an exceptionaly simple TEO

this could be sick - although very cool. his paper. and his wiki page.

in a nutshell, Lesi (heretofore recognized as surfer dude) recognized relationships between elementary particles and what is known as the most beautiful shape in mathematics: E8. This mapping of what we know about stuff to the E8 structure (using pure geometry) - allows for the prediction of 20 yet-undiscovered particles. if the hadron collider (be careful not to mispronounce that) discovers any of these particles - 'surfer' will be the new 'patent clerk'.

I love the way this guy writes. In his intro, he begins:

We exist in a universe described by mathematics. but which math? Although it is interesting to consider that the universe may be the physical instantiation of all mathematics, there is a classic principle for restricting the possibilities: The mathematics of the universe should be beautiful. A successful description of nature should be a concise, elegant, unified mathematical structure consistent with experience.

my question is: why, exactly, should the mathematics of the universe be beautiful? Why has this become a classic principle? Is beauty nothing more than efficiency? certainly there is a relationship - but beauty reflects something else, something more than this coldness. there is something underlying it all, something we may never fully comprehend. why is beauty at the bottom of the rabbit hole?

Your Mind Makes it Real

while I am hardly a specialist in much of anything - and thus completely unqualified to make or reinforce any significantly meaningful statements - one statement I've held comes from a line in the Matrix - "Your Mind makes it Real".

I see this as a fundamental reality of the universe -

... from the quantum universe (my perhaps gross approximation notwithstanding) - to the "reality" of the virtual world - to the "real" world... what seems to matter is human... errr... consciousness. we also don't know what consciousness is... which only adds to the enigma of it all.

in seemingly unrelated news - we still don't know what time is. but this article - suggests we also don't know what space is any more than we know what time is. . why didn't i think of that? we experience time - but have a hard time explaining what it is when asked... yet for some reason we feel we have a pretty good handle on space... except... aren't space-time interrelated? so what makes us think we understand space any better than time?? Does a ruler actually tell us more about reality than a clock??

this article is brilliant to my way of thinking - and is exactly the kind of mind job we are going to need to undergo to finally produce a cohesive and holistic view of this universe (TOE).

this article succeeds in unifying consciousness with space-time by turning your mind inside out: i.e. instead of looking in at consciousness, it looks out from consciousness. in this way - it is also very zen... and begins to explain e.g. this.

not saying this is the way to go - but it is the kind of shift that awaits.

too fricken' cool.