A cow-orker who actually groks a few of the simple Lie groups (which is a few more than me) says that the paper is less "here is a rigorous argument" and more "look at this fascinating thing I noticed." It mixes several different types of abstraction to place the fundamental particles on the e8 graph (wikipedia it, ooh, pretty, just solved this year), but he leaves out a lot of the hard work to make it obvious/proved. Also, if Lee Smolin likes it, I am immediately skeptical.
On the other hand, it's testable, unlike Strings. So when the LHC comes online, we may know fairly quickly if he's on to something. He ran out of fundamental particles with about 20 empty spots on his read of the E8 graph. By using the E8 like a partially filled out periodic table of fundamental particles, he's created plenty of test cases.
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Date: 2007-11-17 06:00 am (UTC)On the other hand, it's testable, unlike Strings. So when the LHC comes online, we may know fairly quickly if he's on to something. He ran out of fundamental particles with about 20 empty spots on his read of the E8 graph. By using the E8 like a partially filled out periodic table of fundamental particles, he's created plenty of test cases.