Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything?

[Jack]

You actually have to pay to read this full article (which sucks) but here's a brief intro and a link to this guy's paper. It sounds pretty amazing even though I have only the vaguest idea of the concepts under discussion. If nothing else, this is the first time I've ever read of a breakthrough in understanding accompanied by an exclamation of, not "eureka", but "Holy crap!"

GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby. That hasn't stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week ([0711.0770] An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe's particles and forces, including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says. That's some achievement, as physicists have been trying to find a uniform framework for the fundamental forces and particles ever since they developed the standard model more than 30 years ago. The standard model successfully weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay. The problem has been that gravity has so far refused to join the party. Most attempts to bring gravity into the picture have been based on string theory, which proposes that particles are ultimately composed of minuscule strings. Lisi has never been a fan of string theory and says that it's because of pressure to step into line that he abandoned academia after his PhD. "I've never been much of a follower, so I walked off to search for my own theory," he says. Last year, he won a research grant from the charitably funded Foundational Questions Institute to pursue his ideas. He had been tinkering with "weird" equations for years and getting nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure matched his own. "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," says Lisi. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'" What Lisi had realised was that if he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points, it might explain, for example, how the forces make particles decay, as seen in particle accelerators. Lisi is not the first person to associate particles with the points of symmetric patterns. In the 1950s, Murray Gell-Mann and colleagues correctly predicted the existence of the "omega-minus" particle after mapping known particles onto the points of a symmetrical mathematical structure called SU(3). This exposed a blank slot, where the new particle fitted. Before tackling the daunting E8, Lisi examined a smaller cousin, a hexagonal pattern called G2, to see if it would explain how the strong nuclear force works. According to the standard model, forces are carried by particles: for example, the strong force is carried by gluons. Every quark has a quantum property called its "colour charge" - red, green or blue - which denotes how the quarks are affected by gluons. Lisi labelled points on G2 with quarks and anti-quarks of each colour, and with various gluons, and found that he could reproduce the way that quarks are known to change colour when they interact with gluons, using nothing more than high-school geometry (see Graphic). Turning to the geometry of the next simplest pattern in the family, Lisi found he was able to explain the interactions between neutrinos and electrons by using the star-like F4. The standard model already successfully describes the electroweak force, uniting the electromagnetic and the weak forces. Lisi added gravity into the mix by including two force-carrying particles called "e-phi" and "omega", to the F4 diagram - creating a "gravi-electroweak" force.

[nerdvincent]

Very interesting! As a future physicist I want to work on the Grand Unification Theory. But slow him a little, I wanna help to find it.

[Keith Hamburger]

Well, we have to wait and see if they can come up with an actual theory that doesn't rely on some 16 or more dimensions to integrate everything.

However, there is a lot to justify the idea that the universe can be described through geometry. After all, geometry was derived to attempt to describe the universe, therefore, extensions of that geometry could well be used to provide a more detailed description of the same universe.

It is intriguing, but, obviously, in its very early stages.

Keith

[Jack]

Wikipedia's entry on this illustrates the broad range of reactions to this by academics. It also helped me understand a bit better the concepts being explored.

[another day]

Yeah, i believe in essence the universe is all derived from a basic (or complex) mathematical formula of balance.

[Athena]

This might help. Like the author, I have concerns about our ability to understand such things, because our materialistic language and thinking has blinded us, and hinders us from having a consciousness of forces and the ancient understanding of sacred math. I think we need to change our consciousness, to incorporate the consciousness of forces, such as Mayan, ancient Chinese, or Druids consciousness. That is to think in terms of forces/action, rather then in terms of things.

Stephen Phillips - Pythagorean Aspects of Music 1. Introduction I shall explore in this article how the ‘harmonies of heaven’ manifest here on earth in our acoustic responses to different tunings. We are aware that Pythagoras was supposed to have discovered the mathematical basis of music, although the various legends surrounding his discovery of its laws probably contain little truth. But we are, perhaps, not aware that the Pythagorean theory of music was but one application of the principles of his holistic philosophy, which was not only a modus vivendi but a system of understanding the immanence of God in nature through the study of number. As part of a continuing programme of research into the connection between Pythagorean number philosophy and contemporary particle physics, I would like to set out here what I believe are some fruits of this work. For some this may be a journey into an unfamiliar and abstract world, and I would fully understand if some readers lost their way as they followed my route. However, my analysis has to be mathematical because number is the ultimate language of logic. That said, I shall avoid using technical terms familiar only to a professional mathematician. My initial discussion will centre on the geometrical figure called the tetrahedron. This solid shape has four corners and four equilateral triangles as its faces. It symbolized for the Pythagoreans the number 4, which will appear regularly in my analysis: we find it in the tetrachord and in the two ‘perfect fourths’ into which the ancient Greeks divided their musical scales. Most importantly, we find it in the tetractys, the sacred symbol of Divine Wholeness at the heart of the number philosophy of Pythagoras. We shall discover that it expresses the mathematical character of the various musical ‘modes’ that the Church adopted from ancient Greece. My research indicates that this is an example of a universal principle at work, prescribing the nature of physical and superphysical reality. As most people’s hearing has been blunted by life-long exposure to equal-temperament, it is difficult for us now to recreate with ‘innocent ears’ the original musical experience of the Greek musical modes. My article will show, however, that they have far more significance than historians of music have considered. They exhibit a certain mathematical completeness and a beautiful symmetry and proportion that has its remarkable counterpart in a certain class of numbers that some physicists believe may describe the basic units of matter. In other words, vibration – whether it is of violin strings or string-like subatomic particles – may be governed by mathematically analogous laws: studying the proper (ie Pythagorean) mathematical basis of music may therefore give one insight into the ‘holy grail’ of physics, namely, the so-called ‘theory of everything’ that explains all the forces of nature. More important still, it may help us to understand our spiritual origins.