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Friday, November 16, 2007

Did you see where this surfer dude has solved the riddle of the universe?

Eat your hearts out, pocket-protected physics nerds:
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

Sometimes the surf's up:
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

And sometimes it isn't:
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."

Well, if it's still around when Paris Hilton is no longer front page news ...

A friend writes,
I don't know how hard to laugh at this, but it seems to be part of a trend in science these days: "Hold the presses! Everything you know is wrong." (Except Darwinian evolution, of course.)

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