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[elvum]

Any fans out there of theories of everything?

I've never been good enough at HEP theory to do more than skim this stuff, but I particularly liked the end of section 5: "The theory has no free parameters. The coupling constants are unified at high energy, and the cosmological constant and masses arise from the vacuum expectation values of the various Higgs fields..." - the guy is simply reeling off desirable features from the GUT ticklist.

I eagerly await the results of some peer review, and about a decade of LHC running. :-)

Comments

[elvum.livejournal.com]

Intuituvely, I feel that there should probably be a large number of mathematical entities that have symmetries that correspond to those of the Standard Model, plus some spares. Continuing in that vein, I think that the elegance of this new theory is due in part to the relatively small number of spares. The fact that Lisi had to use the most complicated Lie algebra is only mildly concerning, given that. But theories are only as good as their successful predictions, so let's see what new particles Lisi's theory requires, and whether we can find them with the LHC. :-)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Well, it's the most complicated simple Lie algebra, so in some sense it's a reasonable choice. I believe it has some other desirable properties, too. But you're right about the predictions: to his credit, Lisi agrees with you :-)