Beauty is truth, truth, beauty...

[mdlbear]

The exceptionally beautiful object in my userpic is a projection into two dimensions of an exceptionally weird, complex, and strangely symmetrical family of 8-dimensional mathematical object called E8. In particular, it's a Lie group that just happens to contain, as subgroups, all of the simpler Lie groups used in quantum physics and gravitation.

With me so far?

Last month, a physicist/surfer dude named Garrett Lisi (CV) posted a paper with the title An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything that manages to combine all of the above into something considerably simpler and more elegant than string theory. Well, simpler if you happen to have a graduate-level grasp of group theory, quantum physics, and general relativity.

The current flurry of Wikipedia articles was apparently set off by this article in The Telegraph; I found out about it during my lunch break, from this post by wcg. Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot of work done this afternoon. Although it also turns out that the E8 lattice is also closely related to the Haming code H(8,4), an 8-bit error-correcting code in which any two codewords differ by at least 4 bits. And that's something that I might be able to use. (Makes a good excuse, anyway.) (But be careful always to call it, please, research!)

update: Almost forgot to mention the connection between E8 and octonions. There's a good monograph by John Baez here. Yes, he's Joan's cousin.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Some math stuff is very pretty. Thanks for adding a bit of beauty to the world.

[patoadam]

If they figure out how the universe works during my lifetime, I'd like to be able to understand it. I would need to review college math and study some additional topics, including Lie groups/algebras. Don't know if I can do all that, but your post gives me an incentive to try. I think I'll start with the book by Conway and Smith that Baez mentions.

[mdlbear]

I'm in pretty much the same position -- haven't studied group theory since college, and we never got into Lie algebra. Every once in a while I go on a Wikipedia binge and pick up a little more. E8 is weird and striking enough that I've encountered it before, but I don't claim to understand it yet.