Monday, September 29th, 2008
3:00pm - 4:00pm, in Science 2-065

Alfred Noël

UMass Boston

Should Mathematicians take a second look at Garett Lisi's Theory of Everything?

Abstract: The physicist A. Garett Lisi has published a very controversial paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" on the archives ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770 ). Lisi claims that he has unified the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak/strong interactions and gravity). Physicists do not believe that is the case from the evidence given in the paper. However, there seems to be a consensus at least from the point of view of some Mathematicians that a better understanding of the structure theory of the group E_8 on which Lisi bases his theory might help clarify the ideas put forward in the paper. In this talk, I plan to speak about certain subgroups of E_8 that "might" be of interest to Physicists. The talk will be suitable for a general audience.