Lisi's exceptionally simple theory of everything is summarized in Wikipedia. I found it a bit more approachable than the original preprint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything
Lisi is attempting to derive both the standard model of physics and gravity from the E8 Lie (pronounced Lee) group. I won't even pretend to understand the math. I do know about groups, rings, fields, and matrix operations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics) The standard model is successful because it describes the thousands of different particles we see coming out of particle accelerators as made of a few simple components, minus gravity. It reduces the number of bits needed to describe physics. I'm not sure that adding gravity in either Lisi's paper or various other string theories does that. Maybe it does, but we can't compute it. A theory of everything doesn't describe a universe of space, time, and particles. It describes a universe with observers that sense space, time, and particles. The theory makes no sense to us because as observers, we try to relate it to these familiar but imaginary constructs. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Sun, Dec 14, 2025, 5:02 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > John. With one distinction, E8 denies chirality. With that, it now denies > (it wasn't its intent back when it started) one of the fundamental > mathematical lattices posited as possibly scaffolding reality. > > Over the past, few years rehashes by converts and desciples are trying to > arbitrarily tie it back into accepted theory, but the very efforts are > contrived, not derived. The true benefits lie in its beginnings, was it in > 1971, predating String Theory? On the face of it, it has seemingly become a > theory that lost its argument as science progressed. It cannot be brute > forced back into natural order. In the main, today it doesn't sufficiently > match the physical reality. AI advocates seemingly love it. > > Even so, there's a lot we could learn from it and great ideas we could > investigate outside of it, using grounded theorems. Speaking for myself, > I'm learning a lot from it's emergent debate about the foundation of the > universe and its postulations of quantum phenomena, such as SUSY. > > On Sun, Dec 14, 2025 at 10:40 AM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Saturday, December 13, 2025, at 1:05 PM, Matt Mahoney wrote: >> >> The models described in the paper (which I admit I don't fully >> understand) reduces the description length of our universe by a few bits >> and suggests the existence of some particles and fields yet to be >> discovered. The author suggests they haven't been found yet because they >> may have very large masses, but the theory doesn't predict their values. It >> doesn't predict any other particle masses, for that matter. It does not >> explain why space has 3 dimensions. It does not explain why time has a >> direction, when both relativity and quantum mechanics are symmetric with >> respect to time. >> >> >> The E8 symmetric algebraic geometry is pre-time and pre-mass, >> information-flat. You have to break the symmetry a particular way to get >> entropy and primes. "Particle mass measures the amount of irreducible >> information locked into a chiral correlation." Either the structure works >> or needs to be further modified to map to physics correctly. >> >> *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T7ff992c51cca9e36-Mfffc5b4a3c46bc726f1aa828> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T7ff992c51cca9e36-M5ba0548af37bc4f29ad7d251 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
