The Theory Of Everything

Could the "most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics," the E8 Lie group pattern, a mathematical puzzle solved recently and shown below, represent the "geometric structure at the heart of our universe."?

At least that's what physicist Dr. Garett Lisi is claiming in his paper "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" which has caused quite a stir in the physics world:

"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is a physics paper submitted to the arXiv library on Nov. 6, 2007 by Antony Garrett Lisi. His theory claims to unify all fields of the standard model with gravity using a 248-point lattice of E8 geometry. It has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, but it has drawn a wide range of professional reaction and stirred public interest in the topic and its author.

The title is a mathematical pun on E8's classification as both a simple group and an exceptional group.

Lisi notes that the theory is incomplete. It has been claimed that, unlike most string theories, it will be testable soon, using the Large Hadron Collider, which is slated to come on line in May 2008. However, as it stands, the paper contains no calculations for particle masses; and it is not clear that such calculations could be done even in principle.

More on the Theory of Everything:

A theory of everything (ToE) is a hypothetical theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena. Initially, the term was used with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories. For example, a great-grandfather of Ijon Tichy — a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of 1960s — was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything" (Polish: "Ogólna Teoria Wszystkiego"). Over time, the term stuck in popularizations of quantum physics to describe a theory that would unify or explain through a single model the theories of all fundamental interactions of nature...

The concept of a "theory of everything" is rooted in the ancient idea of causality, famously expressed by Laplace:

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

-- Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, Introduction. 1814

So, you want to know the meaning of life?