Thursday, November 15, 2007

Apparently the Answer is E8, not 42

Sounds like a game of Battleship, but an umemployed theoretical physics Ph.D. has come up with a simple yet profound unifying Theory of Everything, succeeding where both Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Douglas Adams had failed. I don't pretend to understand either subatomic particles or the mathematics behind the E8 design (see article for a picture) but apparently his idea is elegant and testable, in ways in which many grand physics theories are not.

"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!'"

Btw, "Holy Crap!" translated into Ancient Greek is "Eureka!" ;-)

No comments: