Great particle physics slide show talk by Garrett Lisi

[Martin]

 

Garrett Lisi was invited to give a slideshow talk at TED

 

He explains the Standard Model plus extensions that might be seen at LHC.

Then at the end he talks about his own ToE

The thing is the visuals. He thinks and communicates with visual images. It's a great talk. Do watch it, if you haven't already!

[Severian]

Why do you think that is "great"? It was completely content-less! His pretty pictures are meaningless until he can tell us what masses that we might expect for his new particles at the LHC; tell us how they are produced; how

his "theory" breaks electroweak symmetry; tell us about its impact on electroweak precision observables.

 

He may very well throw up his hands when someone mentions string theory, but at least the string theorists have a mathematical formalism in which to perform calculations. He has... pictures.

[Martin]

Why do you think that is "great"? It was completely content-less! His pretty pictures are meaningless until he can tell us what masses that we might expect for his new particles at the LHC; tell us how they are produced; how

his "theory" breaks electroweak symmetry; tell us about its impact on electroweak precision observables.

 

He may very well throw up his hands when someone mentions string theory, but at least the string theorists have a mathematical formalism in which to perform calculations. He has... pictures.

 

My impression was his talk was not primarily about his own ToE attempt, and not about string theory. Your post seems to be about Lisi's own ToE gambit and comparing that with string.

 

Let's discuss the actual talk, shall we?

 

It was an 18 minute talk delivered to an audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, media people, design people, pundits and übergeeks. The TED audience is by invitation only. It is basically a trendy elite of intelligent generalists.

 

It was not an audience of physicists, or even scientists, although some of the people are undoubtably quite smart. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

 

You may know all this but some other readers might not.

 

So one judges the talk by how well it communicated to that audience.

 

At TED they have a rating system. So we have a reality check! Let's see, based on that objective standard, how well the talk went over. Personally I say it was great. And objectively, I expect the TED audience to rate it very high.

 

These are people who would not ordinarily be interested in having the Standard Model explained to them. Garrett Lisi got their attention and explained about as much as could be explained in 18 minutes. And he did it with pictures, which those media and design people doubtless greatly prefer to equations.

 

If you want to call it void of content, I would say think first whether it was to that audience.