Thursday, November 18, 2010

Garrett Lisi's "Geometric Theory of Everything"

I've been intrigued in the past by the outside-the-box geometry/cosmology thinking of physicist Garrett Lisi (but then I'm not schooled enough in his subject matter to even know if he's only outside-the-box or, off-the-wall!). Peter Woit has a post today related to Lisi's latest theorizing:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3292

... and here's an older TED talk Lisi gave:

http://tinyurl.com/yla4y52

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Peter Woit is deleting requests for Garrett Lisi to provide a full reference for the paper he claims he published in a peer-reviewed journal. I can find no such paper.

"Dear Peter,

If you do not believe me, please search Garrett's claimed article for yourself:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=Garrett+Lisi&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=J+Phys+A+Math+Theor+43&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=1.&as_sdtp=on&as_sdts=5&hl=en&as_vis=1

And you will find: "Your search - Garrett Lisi - did not match any articles published in J Phys A Math Theor 43."

"Your search - Lisi - did not match any articles published in J Phys A Math Theor.""

You can see more here, where Peter deleted a ton of my posts for asking simple questions: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3292&cpage=2#comment-70663

Yes--at Peter Woit's blog, Garrett claims that a peer-reviewed paper exists.

When commenters questioned its reality, Peter Woit snapped: "
Peter Woit says: November 26, 2010 at 12:06 pm

I’ve had to delete repeated anonymous comments by someone who couldn’t be bothered to either look things up for himself or read Garrett’s previous response to the same question:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3292&cpage=1#comment-69686
"

At Peter Woit's blog, Garret writes, "
No, but it’s wrong. The paper with Lee and Simone lays out 90% of the theory, and was published in J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 43 (2010). Lee and I tend to just put papers on the arxiv, but Simone thought it would be good to put it in a journal. There was no problem getting it published."

But then we go to Garrett's wikipedia page which he is known to self-edit, and there is no mention of any such paper.

There is no mention of any paper with Simone, nor the J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 43 (2010).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything

Why is there no mention of the supposed journal paper that was peer-reviewed which Lisi states he coauthored? Is Lisi lying about the existence of such a peer-reviewed paper?

In addition, there is no mention of Simone on the page.