Dogma Discharge wrote:
"Kent Paul Dolan" wrote:

This looks like it will be receiving a lot of
discussion:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/yq4aq2

[a google search on: "An Exceptionally Simple
Theory of Everything"; the results include the
arXiv link to the paper.]

Lisi does a nice talk on this topic over on
TED.com, you can download the video clip, well
worth it, seems like quite a nice character to
boot!


http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/g...verything.html

Trying to describe in mere English what something
_is_, as Lisi tries to do toward the end of that
clip, falls into a set of problems so incredibly
difficult that US President Bill Clinton, on trial
for bringing discredit onto the office of president,
famously challenged "that depends on what the
definition of 'is' is".

The only thing that really "works" in this case to
convey what an electron "is", is the mathematics of
the description.

I'm no more competent to understand Lisi's math than
before, but Lisi's theory does have the advantage of
being beautiful, and conveyably so, a characteristic
of many of the most successful theories about nature
ever discovered.

He certainly made that much abundantly clear.

One can only wish him continued success, and
somewhere a limit to how many dimensions he must add
to his theory before it is complete.

One can only hope that at that limit, out of his
theory will drop not only an explanation of what the
electron "is", and why, but of what the big bang was,
and why, and of what the fate of our universe is, and
why.

This work by Lisi must(?) in some way also interact
with the newly bruited perception of our universe as
equivalent to a hologram projected from a lesser
dimensional surface.

While that concept seems to diminish our importance,
humans have been becoming ever less the center of
the universe as science marches along anyway.

That elementary particles, at the level at which
Lisi works, those of which we ourselves are
comprised for example, are only crude, grainy
approximations, ones that make hyper-sensitive
meters, meant to detect gravity waves emitted from
distant interactions of super-massive bodies,
experience "jitter", just removes us a bit further
from being "at the center of things".

That we might have our existence only on a
projection "surface", with the more accurate reality
existing only on some "film" at the most distant
removes, continues that trend.

Oh, well, in that scenario, at least we all get to
be movie stars.

Thanks for the link!

xanthian