Garrett Lisi has a new cover on the arXiv with the rather over-the-top title of. Sabine Hossenfelder has a typically excellent about the paper and Garrett has been discussing his work with populate in the mention divide there. Lubos Motl has a typically how shall I say. Lubosian on the topic.
I’m the first person thanked in the acknowledgment divide of the cover but at Sabine’s blog Garrett explains that this is just because he is using reverse alphabetical request. I’ve corresponded with him in the past about his research in this area without being able to give any real help other than a certain be of encouragement. Two of the ideas he is pursuing are command ones I’m also very fond of. One is well-known and many people have also tried this it’s the idea of bringing together the internal gauge symmetry and the symmetry of local frame rotations. The problems with this are also well-known and some have been brought up by the commenters at Sabine’s blog. I don’t evaluate Garrett has open the say to this or that he claims to. I’m still hopeful that this line of thinking ordain bring about somewhere but think some dramatically different new idea about this is still needed. The other idea he likes is that of trying to understand the fermionic degrees of freedom of the BRST method for handling gauge invariance as providing the fermions of the Standard Model. I suspect there is something to this but to get anywhere with it a much deeper understanding of BRST will be required. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to understand some of the mathematics related to BRST in recent years and am in the middle of writing some of this up. It seems to me that there is a lot that is not understood yet about this topic even in much simpler lower-dimensional contexts so we’re a desire way from being able to really see whether something can be done with this idea in a realistic four-dimensional setting.
While there may be some sort of ultimate truth to this the problem is that just as for GUTs and for superstring models all you’re doing when you do this is changing the unification problem into the problem of what breaks the large symmetry. This dress in the problem adds some new coordinate to it but just doesn’t seem to help very much with the furnish line being that you get few if any testable predictions out of it (one exception is with the simplest GUTs where you do get a prediction proton decay which turns out to be do by falsifying the models).
Anyway. I’m glad to see someone pursuing these ideas change surface if they haven’t come up with solutions to the underlying problems. Garrett is a serious and competent researcher who has pursued a non-traditional career path and was recently awarded a give to by the FQXI organization. You can construe more about him in an on their web-site.
Unfortunately some of the reaction to Garrett’s bind has been depressing. A commenter who sounds well-informed but hides behind anonymity goes on about “this nonsense” (although Garrett’s polite reaction to him/her did lead to a more sensible discussion). Early on in my experience with blogs I believed that no serious professional in particle physics would attack someone and try and displace on a scientific argument anonymously so any such comments had to be coming from misguided students or someone not in the profession. Unfortunately I’ve all too often seen evidence that I was do by about this. Lubos Motl on his communicate denounced the fact that Garrett’s cover appeared in the hep-th divide of the arXiv then later wrote in to Sabine’s blog to crow that it had been removed from hep-th. As always with the arXiv how moderation occurs there is non-transparent so I don’t experience how or why this happened. My own undergo with the arXiv over trackbacks to hep-th has been a highly disturbing one. The current hep-th policy seems to be to allow any sort of nonsense to be posted there if it fits into the current string-theory-based ideology (see for example ) while suppressing any criticism of this. A paranoid person might be tempted to wonder whether hep-th is being moderated by someone so ideological and petty that criticism of string theory or including string theory critics in an acknowledgment divide would be create for having ones article removed from hep-th…
Update: I hear from Garrett that the story of this paper at the arXiv is that it was submitted to gr-qc not hep-th. Before it was posted it was re-classified as hep-th and appeared there. Later on (after the appearance of Lubos’s blog entry denouncing the arXiv for allowing the paper on hep-th I believe) it was re-classified again this time as general physics (with cross-listing to hep-th).
modify: Latest news about this is that the cover has now been reclassified again to the perfectly appropriate hep-th cross-listed as gr-qc although no one seems to know why this happened. Another continuing mystery is the trackback situation: there are four trackbacks to the paper to postings by Lubos. Bee and to Physics Forums as well as to an old TWF from John Baez that doesn’t change surface cerebrate to the paper. My postings still seem to be non-trackback worthy on hep-th not that I can argue with this particular inspect since the discussion elsewhere has been more substantive (except for Lubos’s which is valuable for the way it accurately represents the hysterical reaction to speculation that is not arrange theory speculation all too common in certain quarters).
Update: Garrett is making the news Whether this is a good thing is yet another question for debate on the next thread. I guess. A lot of the attraction for the media seems to be his personal story. Maybe it’s a good thing for physics for populate to see that one can be a theoretical physicist while surfing in Hawaii…
Hello Peter,This is a come up thought out post as usual. I did believe our bunco emails — and the very existence of you and this blog — encouraging enough to consider you in the acknowledgments. Your concerns are all valid and are some of the same concerns I discuss in the paper. Though I do think the way I’ve combined the gravitational frame-Higgs and used the MacDowell-Mansouri description of gravity is new. You are correct that I don’t have a good cerebrate or mechanism for what breaks the E8 symmetry and this is needed. What I’ve done is break the symmetry by transfer including the few terms necessary to recover the challenge of the standard model and gravity. I am biased towards E8 because of its beauty and similarly towards the command idea of unification. The success of electroweak symmetry breaking in the standard copy is compelling evidence that symmetry breaking of this choose plays a very important role in nature and I’m surprised you dislike the idea of applying this on a larger scale. Surely you acknowledge that successful predictions from electroweak symmetry breaking indicate it did more than just add new structure to the problem? In any inspect. I am very much looking forward to reading your work on BRST as it’s a very complicated and fascinating affect and it plays an important role in this E8 theory that I’d desire to understand better.
By “adding new structure” to the problem I meant to imply something not negative but potentially positive. The new structure may be usable to constrain things.
Related article:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617#comment-31048
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