E8 and the Theory of Everything
Here are a couple of articles to blow your mind. Most fascinating to me is this exotic mathematic structure known as E8. It actually has the same structure that a number of my drawings have, as well as the circles found on Indian cloths; coincidence? I think not. On a subconscious level, we’ve already figured the universe out, but it’s hard to represent in this abstraction layer we call language.
Update: Here’s the actual article in which A. Garrett Lisi published his theory: “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Check out the abstract:
“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.”
My thoughts exactly 
I just tried out a new service called StumbleUpon - think of it as a shuffle button for the internet, where you get fed content based on your interests, voting things either up or down. Using this service, the second site I was shown was mind blowing: “The Elegant Universe,” a three hour movie by NOVA, which is part of PBS. It walks you through the history of the discovery of the forces of the universe, and the attempts to unify the Gravity force with the other three known ones: Electromagnetism and Strong and Weak nuclear forces.
It explains string theory very well, the current hot topic in physics, and how it unifies the forces. Problem is that there’s absolutely no evidence to back any of it up. This is a great piece of content to get a sense of what the article / theory above is challenging; it’s really a story of David vs. Goliath.
If you have the time, you owe it to yourself to check this out. And if you don’t have the time, you might try wrapping your mind around multi-dimensional reality.
[…] I also decided to check out StumbleUpon, which seems to me to be a shuffle button for the internet, which you can influence through preference setting and voting results up or down (think Pandora). I clicked it only twice so far: the second site was “The Elegant Universe,” a program by PBS on string theory, which I ended up watching all three hours of and posting a bit over on my other blog. […]