I was so expecting a link to an Onion article with some some Spicoli-esque quotes about tasty waves and a cool buzz.
Just to make sure I’m following along — the green b is not the same as the blue b, right? (The first one is specifically the inverse of a, but the second one is an arbitrary element.)
There’s been several major books published over the last year or two arguing this in various ways. The one I read was The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, by Lee Smolin who was a pioneering and now disillusioned string theorist. The book is an excellent introduction to all aspects of string theory for the layperson.
However, as a layperson, I keep seeing numerous articles in the popular science magazines talking about possible testable results that string theory implies, and by testable I mean testable by current particle accelerators or astronomic results.
Those may all still be just out of reach, or overblown, or trivial, but I had thought that the controversy raised by Solin and others had string theorists making a good rebuttal case that the lack of testable predictions of string theory was an overblown statement in itself.
I of course invite rebuttal from Chronos on this. 
Yeah, sorry. I should’ve done the coding to write the inverse of a as a[sup]-1[/sup].
Slashdot comments on this too.
What exactly is this? And what is the significance of the symmetrical look of the video? I see that some of the dots and triangles change velocity and direction, what has that got to do with representing a matrix? Will my head hurt even more tomorrow?
I like the guys layman’s explanation even though I have no idea how right it is.
I liked a comment below too:
“So what you’re saying is that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, he plays fizzbin?”
The diagram of the universe in that article looks like something you get with one of those toys they came out with back in the 1960s. I can’t remember what it’s called, and it’s difficult to explain, but there was a hollow circle you’d pin down and other circles of varying sizes and different pen holes put inside. It would allow you to circle and spiral around, creating designs like that. Although I’ve not seen one that elaborate.
What Ultrafilter didn’t say is what distinguishes a Lie (pronounced Lee, named after Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie from the late 19th, early 20th century) group from an ordinary group. A Lie group has as its underlying pointset a manifold, which is (roughly speaking) is a space in which each point has a neighborhood that looks like a Euclidean space of some dimension. For a Lie group, this has to be what is called an analytic manifold (complicated explanation omitted) and the group multiplication has to be given by analytic functions (ditto). The simplest example of a simple Lie group–leaving commutative ones aside–is the group of complex n x n matrices with determinant 1 (for sufficiently large n, probably at least 5). As said above there are 4 infinite classes of simple Lie groups and five that don’t fit into one of the infinite classes. Of those “exceptional” groups, the largest is E8. I once studied this (nearly 50 years ago) but most of it has escaped my mind, what is left of it.
Now what any of this has to do with elementary particles completely escapes me.
Spirograph?
Yeah, that sounds familiar. Probably. It looks like the guy did the design with one of those. as I said, I’ve not seen one that elaborate, but he had years to work on it.
I was a little confused because graphics of the relationships did not include gravity. Part of this confusion was eliminated by this part of the paper:
Is this E8 model stating that there may be no individually measurable occurance of g?
That the only way to establish a metric for g is to observe it’s effect on other, measurable particles and forces?
I understand the probability that gravity may be neither an independant particle nor an independant force (a pseudo particle or force that only exists in relationship to actual particles and/or forces) but where would the gravitron fit into this view?
Would the (hypothetical) gravitron be not the substance of *g * but actually the by-product of *g-anything * else that is refered to as G2?
I forsee this as being an obsticle in building my time machine and taking over the world.
-Please note that I am not a physicist. I work in a box factory for christ’s sake. Just an interested observer.
Yes. Fun times, fun times.
So…if this model turns out to be correct, what happens to string theory? Does it mean that string theory is essentially bunk?
Only if it becomes a rap song. 
My Google ad is for G-strings 
Spirograph was mentioned in the OP, incidentally…
He kinda did, though not in any great technical detail:
I’ll try to explain this a little bit, and in the process explain a very little bit about the pretty Spirograph picture.
In particle physics, elementary particles are thought of as states of some underlying field. And like states in ordinary quantum mechanics, these states transform among themselves like elements of some representation of the Lie group SU(n), representing some underlying symmetry. The cleanest example in the Standard Model is probably the “color” charge carried by the gluons, which is a representation of SU(3). The quarks come in three colors, which is a sloppy way of saying that they belong to the three-dimensional representation (usually just called “3”) of SU(3). Gluons, which transfer color charges, come in eight types, because they belong to the adjoint representation “8” of SU(3).
The collective state space of several quantum particles is the tensor product of their individual representation spaces, and this tensor product generally decomposes as the direct sum of some irreducible representations. So a meson, formed of a quark and an antiquark, lies in a representation space “3x3=8+1.” (Here the numbers label the dimension of the representation; 8 is the adjoint representation and 1 is the singlet. The underline is usually typeset as an overbar and represents the complex-conjugate representation.) A baryon, formed of three quarks, lies in “3x3x3=10+8+8+1.”
The reason that quarks combine in baryons and mesons, and not in other groups like qq, is that only color singlets (elements of the 1-dimensional representation of the color SU(3)) appear in nature at low energies. So both the meson and the baryon are actually restricted to lie in the color “1” in the products above. 3x3=6+3, containing no singlet, so the diquark cannot appear. But apart from this prediction, this SU(3) is rather boring, since everything we see is just a singlet.
Things get more interesting when you consider other transformations. For example, there is an approximate flavor symmetry called isospin, transforming between up and down quarks; and an even more approximate symmetry called strangeness, transforming between down and strange quarks. Putting these symmetries together gives an approximate SU(3) symmetry among these three lightest quark flavors. This is the explanation for the diagrams of Gell-Mann’s “Eightfold Way.”
A “Cartan subgroup” of the Lie group is an abelian subgroup which is as large as possible. The dimension of the Cartan subgroup of the Lie group is called its rank (this is the subscript in the Cartan classification). In the language of quantum mechanics, the operators in the Cartan subgroup are simultaneously diagonalizable and form a complete set of commuting observables.
Because this SU(3) symmetry is only approximate, a Cartan basis may be chosen so that each basis element corresponds to a quantum number. The rank of SU(3) is 2; in the Eightfold Way the quantum numbers are isospin (or charge) and strangeness. Particle multiplets are under this flavor SU(3) are often drawn with isospin on a horizontal axis and strangeness increasing upward (usually at 120°, for reasons I won’t get into here).
Now a baryon containing only up, down, and strange quarks transforms, under this approximate flavor SU(3) symmetry, as 3x3x3=10+8+8+1. So we expect to find, for example, a group of 10 baryons with similar properties. This “baryon decuplet” is what Gell-Mann discovered: he placed nine then-recently-discovered baryons in 9 of the 10 positions in the 10-dimensional representation of SU(3), like this:
Delta- Delta0 Delta+ Delta++
* * * *
Sigma- Sigma0 Sigma+
* * *
Xi- Xi0
* *
*
Then he predicted the existence and properties of the tenth, “Omega-,” which was quickly discovered. Other particles then quickly fell into other multiplets.
The particles in the same row often have the same name. This is because the SU(2) isospin symmetry is good enough that these particles are often quite similar (with masses differing by only a few MeV); the “strangeness” symmetry is less good, and it is not as obvious that the Delta and Sigma are related.
This idea can obviously be extended; once charmed particles were discovered, it was natural to extend the approximate flavor symmetry to SU(4), and so on. As a quantitative predictive tool, this doesn’t add much, since the c, b, and t are so heavy they tend to decay very rapidly. But the idea of grouping similar particles together as elements of some larger space, with a symmetry broken somehow at the low energies we perceive, has persisted. The electroweak unification used a similar idea, for example.
Now the rank of E[sub]8[/sub] is 8, so each particle in a representation of E[sub]8[/sub] has eight associated quantum numbers, and can be plotted in an eight-dimensional space. This is what the spirograph picture is: a plot of all of the elements of some representation (in this case a 240-dimensional representation) of E[sub]8[/sub], being rotated in eight-dimensional space and then projected down to two dimensions.
I got a kick outta that too. ha
Dang…if this is the “Exceptionally Simple” theory, I’d hate to see the complicated one.