Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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I showed this to a friend of mine who studies physics and then we did a little poking around on the internet. This is getting suspiciously little media attention and no mainstream academic attention and there are at least some people saying the guy is a total crackpot:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/ex...theory-of.html

Sorry to ruin the fun.

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Lol that dude is such a jackass.


p.s. I mean his tone, not his knowledge or viewpoints.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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I showed this to a friend of mine who studies physics and then we did a little poking around on the internet. This is getting suspiciously little media attention and no mainstream academic attention and there are at least some people saying the guy is a total crackpot:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/ex...theory-of.html

Sorry to ruin the fun.

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Lol that dude is such a jackass.


p.s. I mean his tone, not his knowledge or viewpoints.

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he's super arrogant but occasionally funny. his use of the phrase "cargo cult" to describe amateur scientists who latch on to small bits of theories they don't understand is pretty hilarious imo.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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I showed this to a friend of mine who studies physics and then we did a little poking around on the internet. This is getting suspiciously little media attention and no mainstream academic attention and there are at least some people saying the guy is a total crackpot:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/ex...theory-of.html

Sorry to ruin the fun.

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Lol that dude is such a jackass.


p.s. I mean his tone, not his knowledge or viewpoints.

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he's super arrogant but occasionally funny. his use of the phrase "cargo cult" to describe amateur scientists who latch on to small bits of theories they don't understand is pretty hilarious imo.

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Ya rly, he's arrogant as hell but pretty entertaining with his acidic insults. His 'common crackpot's errors' ( http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/08/co...ts-errors.html ) blog is a pretty accurate depiction of all crackpots, not just theoretical physics crackpots.

Anybody that hasn't studied past elementary calculus and elementary physics (such as myself) is pretty much through the looking glass when it comes to this stuff, unfortunately. Even the majority of 'simple' explanations require the use of technical terminology that will be foreign without the acquired knowledge, no matter how intelligent the person is. This is the big reason crackpot stuff is sometimes accepted, the average person is wowed and intimidated by technical lingo.

Still, despite these regrettable shortcomings, i'm glad we're on the same page with regards to this:

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It is the same kind of "unification" as if you put stickers with elementary particles on a chessboard and argue that chess is the ultimate theory of everything. Kindergarten stuff.

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Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

hm, this just seems to be a very poorly reported story?

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"The theory is very young, and still in development," he(LISI!!) tells the Daily Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelihood to this prediction."

He hopes the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, currently being built on the Swiss-French border will find some of his 20 imaginary gravity-related particles.

"This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory — it's either going to be exactly right, or spectacularly wrong," Lisi tells New Scientist. "I'm the first to admit this is a long shot. But it ain't over till the LHC sings."

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thanks fox. way to bury that at the very bottom.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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I just wish our smartest scientists would spend a little less time thinking up huge untestable / very expensively testable theories with little practical application and more time working on things like the Microwave invisibility cloak etc.

[/ QUOTE ]http://content.answers.com/main/cont...isible_Man.jpg

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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he's super arrogant but occasionally funny. his use of the phrase "cargo cult" to describe amateur scientists who latch on to small bits of theories they don't understand is pretty hilarious imo.

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Actually, Richard Feynman coined the phrase.

wiki link

Regarding the original story...I can't believe this story is getting so much media attention. At my undergrad school, the physics department was getting so many letters describing ideas like this, that they needed a secretary to sort out the crap from the real letters. Of course, a large portion of the letters came from the nearby mental institution. It's relatively easy to find semi-legitimate idiots like this guy.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

I have to sit through about two of these talks per month and tbh am really tired of hearing about this field of physics. I'm sure somebody will come up with a correct unification theory one day, but imo this shouldn't even be called physics for now. Even these guys admit that they are several orders of magnitude from ever testing these theories. It seems like just anybody could come up with one of these, just make sure your theory isn't testable and make the math hard enough that nobody will bother to challenge it.
Also these experiments are ridiculous, they could fund 5000 condensed matter/amo experiments for the price of the LHC. They will probably find the higgs boson in a couple of years, and it will be a great accomplishment and somebody will win the nobel prize, and then they will be clamoring to spend tens of billions to build the next thing that will allow them to set new upper limits on the validity of their theories. At least the euros fit the bill for this one, although the superconducting supercollider was LOL.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — An international team of mathematicians has cracked a 120-year-old puzzle that researchers say is so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan.

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When stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, the solution takes up 60 gigabytes

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did this jar with anyone else? More like one city block would be my guess.

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60GB of highly compressed TEXT is a lot of numbers and letters imo.

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60 billion letters and numbers? I have an A4 page with some scribbles on it, definitely not tightly packed, say 600 characters, 1000 characters to a square foot. 10k characters to a square metre. 1 million characters in 100 square metres. 60 billion characters in 6,000,000 square metres, or 6 square kilometres.

I guess it's closer to Manhattan-size (60 square kilometres) than I thought, but still off by an order of magnitude. If the solution was written in binary it would be pretty close to accurate.

It just seemed like too much, everybody's hard drive fits 60GB+.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

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I just wish our smartest scientists would spend a little less time thinking up huge untestable / very expensively testable theories with little practical application and more time working on things like the Microwave invisibility cloak etc.

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I have the same desire. It's also the reason why I support the flourishing of the market and the demise of the state. That way, people's actual values (like yours, because you said "I just wish") will get fullfilled.

Re: Grand Unified Theory Solved... Maybe
 

I think Assani Fisher has done some good work in this field