Skip to main content
Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Breaking through

01 Jul 2008

Those outside the mainstream can find it hard to make worthwhile scientific contributions

Breaking through

Like all magazines, Physics World thinks carefully about the images that it puts on the cover of each issue. We aim for illustrations that are attractive, eye-catching and usually related to one of the main features in the magazine. This year a variety of striking images have appeared, including a battleship, a Bombardier beetle, a glacier and a snowflake. This month’s cover, though, is highly abstract, consisting of a projection into 2D of a complex 8D lattice called E8.

This image — or at least a version of it — first appeared in a paper posted last year on the arXiv preprint server by a US physicist living in Hawaii called Garrett Lisi. In the paper, Lisi controversially claims that E8 could form the basis of a “theory of everything” that unites nature’s four forces. The picture has 240 vertices and Lisi believes that 220 of these are occupied by all the fundamental particles of the Standard Model. The other 20, unoccupied, slots hold additional particles, the existence of which could be used to test his proto-theory.

Lisi’s paper was reported widely last year, partly because of its eye-catching illustrations and partly because he gave it a deceptively simple title — “An exceptionally simple theory of everything”. However, the article was widely criticized in blogs on various technical grounds, including the fact that Lisi’s work does not give the strengths of the interactions between the particles. Lisi himself has admitted that the paper, which has still to appear in a peer-reviewed journal, is not the final word. And although the article has been heavily downloaded, many of the downloads are believed to be by non-scientists (rather than mainstream researchers) coming from “news-aggregation” websites like Digg and Reddit that link to it.

Another reason that the paper got so much attention was no doubt Lisi’s unusual background. Although he has a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, Lisi currently holds no academic position and enjoys surfing and snowboarding. “Surfer dude makes stunning breakthrough” must have been too tempting a story for the media to ignore, even if it is far from the truth. Our feature this month on E8 (“Symmetry’s physical dimension”) is not so much about Lisi’s work itself, but rather uses his paper as a hook to illustrate some of the links between symmetry and basic physics.

Whether or not Lisi’s paper is a major contribution to science — the jury is still out — it illustrates the difficulty that those outside the mainstream can sometimes face in making worthwhile contributions to physics. For example, one UK physicist in his mid-50s, who recently completed a PhD in particle physics, explains elsewhere in this issue the difficulties he faced breaking into the subject as an older person (pp18—19, print edition only). He has dubbed this problem “the grey ceiling”, in analogy to the “glass ceiling” that can hinder women’s careers from progressing.

It would be a shame if talented people were excluded from physics, which needs to do all it can to encourage interest in the subject. Of course, those with unconventional career paths have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. But one only has to look at William Henry Bragg (pp42—43, print edition only) to see that age need not be a hindrance to making valuable contributions to the subject. Despite never carrying out an original experiment before the age of 40, he went on to share the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his son for their work on X-ray crystallography. Breakthroughs in physics can sometimes happen in the most unconventional of manners.

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors