The latest "theory of everything..."
Several people have been posting, here and more broadly, about Garrett Lisi's new candidate
unified theory of fields and gravity. (Even slashdot seems to have picked it up) This got encouraged by Lee Smolin, of loop quantum gravity fame, getting publicly excited about it, and it makes for great news because Lisi isn't currently a practicing physicist -- he's currently a surf bum with a PhD. The biggest problem is that this paper is wrong in some rather key ways.
( Really technical digression, of interest only to physicistsCollapse )Anyway, that was really technical and is mostly for the reference of any physicists who still read this. The non-technical version is that it makes for a great news story and all, but this is the sort of idea that most high-energy physicists come up with sometime during grad school, think about for a few minutes, and then realize why it doesn't work.
What's more amusing is watching Lee Smolin go off and praise it, just because it's a non-string-theory theory of quantum gravity. :)
