18 November 2007

Snowboarders Guide

To the galaxy... he thinks...
Garrett Lisi is widely recognized as a thoughtful physicist. But unlike most, he has no longstanding university or research affiliation. He surfs. Snowboards in the winter. Scrapes together cash, and in between, has published a paper that outlines a new universal theory of everything.
This kind of stuff just blows me away... I tried to follow the argument laid out here and gave myself a headache. These guys lose me when they start naming a gazillion different particles and theorising about bending gravity in 8 dimensions.
He's convinced he has found what amounts to the field's Holy Grail: a way to explain all physical forces, including gravity, as different manifestations of the same underlying principle.

So stay tuned – if the surfer's theory turn out to be even partially descriptive of the world, a story to rival Einstein's will enter physics history.
I have to go rest my puny brain.

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FROM THE COMMENTS:
"Once again, neo goes off without doing any real research, and as usual he tries to subtely(sic) shoehorn his particular ideology in with his factoids - in this case, we get another heaping serving of the typical right-wing anti-university/anti-intellectual slop."