Garrett Lisi’s Office

24 responses to “Garrett Lisi’s Office”

1. 

   xouroborus

   Sep 13, 2008 at 4:49 am

   live updates 🙂

   Reply
2. 

   pegleg000

   Sep 13, 2008 at 5:50 am

   22 particles, last I heard… but who’s counting?-) I think (hope) we’ll see some real excitement coming from CERN in the next few years. Not that I’ll have a pion’s chance of stringing any of it together.

   Reply
3. 

   biotron

   Sep 13, 2008 at 11:36 am

   is this a picture of a picture on his office wall (ie inside the office we are looking at in the picture) – ?!

   Reply
4. 

   Head_First_Only

   Sep 13, 2008 at 1:41 pm

   I’ve been following Lisi’s work for a while and even posted on Flickr about his paper on E-8, so I’m very impressed by this!

   Reply
5. 

   Resh B.

   Sep 13, 2008 at 2:06 pm

   Usually I get what you’re saying…

   Reply
6. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 13, 2008 at 3:28 pm

   xouroborus: I just love that URL! thanks.

   biotron: That is his office there – he lives and works in the van! Not the usual academic source for ideas in this field…

   AshwinK: maybe the abstract of his paper would help:
   An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything
   A. Garrett Lisi
   (Submitted on 6 Nov 2007)
   All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold."

   Fair enough, but the E8 plane 2a sure is pretty

   

   For a sense of the beauty and elegance of his construct, this short video shows the graphical conformations that may have been at the root of his epiphany. Physics without equations.

   Reply
7. 

   biotron

   Sep 13, 2008 at 5:42 pm

   extremely psychedelic New Scientist video… great, thanks.

   re: the office – i had gathered the van was his office / home, just that the quality / flatness of the image above looks like a photo of a photo – a photo of the sort one might find blown up and hung on an office / van wall 🙂

   this is a pic of a pic, right?

   Reply
8. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 13, 2008 at 6:00 pm

   Yes, good eye. But it’s projected on a screen at the TED conference. It’s a photo I took of Lisi’s talk.

   Reply
9. 

   Todd Huffman

   Sep 13, 2008 at 8:50 pm

   I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Garrett’s office multiple times, at Burning Man, San Diego, and Hawaii. He ain’t fooling around, he parks it in the best places. It’s purposefully a common cargo van — for the same reason as Telstar.

   From my Hawaii visit — Dr Lisi’s commute to work…

   
   
   
   

   Reply
10. 

    biotron

    Sep 13, 2008 at 8:56 pm

    aha – should have realised that before…

    just read that CERN was hacked into earlier this week.

    the ongoing Higgs-Hawking spat is getting quite amusing, too, in their race for the Nobel…

    interesting to note the difference in scale and cost of the UK’s cupboard-sized Zeplin-3 dark matter lab at Boulby mine, for detecting wimp reactions.

    Reply
11. 

    AMagill

    Sep 14, 2008 at 12:05 am

    I hope he’s right. I personally think that string theory has just been a colossal waste of time for everybody involved. There’s a small number of people in the world who can truly claim to understand it, fewer who can figure out any implications or tests from it, and none of them agree with each other. The Exceptionally Simple theory, on the other hand, is relatively understandable, it can be tested, and it has implications that could actually immediately useful to the advancement of physics.

    Reply
12. 

    j_silla

    Sep 14, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Sweet, I’d love to go along with these guys any time, but I doubt there is space 🙂

    There is too much writing on the LHC, just found one that gave some good data, you have probably read it already 🙂 Seems like they have a limit how much data can be recorded, interesting, well you may have a solution ????? Would be interesting to hear about it as well.

    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-lhc-may-change-internet

    "Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history"

    "it’s cheaper to write the data to terabyte hard drives and ship them from one supercomputer center to another via FedEx than it is to transfer the gigantic data sets over the net."

    "middleware platform called Globus"… "In a perfect world, Globus or its successors would simply make everything on a given grid straightforwardly and transparently accessible from any computer. "If Globus is a success," Bader said, "then you won’t hear about it."
    cool grid as well http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/5B5F475B-ECAF-2FA0-ACACF46F849...
    globus – http://www.globus.org/toolkit/about.html

    eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/
    press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2003/PR13.0…
    main: public.web.cern.ch/public/

    http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001365

    thanks for the video link, amazing theory of everything video as well.
    I think I am becoming obsessed with the whole thing, ok, that’s it for now 🙂

    Reply
13. 

    jurvetson

    Oct 17, 2008 at 11:46 pm

    Lisi’s TED talk just went online.

    "If nothing else, it’s the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you’ve ever seen."

    Reply
14. 

    petersonconway8

    Oct 21, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/31607328@N07/2961736804/?rotated=1&...

    At burning man, Garrett and Crystal set up a booth in the middle of nothing, hung a sign up that said "Oracle" and would wait for random passers to sit down: "Have you prepared a question?" he would ask. Not knowing they were talking to one of the greatest thinkers of our times, they would ask about how to handle a situation with a girlfriend, whether to contact their estranged child, or how to build a row boat out of bamboo. My art project was just downstream so i got to ask a few people how it went. They had no idea who the Oracle was, but they all had this very satisfied look. Garrett said he did it in part to force him out of his introverted default and everybody seemed to be happy with his deductive help. I thought Steve’s blog was the perfect place to capture these exchanges—especially since Steve spends so much of his time on the same dessert doing very different things:)

    Reply
15. 

    jurvetson

    Oct 21, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    I just love that story…. a young Einstein shaves it all off to go incognito…

    

    Reply
16. 

    David G Photography

    Jan 4, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    In NYC that much space rents for $1,500 and its a long way to paradise…

    Reply
17. 

    Lauren_Murray

    Jun 9, 2009 at 6:07 pm

    his " exceptionally simple theory of everything" is a joke. Maybe he should get off of the pot and into the books…

    Reply
18. 

    Entheo_Jen

    Jan 6, 2010 at 7:02 am

    Hey Kids. I know there are like a million-and-one stupid articles and blogs about Garrett and his "Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" but I found a ridiculously amazing one just written last week while trying to research the whole Lisi/Burning Man connection. This article is entitled "The Cosmic Mandala: Burning Man Badass Discovers the Shape of the Cosmos." It had a WAY different feel and tone than every other article on Garrett I’ve come across. In particular, it puts the piece that appeared in Reality Sandwich a couple of years ago to SHAME. Probably because it was written by a Burner, who, from the looks of his other articles (like "Magic Rocks: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Nuclear Physics) seems to have a pretty good intuitive feel for physics. He went to UCLA too. Anyway, if you haven’t seen this yet, I think you’re going to want to check it out. Good luck with the whole LHC thing. Praying for you, Jen. Here’s the link to that article:
    http://www.luminousnuminous.com/blog/

    Reply
19. 

    jurvetson

    Jan 16, 2010 at 4:44 pm

    And don’t miss the best and hilarious coverage of the LHC black hole risk… from The Daily Show

    oh, and from his recent fB post pointing to this article, Garrett Lisi said that he for one welcomes his Ogdoad overlords.

    Reply
20. 

    biotron

    Jan 16, 2010 at 5:19 pm

    some of the other posts on that blog are also absolutely priceless – great link 🙂

    further gunk – albeit without tongue firmly in cheek – about the 8th sphere… in relation to the moon…

    Reply
21. 

    biotron

    Jun 11, 2010 at 11:52 am

    just been to a friend’s father’s lecture – fascinating interdisciplinary overview, with chance to put a few questions to him afterward. he spoke a lot of quantum potential "streamlines" and how, while channels have defined flows, that particles contained therein cannot easily be located – like individual water molecules in a river, if they could be tracked by making them eg. fluorescent, would travel in brownian motion within the predictable overall flow of the medium.

    talking of Tonomura’s 1989 double-slit experiment at length, he said to me afterward he has been seeking funding to time the arrival of individual electrons in a replicable experiment with existing technology at the University of Glasgow. he also mentioned the astonishing current record for entanglement and instantaneous non-local action being demonstrated (albeit without information exchange) at some 28km, and promised to send me some references to current work on the subject.

    when i asked him about Lisi, he came up with a long justification (in highly technical terms which i could not pretend to understand) for why he found it an attractive theory but ultimately not satisfactory 🙂

    biog here.

    Reply
22. 

    jurvetson

    Jun 17, 2011 at 3:30 pm

    Just filmed a segment with him for the History Channel
    

    and earlier at TED
    

    Reply
23. 

    jurvetson

    Jul 4, 2012 at 4:11 pm

    In one of the most pre-announced discoveries ever…. big Higgs news today…

    Via Garrett Lisi on Facebook: “…perhaps the most momentous day in particle physics of the century. The Higgs boson [aka "God particle"] is the Holy Grail for particle physicists because it is the missing link that provides a description of how all particles get their masses and how they interact with the gravitational field. Now that we know the existence of the Higgs boson, this is just as significant as finding out that, in fact, atoms do have these hard little nuclei. We don’t know what the implications will be decades down the line from this discovery, but they will surely be huge."

    from Lisi’s video

    Reply
24. 

    Resh B.

    Jul 5, 2012 at 4:36 am

    Ah! I commented on this post almost 4 years ago. I found it so brain-twistingly fascinating.

    Is Garrett going to pay up? twitter.com/garrettlisi/status/2533216255

    Reply