Essay Abstract
In 2007, A. Garrett Lisi published "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" (TOE) in which he presented a geometrical approach towards TOE based on E8 and the Gosset lattice. Although Lisi's approach has been very well received by FQXi members and pop culture, it has received some serious physics critique - most notably from Prof. Jacques Distler of the University of Texas. Distler's fundamental complaint is that E8 is not large enough to properly contain three chiral generations. Still, it seems appropriate to consider Lisi's geometrical approach a reasonable way to model an approach towards a TOE - a "toy model" TOE as such. The author recently posted "A Case Study of the Geometrical Nature of Exceptional Theories of Everything" and published a book on "New Approaches Towards A Grand Unified Theory". These two papers present the possibility of a geometrical approach towards a TOE. Geometry enters into this approach to TOE in two different ways: 1) Yang-Mills Boson GUT's are derived by recognizing similarities between certain crystal symmetries and certain SU(N) Lie Algebra symmetries, and 2) Particle multiplets are constructed from Simplices, and the product of these Simplices builds representative multi-dimensional lattices. It is anticipated that this geometrical approach may be an axiomic breakthrough that allows us to bypass the apparent complications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and ask the question "What is Ultimately Possible in Physics?" - A Geometrical Approach Towards a TOE.
Author Bio
Dr. Ray B. Munroe, Jr. received all of his degrees in Physics from Florida State University with a Ph.D. in High-Energy Physics Phenomenology in 1996. He is currently CEO-in-waiting of his family's retail business.