This is a discussion thread about the impact of a nonsensical physics paper by Garrett Lisi (click!) on the traffic of various websites.
Yeah, my traffic is way up with google searches for Lisi.
Is it true, by holographics principle we can imagine the Universe as a black hole inside out? Can you propose some physically relevant objections to the idea, the Universe is formed by interior of giant dense star, after then?
Lubos, what turns me off most about Garrett is the fact that he prides himself on wanting to "kick string theory's ass":
http://
backreaction.blogspot.com...nspiration.html
Not to sound like a snob, but to me it's lowbrow for anyone to talk about kicking someone's ass!
And despite the nasty rumor that I'm looking for a turn-on:~(, I'm still a bit turned off by the fact that Garrett receives funding from the Templeton Foundation.
LM: It is completely absurd for him to talk about string theory. He really has problems with some basic physics that talented children understand at the high school which is much easier than string theory. I don't care much about the Templeton Foundation funding surfing crackpots, it's their money. If God gave them the task to bribe people in order to identify God with aggressive cranks and fraudsters as tightly as possible, then they - as proper believers - are obliged to fulfil this task. 
Now, I love God, of course, but not enough so that I would about care this thing.
C: I suppose it's as low brow as calling Africans "blind and stupid." Hmm?
Lisi seems to have a PhD from one of the campuses of my Alma Mater, the University of California at San Diego. This is just plain crazy if it is true and if his doctorate is in any technical field. He obviously doesn't know the first thing about science.
Something is really wrong here and I suspect that he is a fraud and a liar as regards his academic career. If not, something is seriously wrong at that campus.
Hi Lubos,
I'm really buffled by that guy. He went to a decent grad school and presumably studied some field theory but how can he be so incompetent? I mean, really, adding fields with different dimensions and statistics the way he does it is just so plain wrong. And presumably Smolin and others have all seen Lisi's bizarre idea and approved of this but this just begs the obvious question: do you think that Smolin and his LQG friends honestly think that Lisi's construction is correct or do they know it's bullshit but just want Lisi to get publicity?
Old story: Heisenberg claims collaborative effort with Pauli on a unified field theory. Pauli withdraws, but Heisenberg presses on announcing to the World of the success. Pauli's furious. Pauli mails his friends a letter "consisting of a blank rectangle with a caption:"This is to show the world I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing."
From "New Scientist"
"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 (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). 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, ..."
Hmmm, Lee Smolin thinks its "fabulous"
While New Scientist is fun to read, it is rapidly becoming "fun" in the same way the "National Enquirer" is fun.
BTW, Lubos, some idiot called almida is trashing you on Bee's blog.
LM: Dear Gordon, thanks, I've heard that name already. I think that Backreaction deliberately supports these things.
Wow, Smolin said that??? Damn, the PI folks seems to be at the "perimeter" for sure. Sorry Dr. Myers you have to be in that company.
2 Noone. OK, here is an argument that anyone familiar with dimensional analysis can understand. In Lisi's first equation he adds fields that not only have different statistics but also different mass dimensions. Note that there are no dimensionful parameters that make the terms in his equation to have the same dimension.
Now, any sane person familiar with elementary physics knows that one cannot add "kilograms" and "meters".
Here Lisi's answer to Bee who is worried about the different dimensionful quantities being added:
"bee:
It's not quite that bad. The gauge fields have 0 mass dimension, the frame -1, and the Higgs 1. So the mass dimension of the frame and Higgs cancel when they're combined as the frame-Higgs, and this can be added to the gauge fields and mixed together through gauge transformations. The fermions don't have 0 mass dimension, but the addition of fermions (Grassmann numbers) and gauge fields (1-forms) in the connection is a formal addition -- these fields don't mix. The mathematical name is that this is a Z2 graded algebra."
Did you understand what he said there?
How does it matter if they "mix" or not? So, according to Lisi one can add 5 meters + 5 kilograms and call it a well defined quantity because "they don't mix".
Even better, the trick is to indroduce a fancy "mathematical name" and then fool the laymen into believing you're saying something that makes sense.
And then he produces another pearl:
"If we speculate that the fermions are the ghosts of pure gauge fields that they've replaced, then these original gauge fields should have 0 mass dimension -- but I don't think this implies the ghosts replacing them necessarily have 0 dimension. So, I think we're OK on dimensions, and don't need to write in dimension-ful coupling constants. The fermions as ghosts idea is controversial though, and I'm open to others."
What the fuck did he say here? Did anyone honestly understand this? At least he admits that the idea is "controversial" but oh, man what a crackpot.
Lubos,
It's time to cool it. Science is science and you are on the right side of reason.
Lisi, an obvious fool and charlatan is no reason to abandon the pursuit of truth.
You have a lot of friends out here; don't ever forget that.
Dear Gene, thanks for your kind words. Sometimes I also have to sleep. I've erased comments from about "5 people" who use only 3 IP addresses - something that often happens with silly and offensive comments.
Otherwise, I am always grateful for friends and even soulmates. But I am also a realist. It seems that the only realistic conclusion is that as far as theoretical physics goes, the organized crackpot movement turned out to be almost completely in control of both the internet and the MSM media and one should start to be afraid to be walking on the street in certain corners.
According to some measures, it is much more brutal influence of an aggressive anti-civilization group than what it is in the global warming debate. In the global warming debate, a rational person is never "quite" alone. There is always someone who agrees and who speaks out, although he may be a few miles away.
In the case of the main questions of theoretical physics, it is different. Physicists who know certain things, because of a combination of their own innate decency and fear, are simply afraid to say anything, except as very silent anonymous people in isolated contexts whose impact is exactly equal to zero.
The obvious and inevitable result is that those people with IQ below 100 not only control most of the general public but start to include ever increasing groups of people.
This physics-related pressure was at least as important for me to leave those circles as the purely political issues about the academic freedom because I became pretty much certain that all these things would be getting worse as time goes.
When I was first suggested by relatively powerful people that I should have been treating complete idiots such as Peter Woit as my peers if not more, it was just way too much for me. We may be ready that the society may misevaluate many things, nothing is perfect, but these things are just many orders of magnitude out of proportion.
What about next, I would be thinking. Would cranks with their "theories of everything" who know less than 1% what I do and whose IQ is 45 below mine - literally an inferior species - would be placed upon us or even dictate what we can think about physics? Well, this epoch just here. It has become politically incorrect to say that what surfers like Garrett Lisi are doing are light years away from what theoretical physics is. The closer one is to the top of the real physics, the most impossible it is for him or her to declare any opinions. With a realistic idea about psychology and social science, where do you think that the society will be going if the relative influences are arranged in this way?
If the field - and other serious fields that think about aspects of the world ratinoally - won't be able to change it by finding some media - influential friends etc., the world is going towards a new dark era.
Best
Lubos
Lets just see wether he can get this paper printed in any decent journal 
Dear Kostya, thanks for your wise words. I agree of course that he also violates dimensional analysis. Still, I view adding bosons with fermions to be much sharper a contradiction. Why? In various "natural units", more types of objects can be added. In Planck units, everything is dimensionless and you can add length and mass, if you (or someone else!) really wish.
On the other hand, there can't be any units in which a bosonic object is equal to a Grassmannian one. Why? Because bosonic objects, if squared, are nonzero, while fermions squared are zero. Zero differs from nonzero which means that they can't possible be equal in any choice of units and conventions.
But yes, the word "dimensional analysis" is what I really had in mind when I wrote that this concept completely misunderstood by the paper is something that talented high school kids interested in physics usually know.
If you look at Lisi's publications at SPIRES, you find that except of his very first paper, he did not manage (or even try) to publish any in a journal. This is already enough to decide about his quality.
Dear Luboš, I understand your feelings but do not underestimate your power. Spanish blogs identified initially the article as wrong and suspicious. Suddenly someone said (not me btw) that Motl had something to say about the paper. People turned into TRF to read what TRF said and then dozens of comments celebrating your post were written. The comments emphasized two things: It is impossible to destroy a paper in less words than Motl did and your sense of humour (one of the commenters says "I almost die laughlin reading Motl´s opinion on Garret's garbage"). So, at least overhere, Lisi's paper has been thrown to the wastebasket already
and this crank has not been placed upon you and will not have any influence.
best
sorry for "laughlin" wrong spelling
Dear rafa, thanks for your support. My feelings are now more detached which is a relief. I learned not to underestimate human stupidity many years ago.
Three years ago, I started this blog mostly to stop Woit's idiotic rants. I was assuming that it would take a month or so for the crackpot to abolish his misinformation forum. It seemed almost obvious to me that the only reason why some people were reading that shit was that accessible information about the reality of science was not really accessible to them.
Of course, if someone had told me that the jerk would be contaminating the public perception of science three years later and it would not go away but instead grow, I wouldn't have started this blog, at least not for the original reason. Instead, I would have escaped from institutionalized physics as soon as possible back then i.e. much earlier than in reality.
Science is based on a careful separation of the correct and good and wrong and bad ideas and, more generally at the societal level, those who contribute good ideas and those who don't. This mechanism is never perfect in the real society but it is essential anyway. If this mechanism is broken and if there appear opposite societal mechanisms whose very point is to replace gold in the science and the community by shit, science just can't go up. It inevitably goes down.
Finally, people are just waiting for a savior because their souls might be empty after the decrease of the influence of religion - and years of monotonic growth of the economy and democratic countries. This may explain why they're so incredibly and irrationally thirsty for new saviors, Al Gores, new Einsteins, etc. If they're told that certain things are just complex and cannot have trivial answers that they could grab, they just don't like it. The extent might be different but the essence of the phenomenon is analogous to the Weimar Germany that was hungry to get simple answers and a "real leader" which it soon did.
I am afraid that this fact won't go naturally away either - at least not spontaneously. In my post-Weimar analogy, the similar exponential growth of madness was only regulated more than a decade later and it was probably necessary to make tens of millions of people die to stop that madness.
Sometimes it is possible to try to help someone understand something that you only understood a few years or weeks ago: to eliminate a marginal advantage or "finite" ignorance. But in the cases like Garrett's paper, it is a completely different story. These things like the rules of dimensional analysis or adding bosons with bosons only are something that I have never misunderstood. Once I started to hear about several types of units, I figured out what was the relationship between them - what dimensional analysis means and what it forbids.
I just don't understand the people who can't figure these elementary things out. They look like different species to me. I have no idea how to communicate with them about physics. They seem to be just so incredibly stupid - and at least 90+ percent of the people who write about this thing clearly are.
Even if one doesn't understand anything about mathematics or physics, it must be breathtakingly clear that there doesn't exist any rational reason here to believe a fantastic news about a theory of everything written by a surfer. Rationally speaking, the only evidence that a reader has is that one - clearly completely idiotic - journalist is just so incapable to distinguish nonsense from science that he bought a paper by a crackpot - and there are hundreds of thousands of such crackpots, most of whom are never endorsed by the Telegraph.
Are people really so stupid that they uncritically accept these bizarre statements that are written by journalists? Should we get used to the fact that as soon as one idiotic journalist gets confused, hundreds of thousands of people automatically follow him? It's scary.
I just don't understand why someone would ever believe such an extraordinary statement written by a clearly extraordinarily incompetent person. It is just beyond me. A complete absence of independent thinking - or absence of any brain - must be behind it. At this point, any previous traces of rationality have evaporated. Following Newton, "I can calculate motion of celestial bodies or strings but I can't compute human madness."
Hi Lubos,
I feel disappointed that you decided to leave institutionalized science instead of continuing fight against appropriate issues, though in reality you are still a fighter. Probably one good way of fighting is by working hard in science and another way is to make science accessible to general public. You have done both. I think your efforts did not go waste. Peter Woit got the response he deserved from many including you, Distler, Clifford Johnson, Polchinski etc. Such clash seems inevitable. Even Galileo faced this type of problems. There are some who prefer to do their work instead of fighting. But people like you play important roles in the game. You may notice that Peter mentions your views in his blog. He may not agree with you but he must note your views and presence. So please continue and come back to academia. (By the way, you have not told us what you have in mind about your future plans and many would like to know that.)
Lubos,
Once more, you're right.
The people for whom those papers are written are so dull that they must even be reminded what Pauli matrices are.
Lubos,
Don't despair, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. I don't think there is much chance that Lisi's paper will be accepted by any respectable journal.
Dear Lubos,
You said, "Finally, people are just waiting for a savior because their souls might be empty after the decrease of the influence of religion - and years of monotonic growth of the economy and democratic countries. This may explain why they're so incredibly and irrationally thirsty for new saviors, Al Gores, new Einsteins, etc. If they're told that certain things are just complex and cannot have trivial answers that they could grab, they just don't like it. The extent might be different but the essence of the phenomenon is analogous to the Weimar Germany that was hungry to get simple answers and a "real leader" which it soon did."
I really do not think that there is anything new going on these days. People have always been looking for a savior. That was true in ancient Rome, it was true during the Eisenhower Administration, which I remember quite well, and it is true now.
I cannot look at the world through your eyes, my friend, but I find it helpful to keep certain things in mind: The battle between truth and ignorance is eternal. What we can hope for is to leave the world a little better place than we found it and most people are actually doing that, including yourself.
As I have said repeatedly, you have made my world a better place and I am deeply grateful. So don't give up; the fight has just begun.
Lubos,
I didn't suspect the situation was so worrying :
people like Woit and Lisi are trying to interpret the ghosts introduced in the BRST method as the fermions of the standard model.
Any good grad student know that these are unphysical, decoupled states, if you agree that physical states are in the BRST charge cohomology ! That's complete nonsense !
Dear grad student, thanks for reminding me that there still exist sane people.
The very fact that the discussion got to ghosts simply means that someone deliberately emits fog. The core of the discussion has nothing to do with ghosts.
Moreover, when Garrett Lisi argues that something is OK because they're ghosts, he confuses all kinds of ghosts and completely misunderstands their properties.
For non-compact gauge groups, one creates negative-normed states, i.e. the "bad ghosts". These objects make a theory unphysical because probabilities are no longer positively semidefinite.
But these ghosts have nothing whatsoever to do with Fermi/Bose statistics. Even the bad ghosts coming from polarizations of gauge field with a non-compact group are always bosonic objects.
What he wants to suggest is that he might get fermions because the fermions are associated with the Faddeev-Popov "good" ghosts. Indeed, these good ghosts are fermionic, but their being fermionic is inseparable from the fact that they're unphysical.
So his theory has wrong "bad ghosts" and doesn't have fermions and even if he included anything like a "BRST", BRST method is not a method to generate new physical fermions. It is a technical method to deal with an existing gauge symmetry.
Combine it or recombine it in any way you want - it remains completely obvious that a normal gauge field without a *physical* (not just BRST) fermionic symmetry (supersymmetry) simply can't give you any fermions.
It can't give you any spinors of those gauge groups, whatever you get has wrong quantum numbers - kind of all of them etc. etc.
Garrett Lisi emits words that are very similar to those used in physics except that the combinations he creates out of these words are physically nonsensical - because he simply doesn't understand the words he is using. Apparently no one who reads these things can figure these things out.
How many people in the world solidly understand why these comments about ghosts and statistics are safely nonsensical? One million? 100,000? 10,000? At any rate, this set of people is completely unable to be heard.
Dear Lubos,
We do indeed seem poised on the brink of a new dark age. In a hat-tip to Smolin, Nude Socialist has decided to attack rational thought itself in the current issue and has an editorial called "The Trouble with Reason".
The gist of the editorial was that we should encourage irrationality because such behaviour may have helped us in our evolutionary past. Oddly enough, they do not endorse other atavistic behaviours such as violence. For example take the sentence "To want to cleanse society of religion before understanding its evolutioniary roots and purpose seems strangely unscientific". Now replace the word religion with "warfare" to see what I mean.
The article tells us that "Trying to tell people how they should think is a bad idea as it will alienate them". Isn't "trying to tell people how they should think" another way of saying "education"?
LM: thanks for your report, Charles! Your summary is probably the maximum that my stomach can afford today. Have a nice weekend, Lubos
Lubos:
By "...Faddeev-Popov "good" ghosts. Indeed, these good ghosts are *fermionic*...", you mean they are "anticommuting"?
The Faddeev-Popov ghosts still transform like bosons under Lorentz group, so I wouldn't call them fermionic.
LM: Yes, if there's any potential violation of spin-statistics relation, the word "fermionic" means "Grassmannian". Mine is the right choice of terminology (and yours is wrong) because the Fermi-Dirac statistics is about the Pauli principle - about having "+1" in the demoninator of the distribution function.
Whether the spin is integer or half-integer doesn't directly influence Fermi/Bose statistics. To summarize, "fermionic" always means "anticommuting" whether or not the spin is integer or half-integer. For physical states, of course, "fermionic" is equivalent to "half-integer spin" but your opinion that the adjective "fermionic" is linked to spin rather than statistics is a misunderstanding.
For example, you may search for fermionic-BRST vs. bosonic-BRST to see that the conventional BRST generator is fermionic even though it is a Lorentz scalar.
Zephir wrote:
>
> Is it true, by holographics principle we can imagine the Universe as a black hole inside out?
In some respects, except that a black hole event horizon is one way, in that someone inside can see out (for a while!) but we can't see in, whereas the cosmological horizon is two-way. They both share features in common though, including a characteristic temperature.
Also, by all accounts the "visible" universe is dual to a 2D brane, and I gather a similar brane is somehow associated with the event horizon of a black hole, although it's hard to fathom exactly how as there is no material boundary, in conventional theories at any rate.
Thinking about John's theorem (not mine alas, but one summarized by Terence Tao on his wonderful blog http://terrytao.wordpress.com/20...wave-equation/)
I had a whacky idea while stuck in traffic on the way home.
As Terence explains, Fritz John's theorem proves that evolution of the non-linear wave equation flips between divergence and convergence for a critical value 1 + SQRT(2) of a parameter. Now this value is approximately 2.414, which isn't far from (3 + 2)/2 = 2.5, in which 3 and 2 are the intrinsic space dimensions of the visible universe and the dual brane. So could this be vaguely indicative of the "multiverse" being fractal, with fractal dimension 1 + SQRT(2), i.e. is exactly balanced between a "blow up" and tending to zero?
It's almost certainly pure numerology, and I don't take it very seriously (like most of my other "stuck in traffic" ideas ). But who knows? ..
Lubos, thanks for your comments.
They are as thorough as ever.
I know you usually don't bother to read what shit Woit keeps on pounding (I normally don't ; it oddly makes me laugh and feel depressed) but you should have a look on his post concerning the Lisi rambling : about BRST and ghosts, he has written the exact opposite to what you most clearly explained.
You should also think about the discussion Woit had with Mark Srednicki and Jacques Distler. He someway couldn't understand what spinors and chirality mean.
I am indebted to you, for I learned much Physics from your posts since your blog was created. I'm only a first year grad' student and I greatly benefitted from learning how a leading theoretical physicist think.
You also stimulated me in reading Avery & Singer and other similar works, which helped me forge a grounded opinion about global warming.
Selfishly, I hope you will come back and hold a tenure in a top University.
It would reassure me to believe that the perspectives in the field and for society, more generally, might not be so rotten.
Don't forget that there still are sane people.
Albeit you surely won't totally agree with it "You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in" ; Feynman also had his moment of deep despair.
arrgh pass the gravol:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/
0,2...,311952,00.html
Wow, 'irrationality' may have helped us in our evolutionary past? I imagine the very concept of 'evolution' could not have arisen without some hard rational thought. I find it interesting that journalists are quick to accept crackpot 'theoretical' spoutings. Would they be so quick with more pragmatic engineering crackpottery, e.g., accept an offer to ride in some guy's airplane based on 'alternative aerodynamics', or something like that?
Nevertheless, there are sane, intelligent people of reason and insight walking the earth - I read their posts here at TRF daily.
Gordon, I just watched the video clip on the rotating lattices linked at FoxNews - I couldn't comprehend any of the relationships the narrator spoke of - it was just a lot of pretty, rotating little objects without any real explanation of anything. The guy wears shades and lives a cool lifestyle - this is probably why the press jumped on him and his theory - if he'd been a shy, bespectacled nerdy type, I'll bet they wouldn't be covering this story nearly so energetically.
Lubos, you get a mention in the Australian media.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,2...0-
13762,00.html
lol--Philip's link quotes Lubos Motl Pilsen (new surname).
Ann: Undoubtedly the paper is cool, but cool in the sense that it would be cool if pigs could fly. Smolin's characterisation of it as fabulous and
the best unification scheme he has seen in years is typical of his scattershot
thinking processes. Max Tegmark writes papers like this on occasion and he puts them in his
"Crazy thoughts" section of his webpage---this is fine, as the ideas are fun. This is being promoted as the Second Coming. I don't have the expertise to critique it like Lubos does, but and the hand waving is apparent to me.
Mark Thomas : Right on.
While I'm just a disinterested layman (not a "hording masses"...Econ grad...but not a physicist), I must comment. I came here via a U.K. telegraph article, then Googled it, which sent me to (the apparently) dreaded, Woit's blog, which linked here.
I first read the paper, then read your rebut. I am aware (as you say every h.s. student must be) that the units must cancel and cannot disappear...as if swept away by the magic of merlin, or a government social program.
Therefore, I'd hedge that you're correct. The media of course love non-complex "hero villain" linearity (of simplicity) but that's as correct as the causal link man has inferred from observing that the stars tend to revolve around plant earth.
Just saying that some of us plebes aren't just mooing along awaiting instruction.
haha they do degrees in economics?
John, the space is 3D, because just the 3D hypersphere enables the most dense packing of surfaces due the principle of least action, i.e. the most dense propagation of inertial energy and reality through space at distance. This is because the 2D structures of 1D particles are more dense then 3D and 6D structures are even more weaker, therefore the 3D is the most dense metric capable of creation the continuous 3D space.
But my question has targetted somewhat different indicia: If the current Universe generation is formed by interior of dense particle system (whatever you'll call it, dark brane, or black hole), a rules of the most dense particle packing follows from such assumption immediatelly. By Aether Wave Theory the particles are formed by density fluctuations of another system of inertial particles formed by the same way, recursivelly. You can consider the vacuum as a fluid, composed from nested density fluctuations of itself.
The point is, such system will obtain the structure of E8 root vectors, which describes the structure of dense hyperspherese attached to kissing points of another hyperspheres. I.e. the most dense structure of particles, formed as a exchange particles of another generation of particles. These generations are forming layers, which corresponds the nested generations of space-time and quark generations.
After all, in both string and gauge theories, both Garett theory the E8 has an important meeaning, so that every coincidence between gauge symmetry and quark symmetry should be handled with care, no matter how intuitivelly was obtained. While Garett wanted to kick the string theory ass, he revealed the most apparent link between E8 gauge groups of topological theory and the Standard model instead, by my opinion.
By AWT the Universe is formed by the interior of dense star collapsed into black hole. How such collapse should appear? The elastic core of collapsar will condense from many points at the same moment. Such process is analogous the crystallization of the salts from supersaturated solutions (http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/images/chemistry/
naac1.avi).
During this the less dense false vacuum has condensed rapidly into existing one in fast growing spherical zones. At the moment, two or more shock waves will intersect/collide mutually, a newly created nuclei of phase transform appears and the growth continues from the newly created center. The result is mutually intersecting network of spherical zones similar to the foam of approximately dodecahedron topology. This structure corresponds the spatial distribution of streaks of dark matter, which was studied experimentally by using of COBE and WMAP space-probes, because they're projected into CMB distribution (i.e. the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background radiation.
Hmmm- a bafflegab generator.
I'm just explaining, how the E8 is working in context of the last Garett's finding. Not from the math point of view. From the physical one.
Because without inertia is not physical reality, the math developed for its description the less. Even the probability calculus and Peano algebra are based on countable mutually colliding objects, i.e. the fermions.
if i was a mathematician what i would do is apply something akin to the mobius transformation in some ingenius way to the icosahedron to turn it into a torus.
all the while, keeping in mind that one of the stellations of said polyhedra is the unit cell of a 4D hypericosahedron.
i would then recognize that objects that exist in 4D (namely eveything) are only concievable to humans in 3D making us fundamentally limited outside of venerated mathematics to percieve truth.
then i would connect the dots and look up the word immanent.
. . . what does lightning know anyway? must be a crack pot.
Much like Lubos, Aaron Bergman is very much aware that Lisi is dumping trash disguised as treasure on the field of quantum gravity:
Finally, could I make a plea for more modest titles? You don't have a theory of anything until you quantize something. Might I suggest something like "An E_ {8+8} Classification of the Field of the Standard Model and Gravity." (Which is not an endorsement by me that such a thing was done--I do not have the time at the moment to work through the details of the paper.)
It seems to me that only science journalist, who are poorly versed in high-energy physics (whether they're from the MSM or the blogosphere), could get suckered into believing that Lisi's paper is a gem to behold. Plus IMO, it's totally irresponsible for any journalist to consult the low-energy community (specifically, the loop one) without also consulting the high-energy community (specifically, the string one) prior to reporting that any paper on TOE belongs in a treasure chest, instead of a trash bin.
After all, string theorists, unlike LQGists, have a strong enough grasp on both the depth and breadth of quantum gravity to judge whether or not any paper rises to the level of TOE. And even if Lisi's paper is a bit better than trash, any journalist who sees any magic in Lisi's toy kaleidoscope must be living before the fall of the aether, or even before the rise of electricity, for that matter!
And to me, all this hype about Lisi's TOE is painfully reminiscent of the hype that surrounded Magueijo's VSL. Plus both Merali's and Highfield's reporting reminds me too much of gonzo journalism: a kind of fear and loathing at the Planck scale, so to speak.
"...your summary is probably the maximum that my stomach can afford today..."
So Lubos, I hope what I'm saying serves to soothe your digestive tract, not irritate it any further!;~)
Thanks to the counterweights provided by Lubos, even I - a real ignoramus - am able to get a certain sense of the difference between a fair dinkum high-energy physics effort (one that accords with the rules of conservative consistency, rationality, and logic, of this scientific discipline) and the result of a wishful compulsion to take shortcuts toward having a thrilling experience (a placebo type such ) of enthralling physics theoretical beauty (even where there is, according to the same rules) none such to be had (that holds water) .
What we people will do to evade getting too close to the "conditioned-in" states left behind (within our respective actention selection serving systems) by {entirely possibly tardily impacting but nonetheless in the end} 'evil-ponging traumas' knows almost no bounds.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/
UnN...y_of_everything
