Summer Friday evening
Two things I’m grateful for this sticky summer evening - first, the Ann Arbor Art Fair [lots of pictures by Ryan Coleman, many of the law school], which brings big crowds to the streets of Ann Arbor. Tonight it was moving to see so many people peacefully walking along, enjoying the relief of the growing darkness. Street musicians, street-fair smells. Okay, yes, it was like Manhattan, just for a moment.
Second, the New Yorker story on a (sort-of) Lee Smolin protégé, Garrett Lisi. The story, Surfing the Universe, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, isn’t linkable. (For shame!) But it’s terrific nonetheless, so go buy the July 21 New Yorker. Lisi dropped out of traditional academic-physicist life and has spent a lot of time thinking about a Theory of Everything that rejects string theory and has something to do with E8. What’s E8? According to the very game Wallace-Wells, it’s
[A] space whose symmetries are described by E8 has two hundred and forty-eight degrees of symmetry. One rought way to imagine it is as a dense and precisely symmetrical cloud of spiderweb, with thousands of threads exploding out from hubs of concentric spheres.
An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything (good Wikipedia entry here) and a lot of fearful symmetry. In a nutshell, “Lisi’s model attempts to describe all known fields—the gravitational spin connection, frame, Higgs, gauge bosons, and three generations of fermions—as different parts of a single superconnection over a four-dimensional base manifold.”
Presumably these fields would also include Art Fairs.