, who can already grasp the relationships without the need for such a model. If fact, I'd say it's far easier to grasp the relationships 'as is' than to really get to grasp with all the mathematical concepts you need to fully understand E8.

It's basically like having a four-dimensional space-time tube map, instead of just using a two dimensional one and a timetable.

[siranui]

Please excuse the typos and misplaced comas. I was eating a doughnut which may or may not be a three dimensional representation of the shape of the universe.

Don't ask me what the jam filling is.

[alien_radio]

Really? I'm curious now, and desiring a doughnut.

[alien_radio]

No, the power is due to the fact that instead of having to using insane fucking quantumchomodynamics maths for everything you can use matrices for some things instead and matrices are easy, I might not be able to totally grasp all the relationships but I can perform mathematical operations on multidimensional matrices.

[siranui]

One could argue that anyone who can't grasp quantum chomodynamics shouldn't be messing with elementry particles anyhow, but that aside:

Fenyman diagrams do a perfectly good job of defining decay and relationships. So do fairly simple tables. Turning E8 into a glorified periodic table (a good analogy, by the way) doesn't really help much... if at all, considering that to use it as a teaching aid you first have to teach about 8 dimensional geometry.

If there were just a couple of gaps in the structure, or if the matrixes could predict anything at all about the missing nodes, then it might be of some use. At present it's just 'meh', and has no actual aplication, nor pushes the boundries in any way.

Basically, the media heard that someone who surfed had created a simple 'theory of everything' [which sounds kind of like a Unified Theory, so that's good, right?] and spunked all over it. If we're going to dedicate column-inches to physics, lets at least devote it to real physics.

[alien_radio]

no "the media" didn't this isn't some media franzy story. and it makes testable predictions did you actually read the article?

[siranui]

"no "the media" didn't this isn't some media franzy story."

If it makes it to the daily papers (which it did), then it is quite a media frenzy, so far as physics is concerned.

No, I haven't read the article again, because I read it the first time, alongside some more serious commentary on it.

The model predicts nothing particularly falsifiable. What testable predictions do you think it makes?
Even the author is dubious about any predictions made by the model.