Reply #1: Yup, I figured that, when the Theory of Everything finally got thought by [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

somebody, he would be riding a surfboard in Hawaii.

Makes sense.

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"Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

"E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says 'I think our universe is this beautiful shape.'

"What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

"Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. 'My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,' he tells New Scientist. 'I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'

"What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity." (MORE)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml

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And here's his article...

http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

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And...oo-oo-oo-oo! CHECK THIS OUT! The larger image of this thing--E8--is truly, stunningly beautiful. The thumbnail above doesn't do it justice...

http://aimath.org/E8/mcmullen.html

Really. Go there. Take a look. I don't even begin to understand what this is all about, but the image is worth the trip.