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Surfer's Theory of Everything may be dismissed as invalid

November 18th 2007 01:59
There was a lot of wild news and excitement this week, over a paper published in arXiv by A. Garret Lisi. The paper claimed to unite gravity and quantum mechanics by using odd, multidimensional mathematical constructs - though the material was inaccessible to most, the internet fed on the story like a pack of rabid vampires, hungering for the idea that an unaffiliated researcher could come up with the most important physical theory in decades.

Ars Technica is debunking the paper, pointing to a couple of other posts, claiming that Lisi is using nonsensical operations in his math.

Lisi's work concerns a mathematical structure known as E8, shown below:

E8 string theory surfer theory of everything


This blogger goes into more detail about why the paper is utter nonsense.

It's hard to pick through all the noise about this paper... without the background in physics and math, the arguments against and for are clouded by strange, bizarre terms. However, it is telling that the news about this story came out of New Scientist, not being picked up by Nature and Science, like you'd expect.

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3 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Damo

November 18th 2007 07:12
Tried to read the comments on the the rebuff and concluded that someof these science nerds are racist and infantile babies.

"You sound like a Jew"

So much for higher education.

Comment by Ahmed

November 18th 2007 12:18
Honestly I don't care, thats all from Digg, seriously, all of it, the internet lit up because it mmade it to the digg frontpage, then ars technica which is a well known digg whore decided to do a story on it to also get onto the frontpage.

The whole thing is one big grab for attention by various websites, nothing more than that.

Comment by Cibbuano

November 18th 2007 22:06
well, in the physics arena, there seems to be a lot of support for the idea of publishing to public forums, and letting the entire world peer-review. I'm not sure if it's a good model, but the current system has flaws as well...

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