An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything – Garrett Lisi

Deep Future

 I've got a real soft spot for heretics and people who carve their own path outside of the institutions and societal norms and things that everyone is so pressured into because it creates this echo chamber and there's these cookie cutter outcomes, it's not conducive to getting to new ideas, it's not good for figuring out new things and to discover how the world works and invent new things.

It's always a real privilege to spend time with a true heretic and today we're hanging out with Garret Lisi. He has his own unified theory of particle physics, combining that with Einstein's theory of gravitation

Garrett's been slagged by the scientific community for this, even though nobody's managed to do a really good job of proving he's wrong and. I think it's a really great story.

You don't need to know anything about these topics to be interested in this conversation. It's a lot less about the science, you can learn about that independently if you want. What we're really doing is discussing his experience of what it's like trying to bring a new idea from outside of the ivory tower of academia, especially in a field that has been trying really hard for 40, 50 years now with very little to show for it, with string theory and these other things that soaked up a lot of the resources and attention but didn't really get us where we thought we wanted to go.

No disrespect to the people who tried, but we need new ideas and we need to work on those too.

This is a case where the credentialism where the established folks in the scientific community exhibited pretty poor behavior and really tried to shut down an idea in the wrong way, instead of doing it the right way, which is to just come up with one that is better.

Garrett is a super fascinating guy! If you are interested in figuring out how to live a life of surfing, snowboarding and doing a little bit of stock trading and not having to fit into the corporate world: this is a great conversation for you, cause Garrett has been doing that for his whole career. He's living off of stocks and he started trading as early as high school.

I'm going to link to a couple of things that Garrett has written, his papers and things, but also I'm going to link to a YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder, who you may recognize cause now she's getting huge on YouTube, but she's doing a great job of explaining physics. She even has an episode that I really like where she discusses some of the problem with the scientific establishment, from her perspective as well.

Important Links:

• An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything on Wikipedia
• Quantum mechanics from a universal action reservoir
• An Explicit Embedding of Gravity and the Standard Model in E8
• The Pacific Science Institute
• Also recommended Sabine Hossenfelder on What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics

About Garrett Lisi

Antony Garrett Lisi, known as Garrett Lisi, is an American Theoretical Physicist who works as an independent researcher.

Lisi has proposed a new "theory of everything" — a grand unified theory that explains all the elementary particles, as well as gravity. His theory is based on a mathematical shape called "E8". With 248 symmetries, E8 is very large and complex and Garrett believes the relationships of its symmetries correspond to known particles and forces, including gravity.

Throughout his career in research and education, he has made full use of the technological tools available and developed strong expertise in advanced problem solving, the invention of mathematical algorithms, and complex calculations.

This extensive background in science, education, and computing enables him to be very effective in addressing the complex social as well as technological needs of those wishing to solve hard problems.

Currently Lisi is the director of The Pacific Science Institute, a "Science Hostel" that aims to provide scientists the freedom to explore the boundaries of knowledge in an independent and transdisciplinary research community outside the confines of traditional academic institutions.