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Comment by rspeer | Hacker News Reader

I recognize a piece of background that the article is leaving unstated. A decade ago, the mathematical group E_8 was the subject of a unified theory of physics by an outsider, Antony Lisi, who called it "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything". [1]

This theory never got published (it was supposedly the most downloaded paper on arXiV for a while, though). Peer review was not favorable to it. But the popular press ran with it, especially because of the story they could tell about how a surfer dude was maybe the next Einstein.

I assume that the echoes of this are why a mathematician writing down facts about E_8 got caught up in an explosion of weird publicity about God Particles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory...

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I remember that. IIRC, the draw of the "surfer dude" wasn't just that he was a surfer, but that he lived out of his van, was a mathematician or physicist, and basically just traveled around surfing and doing theoretical math when he wasn't surfing. It's fairly easy for a lot of people to romanticize that.

I don't recall whether I read about him, or watched a Ted talk, or both, but a good portion of the time when I read "unified theory" some recollection of that story comes back. I'm sure it helped that a very dumbed down version could be understood almost purely through visual aids with pretty colors and symmetry. ;)

I met Lisi back in the day. It also helped that he was actually not a crack pot. Certainly not in the classical sense. He understood the math at a level typical of a theoretical physicist in the field, and he engaged the scientific community about his ideas in a deep proper way. The rebuttals and criticism he drew also showed his work was at least taken somewhat seriously and considered.

At the end of the day his theory remained to incomplete. Chirality problems were hand-waved away unconvincingly. It's more a mathematical curiosity than a proper proposal for unification.

You'd be surprised at how many mathematicians are avid hikers. I've heard stories of people flying to Calgary, disappearing in the Rockies, then showing up at UBC for a conference over a month later.

I think some mathematicians need inspiring natural scenery like programmers need a good keyboard.

I have a friend who did a math post-doc at Calgary. When he "went to the lab" to get research done, "the lab" was a mountaintop.

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