[thylacine]

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It would be cool if this idea works, but I personally can't say much about it one way or another -- I've tried to get interested in unification schemes, but it's basically all group theory, trying out various ways to fit the standard model gauge group into something less disjoint and weird. I zone out on this kind of task after a while.

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Yes, it seems this paper is doing a variation of something quite traditional. With anything like this I would always want to know, where does this group come from, and why this group instead of that one? I don't think these groups and symmetries are fundamental. They are created by dynamic processes. In other words, I believe in symmetry making, not symmetry breaking.