Sunday, July 27, 2008

Just four dimensions, not one, not ten, not eleven

This article in last week's New Yorker (the issue with the infamous cover) profiles Garrett Lisi, an outsider in the physics community who is bucking the String Theory trend of the past 30 years. He's also a serious surfer and snowboarder. ISers who recall the Brian Greene book we read several years ago may find Lisi's ideas refreshing.

1 comment:

FutureNerd said...

Lisi shuns strings but embraces bundles.

I love the sound of higher math I don't understand. From Wikipedia:

"One goal of the theory of bundles is to quantify, via algebraic invariants, what it means for a bundle to be non-trivial, or in other words twisted in the large."

and

"It is worth noting that the category of smooth vector bundles is a bundle object over the category of smooth manifolds in Cat, the category of small categories."

The poetry of mathematics!