Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems

[jakeXT]

Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I've known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he'd been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see emerging before my eyes potential answers for many of the major problems in physics. It was an extremely exciting, daring proposal, but also mathematically so natural that one could not but feel that it smelled right.


...

The particles described by the Standard Model – the stuff of nature that is revealed in accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider – fall into three "generations". In the first generation we see the electron, the electron neutrino, six quarks and their anti-particles, making 16 in total. But then rather bizarrely in the second generation we have another version of these particles which look exactly the same but are heavier than the first generation.

The heavier version of the electron is called the muon. The physicist Isadore Rabi famously quipped on hearing about the muon: "who ordered that?" It didn't seem to make sense that you should have a heavier version of all the particles in the first generation. What was the logic in that? To compound things, there is a third generation heavier again than the second whose electron partner is called the tau particle.

One of the challenges facing fundamental physics has been to provide a natural explanation for these three generations. Weinstein's theory does this by revealing the presence of a new geometric structure involving a much larger symmetry at work, inside which the symmetry of the Standard Model sits. What is so compelling about the geometry involving this larger symmetry group is that it explains why you get two copies of something with 16 particles but also that the third generation is something of an imposter. At high energies it will actually behave differently to the other two.


..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/23/eric-weinstein-answer-physics-problems

[Laelth]

1. Fascinating. k&r n/t

-Laelth

[DCKit]

2. It's just like politics, 'cept it makes more sense. nt

[Fantastic Anarchist]

3. Very promising ...

... however, I have this nagging feeling that this is arbitrary, as before.

I love studying physics, but it always seems that way, and this article, no matter how hard it tried, doesn't relieve that.

Here's hoping I'm wrong, though!!

[GeorgeGist]

4. Hedge Fund Physics ...

[East Coast Pirate]

5. Interesting read.

[Esse Quam Videri]

6. I love this stuff though

I can only wrap my head around half of it. Fascinating!

[BootinUp]

7. awesome, it will be interesting to see

where this goes. nt

[jakeXT]

8. Weinstein's theory of everything is probably nothing

Exciting news: all the problems plaguing physics have been solved. Dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravityMovie Camera – one amazing insight has delivered us from decades of struggle to a new knowledge nirvana.

There's a catch, however: I'm unable to tell you what that insight is. Neither I, nor any of my professional physicist friends, have the faintest clue. In fact, nobody except Eric Weinstein and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy are sufficiently familiar with the claims to venture an opinion.

Until yesterday Weinstein was largely unknown to us. He has a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University, but left academia years ago and now makes his living as an economist and consultant at a New York hedge fund.

That is not to say he doesn't have anything to contribute, but he will have to go through the proper channels. Physicists are inherently conservative. New claims, especially bold ones, face stiff resistance. That's for a good reason: faster-than-light neutrinos, anyone?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23595-weinsteins-theory-of-everything-is-probably-nothing.html

[BootinUp]

9. Or he could become a patent clerk.