Redlined my brain trying to understand physics

[roy-nexus-6]

This video is of Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything.

I pushed my brain beyond redline to try and understand even a bit of this - it is really really complex. But this kind of thing, and the ability of the human mind to construct such models, truly amazes me. This may represent the 'true' representation of how the universe works - something humans have been pondering forever and a day.

The talk is 18 mins long, but does not include any maths. Give your brain a work out!

Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything

[Speedbag]

Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" seriously make the beast with two backsed up my brain for about two weeks.

I should really dig it out and read it again...

[triangleforge]

I know the feeling. I've tried at least once a year over the past couple of decades to try to get through some version of "Quantum Physics for Dummies" and been stymied every time. One really nicely written book* called "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" (subtitled something like "A Layman's Guide to the Quantum World") has done it to me three times. I make it just fine through Planck &  black-body radiation, Einstein and am mostly holding my own through Special Relativity, then OK, I'm hanging on still with Schrodinger's thought experiments. Then I hit a series of pages where I realize that I've understood every single word, but have no clue whatsoever what the sentences mean. Soldiering on just gets worse, and eventually I stop and go read something goofy like Tom Robbins or Christopher Moore just to reassure myself that English is still my first language.

It's been a while, maybe I should give it another shot...

*Well written, at least as far as I've gotten.

[fastwin]

I'm not even going to try. I'm still working on the Ducati owner's manual.

[Duck-Stew]

Watched it.  Makes some sense to me but I did spend 3 years studying Physics.  Most of it though was over my head...

[superjohn]

OK. I don't want to sound like a dick or anything, but I think understand what he's proposing. Basically what he's saying is at the heart of reality, matter and energy are simply facets of this E8 structure that has a spin which transcends what we perceive as a finite point in space-time. So, an electron is a manifestation of this particles position (or combination of positions) and other basic elements of matter are simply a different manifestation.

Can Pompetta weigh in here? He's the physics geek.

I kind of like this theory a lot as I would like to imagine the universe, nay multiverse being a symmetrical, beautiful thing.

[Goat_Herder]

I don't know enough about Physics but this does seem like a long shot.  He takes the known particle interaction mapping to the 4th demension to form a pattern.  And then adding new demensions and spins the graphs to form "beautiful pictures"...  Even he knows that he is reaching on this one....

I watched the PBS Nova a few years ago on the String Theory.  It's all making sense at the begining until these theoretical physicists take it to the nth level...

[Grappa]

Interesting talk.  I gotta say though, if this guy was an actor, he would be Keanu Reeves.  Smart guy but he's got the public speaking delivery of a high school boy.

[ducpainter]

It's like trying to understand calculus...

pointless.

[Drunken Monkey]

At least calculus and Newtonian physics go hand and in hand.  Hard to understand one without the other, but study them both together and the light bulb goes off.

That TOE ain't physics. That's pure math that just might apply to physics (and the latest poking around in his theory looks like it might not after all)

Still, the math of Lie Spaces that this is based on is kinda cool. Wish I understood them better (the most complicated rotational symmetry possible in any number of dimensions?)

[NorDog]

Scientists don't even know what gravity is yet.  Of the four fundamental forces is physics, it's both the most powerful and least understood.

Newton never "discovered" gravity, nor did he define it.  Rather he coined the term in order to label a "force", then gave a system to describe how that force behaves.  His system is not perfect, and so Einstein came up with his system.  But Einstein did not actually define gravity either.

Much of this talk about string theroy, quantum whatnot, and 11 or 12 dimensions is really just speculative ad hoc premises used in order to make certain mathmatical models work.  Not much different from what Ptolemy did centuries ago with his epicycles in the heavenly spheres.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

[superjohn]

Scientists don't even know what gravity is yet.  Of the four fundamental forces is physics, it's both the most powerful and least understood.

Newton never "discovered" gravity, nor did he define it.  Rather he coined the term in order to label a "force", then gave a system to describe how that force behaves.  His system is not perfect, and so Einstein came up with his system.  But Einstein did actually define gravity either.

Much of this talk about string theroy, quantum whatnot, and 11 or 12 dimensions is really just speculative ad hoc premises used in order to make certain mathmatical models work.  Not much different from what Ptolemy did centuries ago with his epicycles in the heavenly spheres.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And he says as much when he referred theoretical physicists being used to being wrong as new experiments confirm or disprove theories. We're not going to be building a warp drive any time soon, but it's still fun to speculate, hypothesize and drive experimentation.

[Autostrada Pilot]

I did pretty well in calculus and physics, but I can't believe how content I am to just go about my daily life and not stress over this kind of stuff.

Call me small minded, but I'd rather spend my time learning about things in the physical world that are more applicable (probably the wrong word) to me.

However, I am glad that there are people that understand this stuff and make it more applicable to me through advances in technology in a way that I can see and appreciate in my daily life.

[He Man]

that drive to find out hte unknown is what leads to crazy shit being built. Look at GPS systems. Without the through understanding of special relativity, a GPS would of never been accurate down to the foot and would rather be floating around somewhere in the 100's of feet making guided weapons, road map GPS and other devices completely useless.

Now before people start fighting, there are many many many THEORIES out there on how everything works. String Theory, or "Theory of everything" is the leading one and was proposed by that japanese physicsist (and his collegues) that just so happens to teach at my school.

The only thing people that dont directly study this stuff needs to know is that, it tries to describes the very small, the very big and everything in between. But there are parts of it which does not explain everything, which is why it is not taught as how the world works, but much rather how we think it works, where we know how quantum mechanic more or less works, and we know how newtons laws works, but they simpley are not interchangeable.

The end result is even newtons physics isnt the key to our world. It just so happens to model it very very very accurately.

Schrodingers equation just so happens to map out how the sub-atomic particles work very very well.

THeory of everything is trying to model the quantum world and the physically large world together. The key here to understand what string theory is, is the fact that it looks at the Newtonian world in a completely different way, yet it still accurately models it, which means it must yeild the exact same results as newtons laws, and at the same time, it must yeild the same results we know exist in the quantum world, but again looks at it in a different way.

if anyone is confused at how they are looking at more than 3 dimensions on that screen, they are depicted by color and not an axis.

[NorDog]

Actually, I think physicists/cosmologists are moving away from string theory these days.