[ boxxter @ 01.04.2010. 10:37 ] @
| Interesantan clanak. Bar meni jeste :P. http://arstechnica.com/science...imple-theory-of-everything.ars A bit over two years ago, news sources and science blogs lit up when a pre-print paper from Dr. A. Garrett Lisi came to light that proposed a novel theory of everything—one theory that accurately describes all four of the universes fundamental forces. Current theories have demonstrated that three of the four fundamental forces and their associated particles can all be obtained from different symmetry operations (think rotations and reflections) of an algebraic group called a Lie group The pre-print, hosted by the on-line repository arXiv, proposed that, within the complicated symmetry group E8, all four forces of nature could be described and united. The hype that ensued (Google still suggests "surfer physicist" as a possible query) made this pre-print the most downloaded arXiv paper by March of 2008, and spawned an entire Wikipedia entry for the paper alone. As an engineer who specializes in theoretical work, it seemed to me to be a case of "give me enough parameters and I can fit a horse." Our in-Orbiting Headquarters physicist, Dr. Chris Lee, described it as solid, but noted it had some serious shortcomings. In the intervening years, the paper—to the best of my knowledge and research ability—has not made it through peer-review to publication. A new paper, set to be published in an upcoming edition of Communications in Mathematical Physics, formally addresses the idea, and not only finds that Lisi's specific theory falls short, but that no theory based on the E8 symmetry group can possibly be a "Theory of Everything." ------------------------------------- When asked, Prof. Garibaldi, co-author of the paper and expert in exceptional Lie groups, stated that he felt an obligation to help set the record straight. "A lot of mystery surrounds the Lie groups, but the facts about them should not be distorted," he said. "These are natural objects that are central to mathematics, so it's important to have a correct understanding of them." He went on to describe the work in easy to understand terms, and elegantly showed how disputes in science are handled. "You can think of E8 as a room, and the four subgroups related to the four fundamental forces of nature as furniture, let's say chairs," Garibaldi explained. "It's pretty easy to see that the room is big enough that you can put all four of the chairs inside it. The problem with the 'theory of everything' is that the way it arranges the chairs in the room makes them non-functional." (An example of this being that one chair is inverted and stacked atop another chair—it's there, but it isn't useful for sitting.) |