I have no idea if this Theory of Everything is even plausible, or if it is the work of crackpot. What's interesting, though is how the publicity attending this theory and its author has revealed a hunger in the news media--and, I suspect, among the general public--for a non-traditional, non-academic scientist to upend scientific tradition.
This hunger has been both documented and fed by movies such as Star Trek: First Contact (a family favorite in my house). The film (which is either the best or second-best of the Trek flicks) deals primarily with the conflict between individuality and conformity, and definitely comes down on the side of the former. Along the way, though, it also touches on obedience to authority vs. doing the right thing, flawed human nature vs. mechanical perfection, obsession vs. reason, and the meaning of heroism.
All of those themes are present in the case of Garrett Lisi, a 39-year-old unemployed surfer physicist, and his suggestion that the four basic forces in the universe--gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism--and the dozens of subatomic particles that have been discovered so far fit into a beautiful 248-point mathematical pattern that looks like something produced by a super SpiroGraph.
Even among the more relentlessly rational of us, there still lurks a desire for the heroic. We live in an era of huge laboratories, scientific collaboration, and hierarchical research institutions. Even so, we still pine for the Heroic Lone Scientist, someone who through his own brilliance, iconoclasm and originality will shatter old scientific assumptions. We all want the next Einstein, a guy who did his more brilliant and original work while he was a clerk in a patent office. We want to know that the individual is occasionally more powerful than the collective, that even brilliant scientists have quirks and flaws, that obsession at least occasionally leads to truth, and that sometimes credentials don't mean squat.
We're looking for Zefram Cochrane, a man whose scientific discoveries usher in an era of human unity, discovery and understanding. And we're looking for god, a theory that explains everything.
It is these yearnings, rather than any real understanding (at least on my part, unfortunately) of the science involved that has put so much air in Garrett Lisi's sails of late.
Hello James Trumm,
I suppose I can claim to be Zephram Cochrane. Aithough I don't expect any recognition as such either by the mass media or academia any time soon anyway.
One reason being that I'm an even more non-traditional and non-academic scientist than Garrett Lisi, having trod a very lonely path through the realms of quantum physics, cosmology and the philosophy of mind and consciousness.
I say the scientific establishment have not found their new all-explaining Einstein because there's no such individual that can come up with simple or, indeed, any mathematical equations that can be universally applied to a general explanatory theory of how the universe is the way that it is.
So, despite the other successes of the standard model quantum theory, I suggest that physicists have not come to terms with the world-changing experimental discoveries of the early 20th century revealing that maatter exists despite consisting almost all of the space between its universal subatomic component particles called electrons and atomic nuclei and that a hugely powerful force attracts between electrons and nuclei aznd repells berween electrons.
And then, with the development of quantum mechanics 18 yars later, equally unanswerable questions could be asked about how electrons as well as nuclear components could be described as possessing behaviour called wave, spin and entanglement.
But suppose that such questions could be answered only by examining together enough natural evidence of where a cause acts universally in addition to the forces and the existence and nature of which cannot be deduced by measurement, calculation and mathematical fomulae...?
Posted by: bob eldritch | December 01, 2007 at 02:21 PM