Tony Smith's TOE

[houserichichi]

btw, houserichichi, did you already skim through his ideas (you said you plan to do so)

Rather than going through his site page by page I just downloaded his book. Thanks for that, I never knew it existed.

/interlude


****EDIT****

This page has been split, so for anyone trying to follow the discussion, Tony Smith's webpage is here, you can download the entire webpage in pdf format here, and his online textbook in pdf format is located here.

[thigle]

yeah. his page is heavily hypertexted so it's cool to have it in e-form. a good way to enter at where one's interest leads is through his KEYWORDS subpage. ...and enjoy one of the most bizzare yet exquisite works of spirit.

[houserichichi]

I find him difficult to read....maybe you should split this Tony Smith thing into a new topic...we could talk about things there. I'll look for it but bear with because the guy's writing is near impossible to follow. It's so disjoint and intelligible.

[thigle]

i don't have the admin rights or whatever is needed to do so. but if anyone can split topics, please split this, as houserichichi suggests, into 'Tony Smith's TOE' thread. thnx

[thigle]

thnxs.

well, firstly i would like to know what do people think of this structure of tony's physics model, i.e. that each point of 4d (s3xr1) spacetime is itself internal symmetry-space of four dimensions, but complexified, and each universe (the s3xr1) is itself just a point in a pluriverse of a geometric structure that i don't remember anymore.

what is it that make's tony's TOE so difficult to understand for physicists ? or can they understand it and just cannot accept it ? what is so different about it than other conventional theories ?

it seems to me lie Grisha's Perelman's story: a guy figures out a great thing and while other academics stumble upon it and struggle with it and try to prove its in/correctness, he becomes so disgusted with the whole academic field that he steps out of it and doesn't give a f*$! about math anymore that much. goes for long walks, grows long nails and hair and lives with his mother.

it seems tony has been in a similar position, even finkelstein who has been his professor and inspiration admits he doesn't get his theory.

anyone here ever read him ?

[PWrong]

what is it that make's tony's TOE so difficult to understand for physicists ? or can they understand it and just cannot accept it ? what is so different about it than other conventional theories ?

I'll look for it but bear with because the guy's writing is near impossible to follow. It's so disjoint and intelligible.

There's your answer. Although I wonder if House meant unintelligible...

[pat]

Yes, Tony Smith's web pages are incredibly disjointed. He leaves out a great deal of context. I had hopes at one point that I would be able to gather enough knowledge to have the context. But, I would be back at the "database of every possible image" scenario where I might have the context, but I would also have 10 trillion other contexts and no idea which one we was working from.

One of his pages declares: "There are 28 diffeomorphic structures on S⁷. This is because one is prime, two is prime, three is prime, but four is not prime."

Someday, I hope to find enough information to agree with that statement. That, I might be able to sniff out the correct context for. Most of the rest of the contexts are needles in haystacks (and one doesn't even know which haystack). Incidentally, the one is prime, two is prime, three is prime, but four is not prime is also, according to Tony, responsible for the fact that there are only four real division algebras (R, C, H, and O). This may be a stepping stone to the S⁷ thing. I'm not sure yet.

[wendy]

Suppose you could hunt down the recent conway-smith tome 'quarterions and octonions'. This deals with this.

W

[pat]

I read Conway-Smith. It deals with why there are only four real division algebras. It does so very nicely. But, I don't recall any connection with four being composite. And, I don't recall any mention of diffeomorphic structures on S⁷. So, there are still some gaps.

Or, maybe I'm not thinking of the right book... unless you're calling a 150-page book a tome? Compared to Conway-Guy's 600+ page "Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups", Q & O is a bedtime story.