Since everyone's going on about the LHC...
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
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If true, it would throw Supersymetry out the window.
I’ll stay clear of the ‘official’ line on the idea, because that’s too easy.
The entire E8 Theory is essentially a very complex game of ‘join the dots’. Given a complex eight-dimensional shape, it’s fairly easy to fit in any series of progressions or -in this case- elementary decays and relationships, into the nodal framework, especially if there are gaps left in that framework. I can’t be bothered to do the maths, but there are an awful lot of relational combinations you could force into E8. Filling the remaining gaps with arbitrary, unobserved, and as-yet mathematically unfounded particles is somewhat akin to making a jigsaw fit together by making a few extra pieces with cardboard and a pair of scissors.
If the standard model is a bit of a reach for missing one particle, E8 Theory is a complete shot in the dark.
We have according to E8 Theory nearly twenty new particles to find or mathematically predict, with no other predictions available concerning them.
It’s an interesting model for relationships, but not really anything else at present. It certainly doesn’t help us do anything. Generally, it’s a bit like attaching cosmic significance to the brush strokes of the Mona Lisa.
Considering your distain for over-sensationalised head-line grabbing trash physics, you appear to have spurned '2 Unlimited' for 'Five Star'.
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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.
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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.
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Don't ask me what the jam filling is.
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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.
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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.
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