Math's Never Looked Quite This Good

Somebody call Warren Ellis. This post from New Scientist's science and math page isn't the start of a new Planetary story arc, but it sure sounds like one.

E₈ in all its glory! Kinda looks like the LHC detector.

In all fairness, Ellis's inspiration for the (non-spatial) 196,833-dimensional "snowflake" Wildstorm Multiverse came from the Fischer-Griess Monster group, not the E₈ group, but, as I tenuously understand, they're both important parts of group theory mathematics. What caught my attention about this discovery in the 248-dimensional E₈ group being visualized for the first time is its possible link to string theory, particularly in relation to Garrett Lisi's unified field theory.

Now, I'm obviously not a mathematician or a physicist, so I can't be expected to explain everything in exacting technical detail, but I'll try to describe the fundamentals as I understand them. Unified field theory is, currently, the holy grail of the math and physics world: with an understanding of this "theory of everything" scientists could tie the interactions between elementary particles together and understand matter, energy and the universe in a fundamental way. I think gravity is the odd force out right now, meaning that nobody knows how to fit it into the mix. Just to give an idea of what kind of mind it might take to crack this sucker, working on a unified field theory basically broke Einstein and there are even some people that suggest the stress brought on by the exertion cut his life short.

There are plenty of theories of everything and they're all ridiculously complex. Garrett Lisi's theory fascinates me mainly because the man's biography is equally fascinating. It starts in Southern California where Lisi was raised and educated, earning two B.S. degrees for mathematics and physics with honors from UCLA and a Ph.D. in physics from UCSD. Somewhere along the way he became a big, big time surfer and spent his post-doc years transitioning between surfing the Maui shoreline and cooking up his paper "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything"--living the dream I think every serious geek wishes they could. In addition to surfing Lisi has also participated-to-a-degree in virtually every type of adventure sport you can think of, possibly including simultaneous Mexican cock fight/shopping cart demolition derby. (It's the next hot thing!)

Lisi's unified field theory as laid out in the aforementioned paper envisions each point of the E₈ group as a different elementary particle having a distinct link to all the others and resting in our four-dimensional spacetime. Many physicists think Lisi's theory is wishful thinking and I wish I knew enough about the whole movement to express anything approaching a thoughtful comparison of all competing models. Still, his model, on the surface, sounds logical and elegant enough to allow my brain easy access to its message, so I like it.

Now, as the New Scientist article explains towards the end, these experiments with supercooled cobalt-niobium crystals where E₈ as observed have no direct relation to string theory or Lisi's theory, but they do show that the group does show up in the real world and not just on paper. Still a very, very cool advance.

--Matt